STREAMS IQ I First Edition I November 2016

IN THIS ISSUE

NOV 2016

YALADA

Contents

EDITORS WORDS

NOVEMBER 2016 | STREAMS IQ | EDITION 1

P4

David Suzuki’s 5 things we can learn from Indigenous People

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Welcome to Garma the VR experience

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Meet the Indigenous Professor who wants all Indigenous Australians online and coding

P10 Taking Indigenous languages online: can they been seen, heard and saved?

EDITORS INTRO

Yalada!

ENVIRONMENT P4

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People past and present who have faught for our rights and given us a voice as Indigenous people. If it wasn’t for people like David Unaipon, Gladys Elphick, Charlie Perkins, Marcia Langton and many more others we may not even have ever had an opportunity to produce magazines like STREAMS IQ. In our first edition of STREAMS IQ Dr David Suzuki shares his views on what western society can learn from Indigenous people to sustain the planet.

P16 How Indigenous astronomy was used to map our highways

We get an insight into NITV’s Welcome to Garma project which showcases the culture of the Yolngu people and talk to an Indigenous professor who wants all Indigenous Australian’s to go Online.

TECHNOLOGY P6

Indigenous astronomer, Michael Anderson talks about how Indigenous Astronomy was used to mapped our roads all across Australia.

It’s our hope that the STREAMS IQ magazine might play a vital role in ensuring more Indigenous voices in the science, technology and environmental sectors are heard and respected.

Jumunujal.

Luke Briscoe, STREAMS IQ Editor & INDIGI LAB Founder.

© INDIGI LAB 2016 Design and layout: INDIGI LAB Visit: www.indigilab.com.au

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ASTRONOMY P12

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ENVIRONMENT

FEATURE

ENVIRONMENT

FEATURE

Da

vid Suzuki is a Canadian academic, environmentalist and scientist, and is the co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Here he sets out seven reasons why we need to look at how Indigenous Australians interact with the environment. Dr. Suzuki has dedicated his life to reversing the global effects of climate change and considers oceans, sustainable fishing and clean energy as some of his highest priorities. His foundation collaborates with Indigenous peoples and believes that traditional knowledge is critical to conservation.

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“We need to have a paradigm shift; to me the paradigm shift is that we have to see the world as Indigenous people see it.”

“We’ve lost the Indigenous knowledge that was embedded in place, that was the key to sustainability, and instead overrode it with all this let’s take advantage of what we can get out of it.”

5 THINGS WE CAN LEARN FROM INDIGENOUS PEOPLE 4

“We’ve used the air, water and land as a garbage can and now we know that species are disappearing and we’re suddenly realizing, holy cow there is nowhere else we can go on the planet, we’ve filled it up and we’ve poisoned the very things that keep us alive. That’s why many of us are now going to Indigenous people and saying look we’ve treated you so badly and yet you still cling to that sense of where your home is.”

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“[Indigenous people] all over the world people refer to the earth as our Mother and say that we’re created out of the four sacred elements earth, air, fire and water, that all living things are relatives – these are the perspectives, the attitudes that’s needed around the world to rediscover our place and respect for other creatures”

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“Indigenous people celebrate and thank the creator for the world that they live in, that’s not the way science does it and the knowledge acquired through that way of living is absolutely essential for the survival of those people, if their knowledge didn’t work they would’ve been gone a long time ago.”

www.technologyreview.com

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TECHNOLOGY

FEATURE

FEATURE FEATURE

TECHNOLOGY TECHNOLOGY

GARMA

360 NITV VR project showcases the unique culture of the Yolngu people The future of virtual reality has arrived and NITV is enabling Indigenous communities to tell and share their stories in VR. Welcome to Garma with Ernie Dingo, presenting rare insight into the Indigenous festival in Arnhem Land.

“My role in this project was to ensure that the video was authentic and that we followed cultural protocols.”

Written by Luke Briscoe 6

Indigenous peoples have been amazingly adaptive and creative with new media technologies, applying them to their own life ways and maintaining cultural boundaries rather than simply assimilating into the dominant social order. Communities that survived the cataclysmic forces of colonization are now telling their stories and constructing new forms of cultural power in the digital age.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) is increasing changing the way people want to consume media and tell a story. For Indigenous people its not just the entertainment value that VR and AR offer, the new emerging technologies offer an opportunity to share stories that are thousands of years old and pass on traditional knowledge onto the next generation.

This year NITV had the rare opportunity to film the welcoming ceremony at annual

“Digital technology is playing a vital role in the survival and revival of Indigenous ceremonies.”

Garma festival in the Northern Territory.

Tanya Denning-Orman, NITV Channel Manager, said: “Digital technology is playing a vital role in the survival and revival of Indigenous ceremonies, empowering communities to share their remarkable stories of preservation, whilst capturing culture for future generations.”

When you watch the Welcome to Garma 360 video you will get a true sense of what takes place Garma and experience the iconic dancing ceremonies held within the Bungul.

Ben Smith, Producer added: “My role in this project was to ensure that the video was authentic and that we followed the cultural protocols of the community and this is what we as Indigenous TV/ Digital producers have to do to give you a true experience of Indigenous Australia. This is why NITV is so important.”

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TECHNOLOGY

TECHNOLOGY Meet Professor Peter Radoll, who wants to get all Indigenous Australians online and coding. A computer course changed his life. Now Profes-

sor Peter Radoll wants every Indigenous household to have a computer and internet access.

Peter Radoll never thought he would go to university.

For the first 11 years of his career he worked as a motor mechanic, and getting a university education didn’t feature in his “wildest dreams”.

“I was pretty confident I was too stupid to go to university. I know that sounds silly now,” says Radoll, who is now a professor and Dean of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Leadership and Strategy at the University of Canberra.

It was an adult education course in Word for Windows that changed his life forever. On that course he met an elder, Uncle Ray Hurst, who thought Radoll was “too bright to be a motor mechanic” and filled out a university cadetship application for him.

“Unbeknownst to me, Uncle Ray and Aunty Pat had actually written to the Department of Education on my behalf, got the application form, had filled out the application form as much as they could, gave me one reference, and said ‘Look, we’ve got this stuff for you, you just need one more reference’,” says Radoll, who is a descendant of the Anaiwan people of Northern NSW.

CODING & INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA

“So I did that and the rest is really history. I jumped on an airplane, came down to Canberra for the interview and started an IT degree. When you look at people who are successful, I always say ‘Somewhere along the line someone cared enough about them to give them good advice’.”

These days he’s trying to pay the good advice forward, and is dedicated to working out how to ensure that every Indigenous person has a computer at home and internet connection.

Radoll wrote his PhD “Stone Chips to Silicon Chips: A Grounded Theory of Information and Communication Technology adoption in Australian Indigenous households— rural, urban and remote” in 2010, and found that Indigenous communities were just not engaging with the internet.

Written by Alyssa Braithwaite,

“If we’re really serious about closing the gap on health and education, if we’re really serious about financial and economic development in communities, we’ve got to get the internet in all Indigenous homes.”

CONTINUE READING....

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nger of a d s u io r e s in “We are the digital economy,” missing

Missing the digital economy Radoll says the infrastructure is already there, but the reasons behind the lack of engagement include affordability and a lack of purpose and motivation to use it. And the consequences of the poor rates of adoption of the technology in the Indigenous community are a big concern.

MY GRANDMOTHERS

LINGO

“We are in serious danger of missing the digital economy,” Radoll says.

“Based on 2009-2012 data, only 11 Indigenous students a year graduated out of university with IT qualifications, so we are so under-represented. I want to let our mob know, this is part of our culture as well.”

The father of six has already seen the benefits in his own home, with his two eldest children studying psychology and science at university, another following him into IT, and a 16-year-old son who wants to work in biomechanics and has won a $10,000 scholarship after making a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robotic eyeball that reacts to light.

“This is the influence you can have if you are brought up with the technology,” says Radoll.

“I would love it if the government or an enterprise like Microsoft or Google would say, ‘we’re going to give every Aboriginal household an internet connection and a subsidized device, so kids can have access to tertiary education regardless of where they are, and access to home-based jobs and real opportunities.

“That’s my utopia.”

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SMART PHONE TECHNOLOGY

SMART TECHNOLOGY PHONE

REVIEWS

Taking Indigenous languages online: can they be seen, heard and saved?

With our digital world dominated by English, minority and endangered languages struggle to be seen and heard.

With our digital world dominated by English, minority and endangered languages struggle to be seen and heard. A new interactive documentary launched online today by SBS, My Grandmother’s Lingo, attempts to add one more language to the mix and raise awareness of the plight of small languages.

My Grandmother’s Lingo A unique voice-activated interactive tells the story of one woman’s fight to save her endangered Indigenous language.

Angelina Joshua’s grandmother was one of the last people to learn Marra as a first language. She grew up on her traditional country in the Limmen Bight River district of the Gulf of Carpentaria with little contact with Europeans. At around twelve years of age, in the 1940s, she was brought to the Roper River Mission knowing no English but went on to have a long career as a community health worker. She never forgot her mother tongue.

After her retirement, I, along with a number of her own family members, had the privilege of working with her to document and learn some of her language Marra before she passed away in 2013.

Despite there now being only three people in the world who can tell a story in Marra in expressive detail, Marra and other endangered languages in the area are not disappearing out of sight. The Ngukurr Language Centre – where Angelina works – is a local Aboriginal organisation doing what it can to support the community’s seven or more threatened Aboriginal languages.

Written by Greg Dickson

As someone who is already attached to the language and the language group, I’m not ashamed to say that I was so emotional on my first viewing of My Grandmother’s Lingo that I could not speak back to my computer until my tears were under control.

How will those less attached receive My Grandmother’s Lingo? I’m interested to know.

Continue reaading....

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SMART PHONE TECHNOLOGY

SMART TECHNOLOGY PHONE

Can technology really save a language?

With so much of the planet’s linguistic diversity under threat, what role do technology-based projects like My Grandmother’s Lingo have in mitigating the loss of Indigenous languages? It’s a difficult question to answer.

One parameter is resource distribution. When funding to support Indigenous and minority languages is scarce, allocating resources to one project or language means another misses out. How do you prioritise?

Is paying a linguist to spend a year compiling a basic dictionary more useful than a year of oral language lessons in a local school? Is a carefully designed commercial publication that took a year to make more useful than a stapled black and white reader run off an office computer that took a week to produce?

Likewise, evaluating project outcomes is tricky.

Is quantifying the number of new words and sentences learned the key outcome? Or the skills developed via the process? How can the intangible be assessed, such as the sense of pride and strength a community gains via a great grassroots project?

The glossy end-product of a language project may not reveal much about how community stakeholders benefited from the process. If you come across an article with claims that a language will be “saved” by a new app or website, keep in mind that “apps don’t save languages. People do.”

(Note: headlines like those are likely to be examples of journalists inflating the value of the story, not overstated claims made by project participants.)

Finding a place in the digital domain There is no disputing that Indigenous and minority languages need a place in digital domains if they are to remain vital. The proliferation of social media – including in remote communities – may not be as detrimental to small languages as you may immediately think.

How we communicate on Facebook and messaging apps is similar to how we talk face-to-face, more so than traditional writing genres of letter-writing and emailing. So Tweeters and Facebookers naturally produce writing that is like spoken language and, hey presto, many people instinctively use their first language on social media. Recent research found, for example, that Nkep speakers in Vanuatu are using technology to extend the use of their language, rather than limit it.

Twitter users can voyeuristically follow global social media activity in small thanks to the ingenious Indigenous Tweets site. Its catalogue of languages and those who tweet in them lets you see who is tweeting in Māori, Tetun or Inuktitut to name just a few.

Technology-based developments for minority languages are not always reliant on well-meaning outsiders. In Nigeria, for example, millions of Yorùbá speakers are faced with their language being dropped from formal education in favour of English.

A phone app is helping preserve Australia’s Indigenous language An initiative from the First Peoples’ Cultural Council in Canada.

How technology is saving Indigenous languages Language is a precious asset, a commodity that many are doing their utmost to preserve.

NITV looks at how one Newcastle-based organisation united 240 passionate experts from across the globe in a bid to help to save Indigenous languages worldwide.

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Technology is a crucial issue for the ongoing health of Yorùbá because computers and devices cannot create the tone markings above and below Yorùbá letters to allow the language to be written properly. Yorùbá writer and linguist Kọlá Túbọsún, is leading the YorubaName.com project, which has, among other things, created keyboards allowing Yorùbá speakers to easily type their language.

But what does a project like My Grandmother’s Lingo mean for the Marra language? It can’t replace the community-embedded work that Angelina does at her local language centre, nor can it claim to be an community-led project like YorubaName.com. It features only five Marra words, so the language learning aspect is largely symbolic. Its main function is to raise awareness of the plight of Marra and other endangered languages, and it does so marvellously.

As a linguist and academic, my preoccupations are with clinically representing and analysing knowledge. My Grandmother’s Lingo’s approach is different. It focuses on making users feel something. By the end, visitors to the site will likely share Angelina’s desire to see the Marra language exist long into the future, in any medium.

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ASTRONOMY

FEATURE

FEATURE

How Indigenous astronomy was used to map our highways

Th e st a r m a p s use d by Abo r i gi n al pe op l e to he l p re m e m b e r route s b e t we e n d i s ta nt l o ca tion s a re st i l l a l i ve i n o u r h i g h way ne t wor ks tod ay.

“The next time you’re driving down a country road in outback Australia, consider there’s a good chance that very route was originally mapped out by Aboriginal people perhaps thousands of years before Europeans came to Australia.”

ASTRONOMY

Instead of using a GPS network, they used the stars above to help guide their travels.

How ancient Aboriginal star maps have shaped Australia’s highway network The star maps used by Aboriginal people to help remember routes between distant locations are still alive in our highway networks today, writes Rob Fuller.

The next time you’re driving down a country road in outback Australia, consider there’s a good chance that very route was originally mapped out by Aboriginal people perhaps thousands of years before Europeans came to Australia.

And like today, they turned to the skies to aid their navigation.

Except instead of using a GPS network, they used the stars above to help guide their travels.

Aboriginal people have rich astronomical traditions, but we know relatively little about their navigational abilities.

We do know that there was a very well established and extensive network of trade routes in operation before 1788. These were used by Aboriginal people for trading in goods and stories, and the trade routes covered vast distances across the Australian continent.

Star maps I was researching the astronomical knowledge of the Euahlayi and Kamilaroi Aboriginal peoples of northwest New South Wales in 2013 when I became aware of “star maps” as a means of teaching navigation outside of one’s own local country.

By Robert S. Fuller Source: The Conversation 16

My teacher of this knowledge was Ghillar Michael Anderson, a Euahlayi Culture Man from Goodooga, near the Queensland border. This is where the western plains and the star-filled night sky meet in a seamless and profound display.

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ASTRONOMY

ASTRONOMY

“A songline is a story that travels over the landscape.”

Star map route to the Bunya Mountains. Image from Starry Night Education.

“They weren’t used as a map as such, but were used as a memory aid.”

One night, sitting under those stars in Goodooga, Michael pointed out a pattern of stars to the southeast, and said that they were used to teach Euahlayi travellers how to navigate outside their own country during the summer travel season.

As an astronomer, I immediately realised that those stars were not in the direction of travel that Michael was describing. And anyway, they wouldn’t be visible in the summer, let alone during the day when people would have been travelling.

Stars to songlines Further discussion revealed the reasons and methods of this technique. In the winter camp, when the summer travel was being planned in August or September, a person who had travelled the intended route was tasked with teaching others, who had not made this journey, how to navigate to the intended destination.

The pattern of stars (the “star map”) was used as a memory aid in teaching the route and the waypoints to the destination. After more research I asked Michael if the method of teaching and memorising was by song, as I was aware that songs are known to be an effective way of memorising a sequence in the oral transmission of knowledge.

Michael said, “you got it!”, and I then understood that the very process of creating, then teaching, such a route resulted in what is known as a songline. A songline is a story that travels over the landscape, which is then imprinted with the song (Aboriginal people will say that the landscape imprints the song).

I then learned that there were many routes/songlines from Goodooga to destinations as far as 700km away, which might end up in a ceremonial place, or possibly a trade “fair”.

One such route to Quilpie, in Queensland, led to a ceremonial place where Arrernte people from north of Alice Springs met the Euahlayi for joint ceremonies.

Their route of travel was more than 1,500km, crossing the Simpson

Desert in summer, and I was told that they would have their own star map/songline for learning that route. The implication of this is that the use of star maps for teaching travel may have been common across Australia.

Star map route to the Carnarvon Gorge. Image from Starry Night Education.

Parallels Another surprising result of this knowledge came about when I was looking at the star map routes from Goodooga to the Bunya Mountains and Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. When the star map routes were overlaid over the modern road map, there was a significant overlap with major roads in use today.

After some reflection, the reason for this became clear. The first explorers in this region, such as Thomas Mitchell, who explored here in 1845-1846, used Aboriginal people as guides and interpreters, who were likely given directions by local Aborigines.

Carnarvon Gorge and Bunya Mts star maps overlaid on road map.

Image from Google Earth. These directions would no doubt reflect the easiest routes to traverse, and these were probably routes already established as songlines. Drovers and settlers coming into the region would have used the same routes, and eventually these became tracks and finally highways.

In a sense, the Aboriginal people of Australia had a big part in the layout of the modern Australian road network. And in some cases, such as the Kamilaroi Highway running from the Hunter Valley to Bourke in NSW, this has been recognised in the name.

Michael said that they weren’t used as a map as such, but were used as a memory aid. And in the Aboriginal manner of teaching, he asked me to research this and come back to see if “I had gotten it”.

I did some research, and looked at a route from Goodooga to the Bunya Mountains northwest of Brisbane, where an Aboriginal Bunya nut festival was held every three years until disrupted by European invasion.

It turned out the pattern of stars showed the “waypoints” on the route. These waypoints were usually waterholes or turning places on the landscape.

These waypoints were used in a very similar way to

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