*About this paper: Throughout this text are images that are linked to the web-exhibit “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs– Dreamers and the Land”. Please follow these links and other text-links as ‘footnotes’ to the discussion.

In the last several years, members of the Doig River First Nation, a Dane-zaa (Beaver) community in northeastern British Columbia, have initiated video and web-based media projects aimed at revitalizing language and culture, and at providing new media skills training for youth. “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs– Dreamers and the Land” is the most current of these– a web-exhibit directed by the Doig River First Nation, and funded by the Virtual Museum of Canada, the Volkswagen Foundation Endangered Languages Program, and the Northeast Native Advancing Society. The exhibit depended on extensive collaboration between Doig River community members, project co-curator, fundraiser, and folklorist Amber Ridington, myself (project co-curator and visual anthropologist), linguistic anthropologist Patrick Moore, media producers, and the expertise of many others (see Project Team and Credits).

Central to the production of this digital ethnography and virtual museum exhibit was the mentoring of Dane-zaa youth in video production, and under direction from elders, traveling to important places in Dane-zaa territory where youth recorded elders telling stories in Beaver and English about drumming, singing, the history of Dane-zaa Dreamers (also referred to as Prophets), and ways in which Dane-zaa people have dealt with rapid social change and loss of access to land. The web-exhibit integrates subtitled video narratives, interpretive e-text, photographs of the video and website production process, recordings of Dreamers’ songs, and archival images of the places visited in order to address present concerns faced by the community as they negotiate legacies of domination.

In this paper I discuss “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs– Dreamers and the Land,” as a case study in the connection of digital ethnography to participatory media production practice. In particular, I discuss the use of video / verité documentation of participatory processes as one avenue for facilitating polyphonic and diverse articulations of individual perspectives on dynamic Dane-zaa drumming and singing traditions. I discuss how these processes on the one hand facilitate indigenous media practices– in this case, the documentation and dissemination of oral histories told to address contemporary political, social, and environmental struggles– yet on the other, create new hegemonies of representation within and between Dane-zaa communities. Further, I begin to explore how Doig River First Nation community reviews of videos and images recorded in the course of producing the exhibit in fact contributed to local discussions around intellectual property rights and copyright. This emerging intellectual and property rights discourse, articulated and argued in relation to this exhibit and other local digital media projects, played a strong role in the curation of ethnographic representation of the Doig River First Nation in “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs– Dreamers and the Land”.

More than conventional ethnographic scholarship, digital ethnographic representation allows for potentially limitless, more contextualized representations of individuals, cultures, and languages. Further, as Biella (1993) predicted, hypermedia brings an end to the marginalization of ethnographic film [and video] in the discipline of anthropology. In this case, video narratives that draw attention to participatory production processes can both constitute a central focus of digital ethnographic representation and play a central role in facilitating participation in the creation of representations themselves.

Responding to the May 2007 launch of “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs– Dreamers and the Land”, former Doig River First Nation Chief Kelvin Davis told a Fort St. John newspaper reporter, “This is a positive step we are taking, and we want people in the outside world to appreciate what we have comprised, what we’re trying to achieve, and what we’re trying to work towards” (Olsen 2007). With its focus on Dane-zaa place names and oral histories of territory now significantly impacted by oil and gas industrialization, the virtual exhibit is seen by Doig River leaders and many community members as a strong expression, in their voice and on their terms, of the ways in which Dane-zaa people have dealt with rapid change under colonialism, maintain their language and traditions, and assert their Aboriginal and Treaty rights.

The study of indigenous media is thought of as emerging from a critical revision of the field, catalyzed as people traditionally in front of the lens gain greater access to media technologies (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). It pays sustained attention to the fact that mass media are at once cultural products and social processes, as well as potent areas of political struggle (Spitulnik 1993; Hall 1980; Ginsburg 1994). According to Spitulnik, indigenous media projects have “also begun to engage wider anthropological issues regarding race, ethnicity, symbolic processes, and the politics of the nation-state, and has been, for the most part, rooted in a strong interest in the possibilities of media advocacy and a politicized anthropology” (Spitulnik 1993:303).  Indigenous media producers northeastern British Columbia are engaging new technologies to challenge Euro-Canadian meta-narratives of aboriginal and national histories. Museums, film, and photography, which became the visible evidence of an indigenous world expected to disappear, are now mobilized as assertions of aboriginal resilience and creativity in the face of continued linguistic, geographic, social, and political marginalization (Ginsburg 2002; Geller 2004).

The Doig River First Nation’s digital media projects, which have included the creation of a digital archive (Ridington and Ridington 2003), video documentaries, websites, traditional drumming and singing CDs (see Ridington and Ridington 2006), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping projects, and related land reclamation initiatives, have parallels with those of aboriginal peoples in other parts of the world, conducted with similar political, economic, and social goals in mind. Chapin, Lamb, and Threkheld (2005) emphasize that indigenous mobilization of digital technologies such as GIS around the world has been done for political goals. They have primarily addressed the defense and reclamation of ancestral lands, as well as the strengthening of indigenous political organization, economic planning and natural resource management, and the documentation of history, culture, and language to reinforce cultural identity (Chapin, Lamb, and Threkheld 2005).

In her work with South Australian Pitjantjatjara video makers, Faye Ginsburg points out that the challenge for Australian indigenous media producers is to create visions of culture and history that simultaneously address the realities of Aboriginal communities and intervene in representations of national histories (1994). She describes how video produced under the direction of elders focuses on ceremonies, stories, dances, and sand designs, and shows the production process to authorize the reconfiguring of traditional practices for video as “ ‘true’ and properly done.”  They reinforce social relations that are fundamental to ritual production, and reinforce the place of Pitjantjatjara among Aboriginal groups in the area and within the dominant culture. These media “provide sites for the re-visioning of social relations with the encompassing society, and exploration that more traditional indigenous forms cannot so easily accommodate” (Ginsburg 1994:372).

Dane-zaa producers of  “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs– Dreamers and the Land” similarly directed their project so that oral histories and personal narratives recorded both in planning meetings and on the land would become central to their ethnographic representation in the virtual exhibit. As the videos I describe in this paper show, Dane-zaa elders and community leaders played leading roles in the participatory conceptualization of the project and the recording of videos. Further, I suggest that they chose certain narratives and  locations at which to record them in part because of their potential to challenge the legacy of a Euro-Canadian colonial discourse that is based on racist assumptions about Aboriginal inferiority, and which has been used in the past to justify the appropriation of Dane-zaa territory. Roe et al (2003) describe how governmental correspondence and newspaper journalism in the Fort St. John area between 1933 and 1946 engaged tropes of colonial discourse-– Aboriginal destitution, inevitable extinction, weak constitution, European conceptions of progress, the innate value of material progress, and agriculture as an indicator of land use– and used them to legitimize the transfer of Indian Reserve 172, referred to as the Montney reserve, to returning war veterans in 1946  (Roe et al 2003).

The videos discussed below, therefore, and the Dane Wajich exhibit itself, should be viewed in the context of the Doig River and Blueberry River Bands’ successful legal battle for restitution over the loss of this reserve and its associated mineral rights (see Roe 2003; Ridington 1988), as well as Treaty Land Entitlement negotiations with the Canadian federal government. Both of these experiences have raised consciousness in the community about the significance of documenting oral history in relation to Dane-zaa territory and traditions in order to assert authority and to articulate local rights discourse. Such awareness was fundamental in enabling the community to envision, direct, and participate in the critical curation of this website project.

The three videos discussed in this paper were recorded in the context of planning the virtual exhibit. Chosen from a total of twenty-seven video clips featured in the web-exhibit, they represent the beginning of a participatory process in which elders and community leaders articulated, based on their direct personal experiences, the central themes and production plan of the website. The clips document statements made at a planning meeting held in the first week of the 2005 summer documentation and production phase, and a drumming and singing performance at a community barbeque celebrating Treaty Land Entitlement negotiations around the same time.

The collaborative production that co-curator Amber Ridington and I designed and managed was based on community consultation, and parallels many of the approaches of Participatory Action Research (PAR). At best, “Participatory Action Research is a social process of collaborative learning realized by groups of people who join together in changing the practices through which they interact in a shared social world…” (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005:563). Because of the level of communication and involvement expected from both sides of the research relationship from the outset, PAR is a useful framework for designing community-based multimedia projects. Emphasizing liberation, investigation of circumstances of place, and realignment of power (Smith et al 1997), PAR methodologies seem to constitute one way of decolonizing the research relationship. However, practitioners will admit that the ideals associated with participatory research methodologies seldom match the specificities, tangents, and realities of any given project (Kemmis and McTaggart 2005).

This reflexive and subjective methodological approach not only follows a movement in visual, media, and museum anthropology towards collaborative and indigenous media production and curatorial practices  (see Ames 1992; Biella 2006; Ginsburg 2002, 1994; Michaels 1986; Phillips and Johnson 2003; Pink 2006; Rouch [1973] 2003a, Ruby 2000) but also reflects calls by indigenous scholars and their allies for the decolonization of dominant (academic, Euro-Canadian, colonial, imperial) identities and subject positions (Alfred 2006; Borrows 2006; Menzies 2001; Regan 2006; Smith 1999; Tully 1995, Turner 2006). For Jean Rouch, "Knowledge is no longer a stolen secret, devoured in the Western temples of knowledge; it is the result of an endless quest where ethnographers and those whom they study meet on a path that some of us now call 'shared anthropology'" (Rouch [1973] 2003b). Many aboriginal scholars, while critical of western paradigms, have appropriated aspects of participatory action-oriented methodologies to their own ends. Linda Tuhiwai Smith points to the widespread use of participatory action research that is developed on the basis of Indigenous value systems (1999:167). Wylie similarly asserts that research in formerly marginalized communities “will only be effective if those whose lives are affected are directly involved in the research enterprise from the outset, as partners, not merely as subjects, as sources of insight, and as progenitors of new lines of evidence” (Wylie 1995:267 in Lyons 2007). 

The following video clips reflect the ways in which three people-– Elder and Song keeper Tommy Attachie, Storyteller Sam Acko, and former Chief Gary Oker use video to relate their particular life experience to the their goals for the project, to contemporary concerns for Beaver language revitalization, the revitalization of Dane-zaa traditions, and the defense of their Aboriginal and Treaty rights. The videos were both documents of participatory process- and defining moments in which the goals of Dane-zaa stakeholders in the project were articulated.

In June of 2005, following Amber Ridington and the Doig River First Nation’s successful grant application to the Virtual Museum of Canada, Ms. Ridington and I initiated a series of community meetings in the Doig River First Nation Administrative and Cultural Center, with the goal of creating a draft storyboard for the exhibit. While the original funding application had proposed to create an exhibit of Dane-zaa story and song, conversations with Doig River Elders, youth, and Chief and Council, made it clear that in addition to teaching about stories and song, the exhibit should show the world audience how members of the Doig River First Nation are using traditional knowledge to contend with the legacy of colonialism, the impact of oil and gas industrialization, and the many complex challenges with which they are faced.

The direction of content development was established when former Chief Gary Oker brought a large cloth bundle to an initial meeting with project participants. He unwrapped it to reveal a moose hide drum skin, separated from its frame, ragged along its edges and torn on one side. It was painted in red and black, depicting two “trails” leading to a central circle, and from that circle, a single trail leading to the top of the drum. One side of the image is painted solid red; the other, solid black. Chief Oker explained that the drum skin had come into his possession when his Grandfather, Albert Askoty, passed away. It had since been stored in a closet in his house. Elders in the room recognized the drum, and began to speak about it. They identified it as having been made by the Prophet Gaayęa almost a hundred years before. Gaayęa had passed it on to Charlie Yahey, the last Dane-zaa Prophet, who himself had passed it on to Chief Oker’s grandfather.

At a meeting the same week, Tommy Attachie, a Dane-zaa song keeper who remembers the songs of the Prophets from as long ago as two hundred years, used the drum as a starting point from which to articulate the many levels of connection between the drum skin and Dane-zaa social, political, and cultural history. His statement was made in Dane-zaa Ẕáágéʔ (Beaver); well aware that project facilitators such as myself, as well as youth and younger community members, could not understand what was being said, the choice to speak in the Dane-zaa Ẕáágéʔ was an important declaration of the centrality of language in properly communicating the drum’s history and knowledge associated with it. Such assertions of authority and protocol were echoed in the ways that Mr. Attachie and others shown in videos discussed here directed the curation of content for the website, facilitating a process of recontextualization as the old Dreamer’s drum was made relevant to present experience.

Mr. Attachie’s narrative connects the story of Gaayęa’s drum to Dane-zaa oral tradition, prior Dreaming and hunting traditions, fundamental connections to the land, language, and current social and political issues. Mr. Attachie draws on his knowledge of the history of Dane-zaa Dreamers, and as song keeper, knowledge of the songs that Dreamers brought down from Heaven at places throughout Dane-zaa territory.  He discusses, from his perspective, the meaning of Gaaye˛a’s drum. He talks about visiting the Prophet Oker with his Grandmother, and about what his Grandmother taught him about “how to live.” He instructs the Elders present at the meeting to travel out onto the land with the youth video team and “tell them the important stories”. (View Mr. Attachie's narrative)

Immediately following Tommy’s narrative, other Elders, such as Billy Attachie and Sam Acko decided that it was time to get started. We had not yet translated what Tommy had said, but within an hour, the Band’s fifteen-passenger van and three pick-up trucks were loaded with a dozen Elders and the rest of the crew. We drove thirty minutes to Alááʔ S̱ato˛ (Petersen’s Crossing), the former home of the Prophet Oker, and the location of the day school that many of the community members had been required to attend as children. As the youth video team set up their shot, Tommy made sure that the old stone chimney, all that remained of the school, was in the frame. In turn, as directed by Tommy, Elders sat in front of the camera and told “the important stories.”

In the following two weeks, the group traveled to five other locations in northern British Columbia and Alberta that had been important camps and seasonal resource areas, now surrounded, and in some cases, obscured, by oil wells, highways, and natural gas pipelines. At each location, Elders recited place names and explained their origin. They recounted stories of Dreamers there, and described the songs that the Dreamers brought from Heaven to those places. They talked about what these places had been like generations ago, what Dane-zaa people had done there, and how the landscape had changed. They explained to the youth recording them how important it was to learn their language, and to hold on to their traditions. They went to great lengths to ensure that the images and audio documented by the youth correctly conveyed the messages they were sending to their own communities and the unknown audience that would watch these videos over the Internet; in some cases, small trees were cut down if they blocked certain features of the landscape that needed to be visible behind the storyteller. 

At the same project-planning meeting, respected storyteller and Doig River Drummer Sam Acko spoke from his own experience about reviving Dane-zaa Drum making traditions, and about keeping the Dane-zaa drumming traditions alive. Although fluent in Dane-zaa Ẕáágéʔ (Beaver), Mr. Acko addresses the group of elders, youth, and project facilitators in English. He describes how these drumming and singing traditions were almost lost, but how he was able to overcome his initial difficulties with drum making to bring back the tradition and, with Tommy Attachie and others, make drumming, singing, and the Prophet Dance a focus of cultural life at Doig River once again:

While Mr. Acko acknowledges the tenuous nature of drumming and singing traditions, he also describes how the traditions are gathering strength. Doig River’s annual Elders Camp, in which Elders spend time together out on the land, hunting, making dry meat, and relating memories and stories to one another is an important affirmation of Dane-zaa cultural knowledge. Similarly, the Spring Beaver Camp is held to teach traditional skills and knowledge to Dane-zaa youth, such as hunting and trapping, making dry meat, and learning Dane-zaa oral history and traditional stories. Sam Acko is known for his skill as a storyteller, and went on to make a significant contribution to the web exhibit, telling traditional Dane-zaa stories, in both English and Dane-zaa Ẕáágéʔ (Beaver) at places such as Madátsʼatlʼǫje (Snare Hill) and Nętl’uk (Osborne River). 

For former Chief Gary Oker, drumming and singing traditions are a source of moral guidance and strength for the Doig River community. Echoing Tommy Attachie’s interpretation of the drawings on Gaaye˛a’s drum, and relating this interpretation to his own experience as a community leader, Chief Oker also demonstrates how these traditions are also powerful tools to be mobilized politically in performances like the one documented, and through representations of Dane-zaa culture in projects such as this one. In this video clip, Chief Oker, Tommy Attachie, and Doig River Drummers Jack Askoty, Brian Acko, and Eddie Apsassin perform for Federal government negotiators at a Treaty Land Entitlement celebration at the Doig River First Nation Cultural Centre. In between performing Dreamers’ songs, Chief Oker tells the audience that the recording of these songs and traditions for the virtual exhibit is important for Dane-zaa people. He speaks in a mixture of English and Dane-zaa Z?áágé? (Beaver), asserting the centrality and endurance of the Beaver language, but also ensuring that he is heard and understood by Crown negotiators and all community members in the audience:

Like Mr. Attachie, Chief Oker connects the virtual exhibit, Gaayęa’s drum, and the Dreamers’ songs to Dane-zaa land and the struggle to defend Aboriginal rights to it. The web-exhibit is seen as a way to convey Dane-zaa history and knowledge of the land, and the moral and religious authority associated with the history of Dane-zaa Dreamers.  Like Mr. Acko, Chief Oker uses the drum and knowledge associated with it as a grounding metaphor for cultural, linguistic, and political revitalization, and as inspiration for ongoing community development initiatives.

The videos discussed in this paper demonstrate that local control over technology, and local authority over ethnographic documentation can facilitate important community-defined processes aimed at defending autonomy, rights to traditional lands and resources, revitalizing the Beaver language, and building relationships between elders and youth. Oral histories are foundational in these processes of recontextualization, in which stories, songs, and knowledge associated with material culture become meaningful tools for negotiating social and political obstacles to self-determination.

The videos also demonstrate a Dane-zaa practice of speaking from direct experience (Cruikshank 1998; Ridington 1988). In the course of developing this virtual exhibit, project participants repeatedly drew on subjective experience to articulate goals and direction for the project. As I have described, the active participation of elders in the framing of video shots, in their choices of oral narratives to record, and where to record them, resisted the separation of Dane-zaa stories and songs from the political and social context in which they are entwined. These observations are in keeping with the experiences of other anthropologists working with northern Canadian Athapaskan peoples, who have written about moments in which they realized that their conventional academic approach to research had little relevance for the individuals and communities with whom they work. Julie Cruikshank, for example, describes how her early attempts to document secular history in the Yukon Territory were thwarted by Southern Tuchone elders who insisted on telling stories instead. Robin Ridington, writing about his experiences forty years ago with the many of the individuals involved in the creation of this web-exhibit, similarly recalls how his novice endeavors to fill out surveys were met with blank stares, buffered by offers to provide “Indian stories.” He later wrote that while still honoring scientific inquiry and scholarly method, “I have used these methods and traditions to inform a different anthropological language from the one I was taught in graduate school” (1988:73). Cruikshank too came to understand that these stories enlarged, rather than limited her project; that the extensive knowledge of these elders was “not amenable to direct questions” and required demonstration so that others could see how it is used in practice (Cruikshank 1998:70).

Both Cruikshank and Ridington give examples of the resistance of northern Athapaskan peoples to the attempts of anthropologists to separate indigenous knowledge from broader contexts of social relations. Such a separation has had real consequences for these communities; textual and visual representations of aboriginal people, removed in time and space from their complex web of social relations, have been used by anthropologists, museums, and the state to construct what Peter Geller calls “illusions of possession” which can be systematically ordered and organized according to the criteria of the collectors (Geller 2004:166). These representations are tied to ideological assertions of state authority, which gain their power to dominate and alienate as ideas of the nation are “imagined” and reproduced by those who encounter them (Anderson 1983).

These effects and responses transcend national and cultural boundaries. Returning to the example of South Australian Pitjantjatjara videomakers, Faye Ginsburg has pointed out the ways in which these Aboriginal producers use “a language of evaluation that stresses the activities of the production and circulation of work in specific communities as the basis for judging its value” (1994:367). In communities where traditional activities are still practiced, she says, “such evaluation is culturally very specific, corresponding to notions of appropriate social and formal organization of performance in ceremonial or ritual domains” (1994: 367). Ginsburg calls this orientation “embedded aesthetics,” a system that “refuses the separation of textual production and circulation from broader arenas of social production” (1994:368). In the same way that Dane-zaa and Southern Tuchone Elders showed Julie Cruikshank and Robin Ridington the importance of constructing ethnographic representations that place narrative as the foundation of social relations, indigenous media practices such as those facilitated in the course of producing “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Songs– Dreamers and the Land” provide direction by which non-Aboriginal ethnographers and media producers can shape their collaborative practice, allying research with Aboriginal peoples’ broader goals for self-definition and cultural restitution.

A central goal for participatory research processes is realignment of power, and in visual, media, and museum anthropology, the facilitation of self-representation. However, community direction of a media or research project, while potentially breaking down relations of power between researcher/outside facilitator and the community, can create representations of culture that generate new hegemonies of representation. In “Dane Wajich: Dane-zaa Stories and Song– Dreamers and the Land,” these negotiations of relations of power occur both within the Doig River community, and between Doig River and neighboring Dane-zaa communities that were not directly involved in the production and curation of the exhibit (see Ridington and Hennessy 2008).

Looking first to ways in which these relations of power play out within the Doig River community, I raise some of the logistical issues that functioned to limit participation in the production of the exhibit. Firstly, youth participation in the project was restricted by the fact that a single group of teenagers were needed to commit to learning video production and traveling each production day with the team. Elders requested at the beginning of the production phase that the group of youth recording narratives for the project be rotated each day that the project team traveled out on the land to record oral histories. However, it was logistically difficult to train a new group, or to locate a new group of youth for each trip and subsequent recording session. The result was that only six youth were able to receive media production training, contribute directly to the project, and represent the perspectives of Dane-zaa youth.

Secondly, the majority of Dane-zaa members of the Project team were either elders with time to participate in such events, youth on summer holiday from school, or political leadership for whom participation in cultural activities was a part of their official responsibility. Young to middle-aged adults with childcare responsibilities, employment commitments, or businesses to run were not able to participate in the production phase of the exhibit. While many of these community members made important contributions to subsequent reviews of the exhibit design and content through its development phase, for example copying personal photographs for the website and making important curatorial suggestions, their schedules and circumstances limited their presence in the exhibit’s representation of the Doig River First Nation.

Thirdly, even though five out of six youth video documentarians were young women, elders who took the lead in planning and organizing the production phase of the exhibit were almost exclusively men. While young women took a leading role in the documentation of narratives, elder women primarily supported the participatory process with their presence as listeners, particularly important as a Beaver-literate audience for Dane-zaa Ẕáágéʔ narratives. Male elders and community leaders primarily determined the exhibit’s central theme–Dane-zaa Dreamers, their drumming and singing traditions, and their relationship to the land. These drumming and singing traditions are largely those of Dane-zaa men, not women, and therefore men were the ones to speak, from their own experience, about Dane-zaa drumming, singing. This is not to say, however, that women were excluded from the exhibit; in the course of the project, particularly through the production phases in which the project team moved out onto the landscape, broadening the project to include narratives of place, women also spoke about their own experience with the land, what they remember about the Dreamers, and how these places and traditions hold significance for them today.

Less explicit upon viewing the exhibit, yet most in need of further exploration is the extent to which facilitation of participatory media projects at Doig River also function to exclude representation of other Dane-zaa communities. As described in greater detail in Ridington and Hennessy (2008), this is particularly complicated by the fact that adjacent Dane-zaa communities have shared-digital cultural heritage for which intellectual property rights have yet to be defined. From the completion of participatory production and documentation processes in 2005 to project completion in 2007, community-based inter-and-post-production review of these videos in the context of the web exhibit were essential elements of exhibit prodiction consultation. Discussions, both formal and informal, about what is appropriate to display in a web-exhibit that is publicly accessible have been an important mechanisms for generating discussion around issues of intellectual property rights and copyright of digitized ethnographic documentation. Resistance to the use of particular images and archival audio recordings expressed by members of an adjacent Dane-zaa community raised awareness at Doig River that these images were contested and should be avoided in local projects until further discussions could occur. In this case, in the final review phase of the project, consultation discussions resulted in a shift in community consensus– in fact a movement toward lack of consensus– on what culturally sensitive or sacred visual material was appropriate to show over the Internet. This resulted in the reworking of the Dane Wajich exhibit to remove any Dreamers’ drawings or images of the Dreamer Gaayęą’s drums, including archival images from the Ridington-Dane-zaa Digital Archive, and images recorded in the course of the project.  

The emergence of a new awareness and articulations of copyright and intellectual property rights to ethnographic documentation requires extensive further investigation, particularly as the use of digital media become standard in ethnographic practice. However, preliminary observations indicate that the use of video in participatory web-exhibit production and evaluation processes has made a significant contribution to the documentation and representation of diverse perspectives, and, through consultation and review, the re-negotiation of consensus around display of digital images of sensitive material and visual culture. Participatory digital ethnographies, with endless potential for multi-media contextualization, point to possibilities for the alignment of digital ethnographic practice with aboriginal movements aimed at the “decolonization” of geographies, both physical and metaphorical.

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