This document discusses the author's research into how indigenous groups in Brazil and Colombia have appropriated new media technologies like the internet. It describes how some Brazilian indigenous groups conceive of computers and the internet as "digital bows and arrows," while an indigenous organization in Colombia called ACIN represents the internet through the imagery of weaving. The author's research began by accidentally encountering materials in Spanish and Portuguese while conducting online searches, and led them to learn Portuguese in order to better understand indigenous appropriations of technology across linguistic boundaries. Digital tools have allowed for translingual research methods that move beyond hierarchies of language.

1. THE TRANSLINGUAL DIMENSIONS OF
RESEARCH INTO INDIGENOUS
APPROPRIATIONS OF NEW MEDIA
TECHNOLOGIES, IN BRAZIL (AND
COLOMBIA…)
Dr Thea Pitman
Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures
University of Leeds
t.pitman@leeds.ac.uk

2. ÍNDIOS ONLINE WEBSITE, 2015

3. INDÍGENAS DIGITAIS (2010)
DIR. SEBASTIÁN GERLIC
 Teaser
 ‘O computador conetado
à internet é como se fosse
um arco, que a gente
denominamos de arco
digital.’

4. WHY I WAS INVITED…
 For ages now (at least since 2011) I’ve been
wanting to write about something that I keep
calling ‘digital indigeneity’.
 I took my cue for this term from a short
documentary made with a group of indigenous
communities in NE Brazil who all participated in
an ethnojournalistic project using new media
called Índios Online.
 The documentary was called Indígenas digitais
(dir. Gerlic, 2010) and was all about what
difference it did or did not make to indigenous
people to use new technologies such as the
internet, how they used them etc.

5.  I was struck by the way that they sought to
‘indigenise’ new ICTs such that a computer
connected to the internet became a ‘digital bow
and arrow’. ‘guerreiros digitais’…
 There’s been a lot of discussion of how indigenous
people might appropriate new media in order to
get it to work to serve their interests and fit with
their way of looking at the world.
 How they might challenge the Western and
colonialist assumptions in terminology such as
‘surfing the web’ or ‘homesteading on the
electronic frontier’… And terms used in Spanish
for eg ‘navegar’ are no better…

6.  Right from the start there were people who suggested
that indigenous Latin Americans might conceive of
the internet as a hammock…
 The predominant assumptions about indigenous
appropriation of new media, revolve around
nets/networks and by extension around weaving, and
not around digital bows and arrows.
 So I’ve been comparing the Brazilian case mentioned
with a Colombian indigenous organisation called the
Asociación de Cabildos Indígenas del Norte del Cauca
(ACIN) that does just about use weaving as a way of
indigenising the internet, through their Tejido de
Comunicación structure (and the aesthetics of their
site).

7. ACIN WEBSITE IN 2011

8. ACIN WEBSITE IN 2014

9.  The answer is, in my view, not as simple as
saying that Brazilian indigenous people use bows
and arrows and Andean cultures do lots of
weaving. Or that warrior poetics/weaving poetics
are common parlance more generally in Br/Col.
 It’s not absolutely to do with the greater or lesser
input of women in these projects of appropriation
of new media technologies. Which is what you
might presume... (weaving as women’s work;
cyberfeminism re weaving and the digital).
 It’s more to do with the politics of the groups. In
Manuel Castells’s terms, the digital bows and
arrows are symptomatic of a ‘resistance identity’
and willingness to engage in conflict to retake
their land.

10.  Whereas the ACIN are specifically now focused
on peaceful resistance and on ‘la liberación de la
Madre Tierra’ rather than reclaiming land. The
focus on weaving networks, on ‘tejidos’ by the
ACIN is more of a ‘project identity’ in Castells’s
terms. More radical attempt to change society as
a whole for everyone, to weave social networks…
Very deliberate choice of terminology.
Purposefully rebarbative.

11. THE BOOK, ARCO DIGITAL (2007)
Online
educational
network, 2006-07
book of same
name (2007).
Author – Nhenety
Kariri-Xocó e
outros indígenas.

12.  But I also like what some of these guys achieve
when they mix their poetics.
 The best eg is the book Arco Digital (2007) where
in the title we have digital bows and arrows and
in the subtitle we have fishing nets. And these
nets lead on to comment on back cover:
 ‘Você sabe quem inventou a Rede?’
 This places indigenous people as first come in
cyberspace. Overturns the colonialist rhetoric of
‘homesteading on the electronic frontier’ and
‘white people’ playing at being ‘digital natives’.

13. THE TRANSLINGUAL DIMENSIONS… OR
HOW I GOT INTO THIS MESS…
 I didn’t train as a Brazilianist. (And I’m not an
anthropologist, but that’s another issue..).
 I tried on several occasions to learn Portuguese as a
UG and PG student, but didn’t get very far.
 This research direction started with doing keyword
searches on search engines without specifying the
language I was searching for.
 On the first project that Claire and I did together, I
was putting in terms such as ‘ciberliteratura’ or
‘cibercultura’ and of course this brought back
materials in Spanish and Portuguese.
 I quickly realised that Brazil was a really happening
place for this kind of thing and it couldn’t be ignored
in a project about Latin American ‘cyberculture’.

15.  This could have happened with traditional analog
research methods in library catalogues, but it’s so
much easier to quickly dip into things on the web…
 This defective research method continued in our
second book project.
 I was supposed to be writing about the discourse of
mestizaje, but my searches for mestizaje kept
throwing up stuff about cyborgs and the materials
were all from the US/Mexico border.
 The word ‘raza’ was no use either; I wanted to go
further south.
 So I started playing around with terms such as
‘indígena’, and ‘ciber’ or ‘digital’, and once again the
results came back in both Spanish and Portuguese.
 But this wasn’t ‘cultural production’ in the arthouse
sense that we used it in our second book so it got
missed out and left on the ‘to do’ pile…

16.  Its presence on the ‘to-do’ pile was sufficiently
compelling that I had another go at learning
Portuguese and got quite a lot further; enough so that
I can now work with these materials.
 I’m still not really an anthropologist, nor a media and
communications scholar. My obsession remains with
discourse, poetics, aesthetics and the cultural politics
that underpin such choices.
 But I have had to consider the fact that I’m not
dealing with cultural products as I used to, but with
real people and traces of their lives. Issues re ethics.
 And I’ve also started working directly with these
people, really opening myself up to other ways of
working. This has been really exciting (and
frustrating at times…). Need for advocacy.

17.  I invoked the term ‘translingualism’,
‘translanguaging’ in my title to encapsulate what is
most noticeable for me about what digital
technologies can facilitate in my research.
 It goes beyond multi/bilingualism, beyond hierarchies
of powerful/subaltern languages.
 In order to conduct research in dialogue with the
indigenous people in question in Colombia and Brazil
without ever having gone there for real yet, I use a
wide range of digital communication tools – email,
skype, whatsapp, facebook.
 Give eg re whatsapp interviews in Portuguese with
Tupinambá too.
 Diachronic nature and mix audio v textual is helpful.

19.  This is extremely liberating: no-one’s worried re
spelling/grammar or who’s more competent that
whom. A relief – modern linguists can get too hung up
on this…
 But it can also produce troublesome results in terms
of how we account for translingual interactions in
traditional academic fora.
 Eg. Blog in English/Portuguese/Spanish to capture
the best bits of the event we ran on subalternity and
the potential of the internet for indigenous advocacy
and resistance in Latin America as a whole. I wanted
to turn it into a multi-authored article such as the one
we recently did on ‘ML and the digital’, but not easy
to move from multilingual pick-and-choose design
blog in 3 languages, to a linear argumentative
academic article in how many languages?