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Using technology for preservation Arviat residents working with experts and organizations to keep language and culture from being lost
Miranda Scotland
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, July 3, 2013
ARVIAT
Preparations are underway for Arviat to get its own TV channel so community members can broadcast local events and share content they create.
Assitant professor Tim Pasch, left, visited Arviat June 16 to 24 to connect with members of the community and collaborate with them on ways to use technology to preserve Inuktitut. Outgoing film society president, Eric Anoee Jr., right, said Pasch has given him a lot of ideas. - photo courtesy of Tim Pasch |
The new initiative is being made possible with help from IsumaTV, an organization which is focused on encouraging Inuit and indigenous people to express themselves through multimedia.
Eric Anoee Jr., Arviat Film Society's outgoing president, has been working with the company on the project. He said the current plan is for John Arnalukjuak High School to host the station.
The students produce a lot of great work that could be recorded and put on the channel, he said. For instance, the teens have performed plays about important social issues and recorded interviews with each other about bullying.
Also, there are many students in grades 9 to 12 that are really involved with the film society and they have the know-how to create compelling content, said Anoee.
Stephane Rituit, a spokesperson for IsumaTV, said the station could also be utilized by organizations to engage residents on issues that affect them. Instead of posting a written document translated into Inuktitut on a web page where nobody will read it, politicians or businesses can create a short video about it and air it on the network, he suggested. There is no limit on what the community can create.
"We provide the technology, we provide the website," said Rituit. "We expect people will take over and use it."
By this fall, at least eight communities will be connected to IsumaTV through local cable networks, he said. Arviat residents who have a basic cable package will be able to view the content on channel 19. Those with Internet can visit the station's website.
Anoee said he's excited to work with the youth on this project and a number of other initiatives happening through the film society.
Last month, Arviat hosted Tim Pasch, an assistant professor of communication at the University of North Dakota. While visiting the community, he connected with a number of organizations, including the film society, and shared various ways technology could be used to preserve the Inuktitut language and culture.
"It's not enough to learn one software program and let that be your bread and butter," said Pasch. "It's really, really important for the Inuit to enable their voices to be heard really strongly because there is a real move in the North right now for increased development and sovereignty."
Pasch said the world is clambering for the Arctic right now and if the Inuit voice isn't heard, he has concerns regarding the environment and the traditional Inuit way of life, language and culture.
"There is a real risk of it being subsumed, so I think now is the time to utilize all of those tools to their utmost," he said.
Pasch, who has done research on Inuktitut preservation, introduced some of the youth to software they could use to make beats for Inuktitut rap or techno music. He encouraged community members to produce audio recordings of elders telling stories or throat singers sharing their gift.
The professor also showed residents a number of open source apps that could be tweaked to teach Inuktitut.
"There are so many possibilities," said Anoee. "We have a lot of brainstorming to do to figure out what types of training we want to start running next year."
In the meantime, the society is gearing up for the Adobe Youth Voices project, which Anoee hopes Pasch will help out with. The students know their way around a camera and a tripod, but their post-production skills aren't as strong. The workshop will train the teens to use Adobe's editing software.
"We want to use technology more and not just stick with one medium," said Anoee.
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