New Technologies and Contested Ideologies: The Tagish FirstVoices Project

In December 2004 representatives of the Yukon government and the First People's Cultural Foundation of British Columbia signed an agreement to facilitate the use of digital multimedia technology to archive and teach endangered Native languages.¹ "Without initiatives like FirstVoices, indigenous languages and cultural knowledge are at risk of disappearing forever," Yukon premier Dennis Fentie said in a prepared statement.² The Tagish language website project being conducted by the Carcross Tagish First Nation was funded by this agreement and is one example of the ways Native communities are using digital technologies for cultural and linguistic self-representation.³ In many cases, the use of new media generates wide-ranging discussions concerning cultural values, modes of representation and teaching, and contrasts between Native and non-Native ideologies. This article examines the discourses of the Tagish website team as they formulate an Indigenous language ideology based on traditional values and contemporary responses to language endangerment that contrasts with the approaches of outside agencies.

The Tagish website project makes use of digital sound files, photographs, videos, and text. In addition to promoting language revitalization efforts, the new technologies used in this project have also facilitated community control over the representation of the Tagish language and culture. Access to new media has made it possible for the local community to manage and conduct the project, and the technological sophistication of the website lends authority to their efforts. A central concern of the project members has been defining their language ideology as they take control of the representation of their heritage.

Canadian political economist and communications theorist Harold

Innis suggested that innovations in communications technology often compel realignment in the monopoly or oligopoly of knowledge.⁴ Borrowing imagery from Hegel, who wrote, "Minerva's owl begins its flight only in the gathering dusk," Innis identified cases where the flowering of culture has come before a final collapse.⁵ Similarly, the use of digital technologies by Indigenous groups is also facilitating a realignment of authority as local communities are able to represent their own languages and cultures in sophisticated ways.

This study is based on our experiences participating in the Tagish FirstVoices project and earlier language documentation initiatives. Between 1992 and 1994 one of us (Moore) conducted language documentation projects for the Yukon Native Language Centre and the Carcross Tagish First Nation. At that time Tagish was already the most endangered Yukon Native language, with only three fluent speakers. In 2004 we assisted the First People's Cultural Foundation with the development of a keyboard and unicode font for Yukon languages, met with them to discuss their projects, and transcribed sound files as the Tagish FirstVoices team recorded them.

In December 2004 one of us (Moore) traveled to the Yukon to work with the Tagish project and participated in the project members' discussions. Three main elders were working with the project: Lucy Wren, who may be the only fluent speaker of Tagish, her son Norman James, and Clara Schinkel. Other local elders also provided project oversight or contributed in other ways. Two young adults from the community, Jason Greenaway and Sophia Smith, recorded materials and uploaded them to the Internet. As a linguist working with the project, it was possible for one of us (Moore) to record the discussions of the participants and later interview them in a context of shared trust based on common goals. One of us (Hennessy) conducted an analysis of the FirstVoices projects and reviewed the transcripts of interviews. Our description of this project reflects an outside academic perspective that is informed by the views of community members.

Language Ideologies

The Tagish...