Weird tech: Tribal confederation 2.0

While investors and pundits bow to the dogma that Web 2.0 is a “disruptive” force sure to shake the future of the technological landscape, one organization — Oregon’s confederation of Indian tribes known as the Grand Ronde — is going against that grain, applying emergent Web technology to bring back together an already disrupted system, tribal culture and tradition, and thereby lend greater voice to its past.

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Technologies introduced into North America during the past 500 years have certainly proved disruptive to indigenous societies and their cultures. The introduction of the horse and later the repeating rifle changed living patterns and tribal organizations significantly. Movies and television so distorted traditional values and stories that Mickey Mouse supplanted traditional Native American figures such as Hopi kachina dolls. Tribal storytelling was partially replaced by outside, for-profit storytelling. Time and again, technology has worked against the preservation of indigenous culture.

The roughly 5,000 Grand Ronde members are scattered across North America, and the signature event that brings them together, an annual powwow, is difficult for many members to get to. Their languages continue to fade; the stories that cultivate and continue their traditions vaporize through underuse.

So when Grand Ronde’s Web designer, William Mercier, inherited a site that was just pro forma, he started thinking. “We had a site, but without knowing what grabs people’s interest, without rhyme or reason — it was just thrown up. We wanted better communication with our members, but we didn’t have the know-how,” Mercier said. 

Change was triggered by a project to put the tribes’ museum collection into an online resource accessible not just to the half of the members who have moved away but also to those who are not tribe members. To help realize the project, Mercier contracted ISITE Design, a Web development house that had executed media-rich, Web 2.0-infused sites for clients such as Farm Aid.

ISITE and Mercier built a members-only area for gathering information and giving feedback, an ongoing, if thin, powwow surrogate. But the real collaborative engine is the interactive Our Story area that presents collected video of tribe members and images of the museum’s collection. The Web team has a project under development to allow members to attach their memories to items in the collection. For example, an exceptional basket presented on the site might be recognized by a member as one made by her grandmother, which could in turn jog others’ memories regarding her relative, as well as some of the traditional stories she may have told during her lifetime. Information about the artifacts increases. Even better, stories surface and are recorded as part of the museum’s oral history collection, thereby deepening the store of traditional knowledge.

In this way Grand Ronde is turning disruption on its ear, tapping collaborative Web 2.0 technology to collect, organize, and disseminate tribal knowledge that reinforces and preserves a tradition that previous technologies disrupted.

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