Reflection on Week 10: Surveillance, More on Accessibility, Indigenous Digital Literacies, and more

For this week’s reflection I wanted to focus on Indigenous perspectives on Digital Literacy, especially because I had an Indigenous Mental Health course last semester.

Indigenous culture is all about community and spirituality. Indigenous peoples beliefs and values can differ from those that are not indigenous. As well lots of indigenous people live in remote communities and may not have access to high-speed internet. Another big issue is with generative AI misrepresenting indigenous knowledge by representing Indigenous knowledge through one overall combination of ideas. This is problematic because there is a wide range and variety of different Indigenous groups who may not follow the exact same beliefs or practices.

To show how organising all indigenous beliefs/practices into one whole concept is problematic, I found an article that shows exactly why combining groups and communities into one, can have negative outcomes.

In this article, we see a story where a group of students created a graphic novel exploring Métis identity. The problem that arose was with Western Métis communities were arguing that simply having mixed ancestry does not make someone Métis, and challenged the idea of the “Eastern Métis”. These Western Métis communities come from and belong to the red river region, which has a completely different culture, history, and even language, then those that call themselves Eastern Métis. The author of the article says that “While the French term métis initially referred to those with mixed European and First Nations ancestry, the term has come to refer to descendants of a specific group in western Canada’s Red River region”. This article shows the importance of not misrepresenting indigenous groups and reflects why artificial intelligence systems should not group all indigenous peoples into one combined group. Given that there are over 600 indigenous communities in Canada, it is crucial for AI systems to address this issue.

References

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/19/graphic-novel-canada-indigenous-identity-?utm_source=chatgpt.com