"Handicapped by distance and transportation": Indigenous Relocation, Modernity and Time-Space Expansion

"Indigeneity at the Crossroads of American Studies." Published as a special joint issue with American Studies, Volume 46, No. 3/4, Fall 2005

SESSION 2.3: As I Remember It: A Digital Remediation Project

This paper discusses the collaborative process through which a team of authors (including myself) remediated a successful print publication and transformed it into a digital book. The three authors of Written as I Remember It (UBC Press 2014), decided to pursue what we originally conceived as a digital companion to the original text. We realized, however, that a more important opportunity lay before us: namely, to produce a quite different book that would be accessible and appealing to different audiences, most particularly to Tla’amin community members themselves, as well as to students of all ages (kindergarten through university.) The result is As I Remember It (UBC Press 2019). In working on this book, we grappled with the problem, common to in Indigenous digital humanities projects, that despite the much-lauded democratizing potential of digital forms, the internet is also a site that can easily expediate and expand (rather than eliminate) the colonial theft Indigenous intellectual property. In addition, we struggled with the implications of the new K-12 curriculum for how to teach and present Indigenous materials in classroom settings. Here too, the issue of intellectual property and expertise was paramount. Even as we articulated the digital book to the specifics of the curriculum, we realized that teachers without expertise in Indigenous studies were prone to mis-interpret or mis-apply the material. Our project offers one example in which an Indigenous knowledge-holder engages the internet towards de-colonizing/anti-colonial ends, while mediating the risk posed by the internet her status as a privileged knowledge holder