Indigenous Domain

Author

Joline Blais, Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Maine, where she co-founded the Still Water lab with Jon Ippolito. She is co-author of At the Edge of Art (Thames & Hudson, 2006) and works on network culture, indigenous knowledge systems and the commons.

Citation

Blais, Joline. "Indigenous Domain: Pilgrims, Permaculture and Perl." Presented at ISEA2006, the 13th International Symposium on Electronic Art, San Jose, 2006. A related version appeared in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

The Argument

Blais's target is the vocabulary of the digital commons movement, and specifically two words it relies on: commons and reservation.

Her claim is that both carry colonial structure. The "commons" as invoked in free-culture discourse is a space carved out of an otherwise proprietary order — a protected exception that leaves the enclosing logic intact and depends on it for its definition. The "reservation" is more explicit still: a bounded territory set aside for a group, on terms set by the power that did the setting aside. Copyleft, in this reading, is a defensive licence that borrows the enforcement machinery of copyright and thereby concedes its framework.

The three terms of the subtitle name the alternative she assembles:

• Pilgrims — the settler-colonial pattern of arriving in an inhabited place, declaring it empty, and calling the resulting appropriation a founding. Blais reads a good deal of digital frontier rhetoric this way; compare the frontier thesis and its afterlife in network culture.
• Permaculture — design principles drawn from ecological agriculture: work with existing systems rather than clearing them, close loops, favour perennials over annuals, value edges and diversity, and design for regeneration rather than extraction.
• Perl — free software practice, and specifically the cultures of gift, reciprocity and stewardship that grew up around it, which Blais reads as closer to indigenous protocols of shared use than the licence texts suggest.

The proposal is an indigenous domain rather than a public one: a model of shared knowledge grounded in obligation, relationship, stewardship and protocol — where use carries duties to the source and to future users — rather than in the negative liberty of an unowned commons.

Related Work

The argument connects to the Cross-Cultural Partnership template developed at Still Water, an agreement form intended to let collaborators from different knowledge traditions share work on terms that do not require either to adopt the other's property regime.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

This is one of the few pieces in the network-culture literature that examines the metaphors of openness rather than assuming them. Its central observation — that "commons," "frontier," "settlement" and "homesteading" are not neutral descriptions but imported structures with histories — applies directly to how digital spaces are described, including in Eric Raymond's homesteading of the noosphere.

Related Reading

• The Significance of the Frontier in American History
• Noosphere
• Cultural Resource Management
• Ward Cunningham
• Material Semiotics