Abstract Western technology in general and Internet web design software in particular are implicitly based on grids, tables, right angles, and intersecting straight lines. The circle or broken circle is a theme recurrent in Aboriginal cultures in North America and the world. This speech discusses the issues and how these seemingly opposing ideals were reconciled in the design of the Native Drums and Native Dance websites.
Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen As a computer programmer by training, I was certainly in the minority at the National Gathering on Aboriginal Artistic Expression, held in Ottawa, Canada, in the summer of 2002. The National Gathering brought stakeholders from Canada's Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artistic and cultural communities together with private industry and government policy makers to discuss issues relevant to Native artists, to celebrate their accomplishments, and to advise the Canadian Government's Department of Heritage on Native policy. I arrived with the notion that I would learn more about state of the arts in Aboriginal communities in Canada and participate in the discussion forum on New Media but I was instead plunged into a complex world of politicized social and artistic issues.
During the National Gathering, several artistic performances were staged. One of the performances was three movements from "Bones", which is described in the promotional material as "the world's first Aboriginal dance opera to be sung in the 'universal language' created by author, composer and director Sadie Buck."
The music was a haunting series of repeating verses with subtle variations. A series of rhythms was played out, starting with the heartbeat-like sound of the drum and bass working together, overlaid with the beautiful and optimistic vocal intonings of Suni Moreno. A slow meditative vocal melody fills the air. The somewhat slower revolution of the male warriors around a central archetypal female character plays out on the stage. The heartbeat gave me a sense of the moment, but the slow regular movements of the warriors gave me a sense of a slower movement of time. They became the planets moving around the sun. I sensed a yearly or seasonal time frame was being indicated. The fusion of Aboriginal music and dance with Western operatic elements was subtle and brilliant. In Bones, Sadie Buck had created not only brilliant art, but also a bridge between cultures.
The Western concept of specialization is highly exemplified in our post secondary educational system, with the division of subject matter into faculties, schools, and departments. Similarly, this compartmentalization mentality is a basic foundational principle underlying virtually all the technology of modern automation, databases, telecommunications, and the World Wide Web itself.
It is the clash of the integrated wholistic Aboriginal and artistic worlds and the deconstructionist world of Web Technology that posed the fundamental challenge in the design of Native Dance.
Design is about imagination and innovation. Great design it has been said occurs at the intersection of constraint, contingency, and possibility – competing forces that forge innovative and functional designs. On Native Drums and Native Dance, the second in the Native Voices Web series, we began with a fundamental opposition of forces: how to create a website that honours and portrays Aboriginal Culture while working within a world in which all the available tools have been built on the assumption that the “proper” way to approach web design is in grids, tables, and intersecting straight lines. This is so in part because layout in grids, tables, and intersecting straight lines is an unchallenged underlying assumption built into all the web browsers we use, and indeed the specifications of the World Wide Web itself.
The performance of Bones was a crucible of ideas which led me to ask: if Sadie Buck can unite Aboriginal music and art with Western operatic forms, why can we not unite Aboriginal concepts with the World Wide Web?
In the analysis phase of a design you need to distill your problems, issues, and pressures down to essential concepts. We looked to central themes in Aboriginal culture for inspiration, and found the circle as a metaphor used in many ways: as a representation of the cycle of birth, life, an death, as a representation of the sun, as a representation of the relationship of the self to the larger community, and to mother earth, to the Creator, and as an inspiration for the drum itself.
In these Aboriginal Cultural Web projects, we arrived at a single statement, a mission statement if you will, to drive the design phase: Eliminate the use of straight lines.
This forced us to rethink how webpages were conceived, designed, and rendered, and led to us developing an entirely new set of assumptions and methodologies to achieve the goal of eliminating the straight line.
From that single statement we have driven the design of Native Drums and Native Dance to bring uniquely Aboriginal concepts to the World Wide Web, and which represents, respects, and promotes Aboriginal Culture in a striking visual way.
We encourage you to explore these websites which contain an abundance of original materials including:
* hundreds of thousands of words of original research, editorial, and interpretive material for students and scholars, in English, French, and Aboriginal languages,
* interactive games for school age children,
* downloadable resource kits for teachers containing classroom exercises, grading rubrics, and advisories on how to integrate the material into provincial curricula,
* original educational and archival video material,
* a compendium of over 20 years work of Dr. Keillor’s and her associates work in the form of the CARD database, containing over 4000 annotated bibliographic references to Aboriginal Cultural research,
* the Mediabase, a searchable database which contains in excess of 1100 digitized images, audio clips, and video clips, all with descriptive metadata,
* interviews and artist profiles of contemporary Aboriginal drummers, dancers, and musicians,
* and picture galleries of drums, masks, clothing, and musical instruments.
It is a long list, and even I sometimes forget the full extent of what we have created. I encourage everyone to check out these sites and see for yourselves.
These projects have been enormously exciting, enlightening, and satisfying to work on.
It has been a great opportunity to work with leading researchers and academics, Drs. Keillor, VonRosen, and Clealls/JMHK, all the staff at Carleton University that contributed, Chief Paul Nadjiwan of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation and Judy Lee of Library and Archives Canada, for their insight and guidance throughout, the 12 leading Aboriginal cultural societies and museums across the country, all their staff, and the many unsung researchers, collaborators, and informants who have worked behind the scenes and with whom we have collaborated on these projects.
I would like to pass on the regrets of my partner in the Sumnergroup, Ms. Mary Moylum, who was instrumental in bringing all the partners in these projects to the table, who was unable to attend today because of unforeseen client commitments.
I would also like to thank and acknowledge the funding and support of CCOP, the Canadian Cultural Online Program, of Canadian Heritage, for their vision, energy, and commitment to supporting the creation of these valuable Canadian and Aboriginal cultural resources.
Additionally, I would like to personally thank my own staff and contractors, Julio Leiva, database and server side programming, Usha Gogireddy, interactivity programming, and Edward Solodukhin, graphic design, Andrew Tracy, Web Editing, David Anderson, audio video post production, Saida Belas and Maud Revel, translation, and the artistic and visioning contributions of Mark Seabrook and John Tenasco. I offer my sincere apologies to anyone who I may have missed in this list, as there are many others who contributed to these projects over the course of the last several years.
As a final technology note, I would like to say that these websites have been built and served out using opensource technologies, and have been built to international standards and specifications, which extend the reach of this information to the widest range of computers and browser software existing today, and will likely be still accessible in 10, 20, even 50 years, protecting the investment of all partners and stakeholders, and making these valuable cultural resources available to future generations.
Thank you for your time this afternoon.
This was a speech given by Frank Krzyzewski, Sumnergroup Inc Principal, at the launch ceremony for the Native Dance website, on June 21, 2006, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
