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From Epoch Times

Telecom Boosts Development in Aboriginal Communities - Indigenous commission seeks partnerships and info exchange to develop communications technologies in the Americas

By Cindy Chan, Epoch Times Staff Jan 16, 2009

When a group of remote First Nations communities in northern Ontario
launched an electronic bulletin board in 1994, it was the seed that
would become Canada’s largest Aboriginal broadband network and a model
network for Indigenous telecommunications of interest worldwide.

The Bulletin Board System (BBS) was meant to meet the critical need of
maintaining contact with the communities’ children and help support
them to stay in school while living away from home.

These fly-in communities had no high school and many of their children
continuing their education at boarding schools were dropping out.

At the time many of the communities’ approximately 2,800 residents did
not even have a home phone—a public payphone had to be shared among
several hundred people.

In less than a decade, residents were able to access broadband services
from their homes and public places like community centres and libraries.

K-Net is a success story of how Aboriginal communities have sought out
partnerships, leveraged support, harnessed funding opportunities, and
used information and communications technologies (ICT) to address their
people’s critical health, education, and economic needs.

Today, the communities coordinate with service agencies and
universities to deliver an Internet high school, telehealth,
telejustice, and webcasts of education and training events to residents
via their Kuhkenah Network (K-Net), a system vastly expanded from its
BBS days.

The online high school offers grades 9 and 10 as well as compulsory
courses for grades 11 and 12. It shares teachers among communities and
is allowing students to stay home longer and maintain their support
while studying toward their diploma.

K-Net is a program of the Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO), a tribal
council directed by the chiefs of six First Nations communities.

Throughout K-Net’s evolution, addressing local needs has remained the
prime objective, along with supporting local ownership and development
through community-driven applications and community-based networks.

A terrestrial network linked to a satellite network, K-Net now connects
about 70 Aboriginal communities and a number of non-Aboriginal
communities in northern Ontario, Manitoba, and Quebec, linking them to
the world.

K-Net also interconnects to other regional networks to form a national
broadband network providing videoconferencing at Aboriginal and urban
sites across Canada.

Sharing knowledge, successes across the Americas

K-Net
is a success story of how Indigenous communities have sought out
partnerships, leveraged support, harnessed funding opportunities, and
used information and communications technologies (ICT) to address their
people’s critical health, education, and economic needs.

It is the kind of story that an Indigenous commission launched at the United Nations wants more people to know about.

The Indigenous Commission for Communications Technologies in the
Americas (ICCTA) resulted from Indigenous people’s growing interest in
ICT following the 2003 World Summit on the Information Society in
Geneva.

The commission was formed by the Indigenous peoples of South, Central, and North America.

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) recently awarded ICCTA a $100,000 grant to support its development.

“ICT are critically important for many, many reasons, whether it’s for
health, education, commerce, or governance,” said President Tony
Belcourt from ICCTA’s head office in Ottawa.

Mr. Belcourt noted that Aboriginal people in Canada are among the leaders in the use of ICT for telehealth and tele-education.

ICT is also important to Indigenous people worldwide for building
economies through e-commerce, managing their own governance, protecting
rights, participating in society, and preserving their culture and
language.

Canada’s Métis people, for example, have a digitized registry system to
identify themselves as Métis. In a country like Ecuador, vast numbers
of Indigenous people have no means of identification and cannot be put
on a voters’ list. Canada’s support can help them establish their own
registry system which can hopefully lead to the right to vote, Mr.
Belcourt said.

And ICT as simple as teaching tools on CDs, or dictionaries and
keyboards for computers and typewriters, can help in the preservation
of Indigenous language.

“Those [areas] are the examples we see of Aboriginal people being
successful. We want to be able to exchange that information with other
people, and then we want to bring industry, governments, and NGOs into
the mix as partners.”

ICCTA is in the process of building a multi-lingual portal to allow
knowledge sharing. The CIDA grant will help ICCTA build capacity to
move forward. 

Level the playing field, and ‘they’ll be the ones to lead the way’

Two important ingredients for success are levelling the playing field for Indigenous peoples and having them take the lead.

“We’re very much determined that this be driven by Indigenous peoples
and that it not be governments or other people who set up an
organization for us and have us participate but they be the decision
makers,” said Mr. Belcourt.

“The community should be in charge ... the community needs to be
respected and the people need to have the opportunity to build that
capacity,” said Brian Beaton, coordinator of K-Net Services, based in
Sioux Lookout, Ontario.

This means government must step in and ensure adequate and equitable
infrastructure, since telecommunications companies do not have a
business case for building and investing in small, isolated
communities, he said.

“With the proper infrastructure, the proper support systems, and the
proper resourcing, it would be a lot more level a playing field for
everyone,” said Mr. Beaton, who coordinates the computer services
department of the KO tribal council.

Through the new jobs in the communities as a result of K-Net, “We can
then train other people, and these people then start using these tools
to build their own capacity,” he said.

“We don’t have to be taken care of. You become self-sufficient once you
have the infrastructure in place and you have the skills.”

The communities that created K-Net have been active in sharing their experiences with others.

Last October their telehealth staff met with a delegation from Brazil that was in Ottawa attending a telehealth conference.

K-Net hosted an online two-day international Indigenous conference in
2004 to discuss the use of ICT. Over 100 people registered from North,
Central, and South America, Africa, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

KO also run an institute that conducts research on Indigenous issues, emphasizing the impacts of ICT.

“If [Indigenous people] are given the resources and the tools, they’ll be the ones to lead the way,” said Mr. Beaton.