Virtual Reality Warriors: Native American Culture in Cyberspace

(This story appeared in High Performance #57, Spring 1992.)

TI-POP Art image downloaded from Le Musee in Montreal.

Dave Hughes comes in a large package, galloping across the far side of middle-age in boots, jeans, bifocals and cowboy hat. He's ex-army, president of Old Colorado City Communications Company. In Silicon Valley they call him the Colonel; on the Cree and Assiniboine reservations of Montana they call him the Cursor Cowboy. He calls himself a Singer of ASCII Songs, and some magazine editor about a decade back called him the Poet Laureate of the Networked Nation.

Hughes is in love with an idea. He dreams of theater in cyberspace, a perfect performance art of interactive, computer-generated pictures and words made possible by an alchemical algorithm called NAPLPS (pronounced nap*lips).

For years he's been riding across the plains in his cybersaddle, laptop computer slung across leather pommel, talking about NAPLPS to anyone who will listen. He says the word NAPLPS rolls around his tongue "like ripe mango dripping sweet juices, like the sound of warm South Sea Islands lagoon water licking against the legs of exotic maidens in a Gauguin painting."

Hughes' whimsical eloquence sugarcoats the technobabble needed to explain that NAPLPS (North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax) is a form of computer code that can wrap pictures and words together in extraordinarily small digital packets to be transmitted by telephone to computer screens on the other end of the world or down the block.

Before your eyes glaze over, consider the politics of empowerment in the Information Age. If popular access to affordable communication tools is a powerful counterbalance to the worldwide mind control yearned for by political spin doctors and commercial media moguls, then "appropriate technology" in the hands of people with unique voices matters. Hughes gave a NAPLPS workshop to a group of Native American artists last year, and though he didn't realize it at first, he'd finally found a people who could share his vision and then expand it.

Hughes' workshop happened to coincide with a quiet Information Age revolution taking place among Native Americans. Although the Indian Self Determination Act in the '70s gave back to native peoples the right to educate their own children, it was another 15 years before Native Americans took administrative control of the community schools. With passage of the Tribal Colleges Act in the '80s, community colleges were established on every reservation. With Native Americans in charge of both administration and curriculum, these colleges are now evolving into community resource centers where people of all ages are gaining access to high-tech tools. Even on reservations like Rocky Boy where many people don't have telephones in their homes, new technology is being put to traditional educational uses.

Storytelling was the heart of education among Native Americans. Their art and culture and education were fully integrated as one in the flow of knowledge that passed from one generation to the next. The cultural renaissance of today is based again on ancient stories and an unlikely ally of oral culture: the microcomputer. NAPLPS is as simple and ingenious a next step as smoke signals and the tom tom. Teamed with a low-cost microcomputer and modem, it allows Native American artists to create bold graphics in colorful dynamic sequences, then send them over distances by ordinary telephone.

Suddenly, in the hands of the Sioux, Crow, Navajo and Assiniboine artists, NAPLPS has a powerful new identity -- a runner crossing snow-capped mountain tops, a messenger flying across the land of the Crow on the back of the big-beaked bird, telling stories to the children of the Sioux, blowing magic into the eyes of Assiniboine children, bringing ancient messages into the heart of the future. NAPLPS has become an algorithm with soul.

Dave Hughes and Cynthia Denton, system operator of Russell Country BBS (bulletin board system), collaborated with the Native American artists to create the Native American Share-Art Gallery. Today, their electronic artwork will paint itself across your computer screen anywhere in the world, with a simple call through a microcomputer, modem and NAPLPS software. The area code is to Hobson, Montana, but the gallery exists in cyberspace, a collusion of quantum mechanics, human imagination and computerized telecommunications that is creating a new theater for this emerging body of Native American art.

When Minerva Allen's grandmother and grandfather still walked the earth, they told the stories around a campfire. Children gathered sticks and young men pulled logs to the clearing. They built a fire that licked the mountain chill out of the autumn night. The children listened to the stories and watched the flames dance. They learned about Inktomi, the trickster, who helped the Creator make the earth, grow plants, and blow life into the people, and when the old storyteller leaned forward to stir the fire, sparks flew up into the sky and danced across the night, etching a pathway to the Seven Maidens and Big Brother, to Turtle Woman and the Coyote Children, to all the star people who burned bright stories through the darkness, into the childrens' minds.

Today Minerva Allen is a grandmother herself. She is part of the new wave of university-educated Native Americans taking over the role of cultural teacher and educational administrator on the reservation. She is an artist. Her stories flicker across telephone lines and satellite links to computer screens hundreds of miles apart.

Assiniboine children touch the glowing images with their fingertips. "Look, look! It's moving and its in our language!" they call, as pixels of light paint a land of lakes and forests, of people lowering the lodgepoles, gathering the tepees, fleeing to the mountains before a big battle. Assiniboine and English words join the images. Myths and history march together, telling the story of The Vanishing Braves who followed deer into the forest and are bewitched into the form of tall pine trees.

"Telling stories on the computer puts a mystic, magic type of thing into it for the children," Allen says of her bilingual work for Assiniboine and Gros Ventre children of the Fort Belknap Reservation. "It makes it like it's really happening, like it's really unfolding. It's like cartoons, only more interesting, more exciting, because it's their own language, and about them. It's our own heritage."

To the south, in the dry washes at the end of summer, when the desert stars shine bright and hard as small white stones, Navajo children watched their grandfather draw stories into the sand under the full moon. He carved worlds into their memories, telling them of bravery, trickery and wisdom he had heard about from his grandfather. The stories lived in the stars and the sand, spoke through the wind in the trees, and when they walked over the land they remembered who they were and where they came from.

Willis Tsosie's grandfather was a Navajo medicine man. Today Tsosie uses an IBM 386 computer to create images from his grandfather's stories. He went to Hughes' NAPLPS workshop with his advisor from Little Big Horn College on the Crow reservation in Montana. They studied the drawing and telecommunication techniques before creating images from Tsosie's Navajo childhood.

"Some of the drawings are part of what grandfather told me," Tsosie says. "He'd picture Monument Valley. He'd go as a medicine man and when he came back, he'd share stories about what helped these people. My grandfather said that spiritual beings brought different kinds of ceremonial designs to help people. Knowledge of those designs has been brought down through Navajo mythology in the tradition of the Lodges. They knew the designs that were powerful. They would select the proper design for the specific problem and the sand painting they made had to be perfect. I use the medicine man approach in my computer work. I concentrate on that which I know I can do and then I put it on the computer."

Using NAPLPS and telecommunications to extend the reach of their ancient stories and images wasn't much of a leap at all for people accustomed to hearing their grandparents' voices when they look up at the stars.

"My grandfather would name the stars," Tsosie remembers, "and talk to us for hours. He told us what the stars mean, what our myths and legends represent and how important that is. He said the most important thing is to remember where you come from and what our values are. He told me to respect other people and to remember our religion."

Henry Webster is a member of the Chippewa Cree tribe in Montana. He is an information technician at the Stone Child Community College on the Rocky Boy Reservation. With a hardy laugh, he told about receiving a check recently for his "show" in the Share-Art Gallery, part of the Russell Country BBS that allows you to browse through the electronic gallery without charge, then send $25 to the artist if you decide to download a graphic or animated story to keep for yourself.

"I don't really know why that particular image came out," he recalls of the piece for which he had just received payment. "I went to some elders afterward and described my painting, trying to understand what it means. It was a feather shield. It shows the four corners of life, like a compass. I put a feather on the front with a tepee and mountains. The shield is a sign of protection. The feather in the shield is a sign of respect, and the four corners are the symbol of our whole life, from beginning to end.

"When our families had feasts," Webster continued, "we would listen to stories from the older folks. They would talk about the symbols and images and what they meant to our people. All this stuff is built into your mind, it comes out in your art."

"Virtual Reality" may be a current hit on the pop jargon charts but it appears that the Native American forebears of Minerva Allen, Willis Tsosie and Henry Webster were there first. Indigenous peoples used all the world around them to pole-vault human consciousness beyond ordinary reality into expanded experience and knowledge.

Dave Hughes credits the stunning work of current Native American artists with finally rescuing NAPLPS from the clutches of the Videotex industry. For over ten years the tool had never been available to the general public, priced exclusively for highly capitalized corporate consortiums trying to find new ways to blast one-way advertising into the homes of couch potato consumers. For almost as long, Hughes had been lobbying Canadian software houses, arguing that if they made NAPLPS tools affordable to the general public, their true market could be every user of the growing web of computer networks, including artists, educators, children and professionals around the globe. Finally, late in 1991, after viewing the Native American Share-Art Gallery, the popular potential of NAPLPS suddenly became obvious to the Canadian companies.

MicroStar and MacGregor, two NAPLPS software producers, decided to make their programs, which formerly sold for well over $1,000, available for between $25-$100. This is a major victory for Hughes' vision of NAPLPS becoming broadly accessible. Today he is a little closer to seeing his dream of "interactive mind-to-mind communications" come true.

As the reclaimed reservation schools and colleges become centers of a cultural renaissance among indigenous peoples of North America, art and culture again are becoming intertwined with education. Bilingualism is an important part of this revolution, and aptitude for computers seems to accompany exposure to multiple languages. The schools are becoming community centers for access to Information Age tools with guidance from Native American men and women confident that these new technologies can fit well with traditional values.

"The elders tell us to always look toward the future," says Henry Webster, "but don't forget about the knowledge from the past."

In a time when many experience future shock as a permanent state of being and philosophers ponder grimly about how the proliferation of new technologies will affect our lives, the Sioux, Crow, Assiniboine and Navajo artists of the Russell Country BBS are excited about what they see happening. Their focus is on a reintegration of the cultural values of their ancestors into the life of their people. With the help of powerful, affordable, information tools, 500 years after Columbus came to North America and 116 years after General Custer made his last foolish grab for glory, the indigenous peoples of the continent have become trailblazers into a future where progress wears the gentle face of the familiar.

Patric Hedlund is co-producer of Computers, Freedom & Privacy, a 15-part video series about the future of freedom in the Information Age and threats to the Bill of Rights in cyberspace. As an artist, activist and writer she is interested in alternative information systems and their role in democratic society.

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999