'Digital Natives'

Between ads for beer and pop music, an electronic billboard in Vancouver beams challenging messages by and about First Nations.

By Clint Burnham 

"If you're crossing Vancouver's Burrard Bridge and glance at the electronic billboard that rises at its Kitsilano end, you may notice something different. Amidst the Guinness and Jack FM ads will flash the occasional message on a red background. Some of them will seem to be about native issues:

"First Nations. We are not a stereotype. Not gone... not lost! Still connected."
Or: "Riot 1492."
Or: "My great-grandfather hid his ceremonial regalia in a cave that we have long since lost track of. Who wants to go spelunking? #potlatch ban."
The last one gives us a bit of a clue -- "#potlatch" is a hashtag, how you provide a hot link in Twitter. The text messages that will be up on the billboard for the month of April are part of Digital Natives, a public art project that Lorna Brown and I are curating, bringing together contributions by 30 native and non-native writers and artists, from Vancouver and from across North America.
Digital Natives is also being previewed as part of the WE: Vancouver exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery (and this article is part of a Tyee series sampling voices from that exhibit.)

In what follows in this piece, I'd like to talk a bit about the process by which we developed the project, a bit about some of what we've learned about issues of technology and First Nations languages during that process, and a bit about what we think this all means..."continue reading 
About Digital Nativeshttp://digitalnatives.othersights.ca/about/