If you grow up hearing and using certain sounds, I believe that your voice apparatus is either built for this or adapts to this. What happens when you encounter another language with different sounds than the ones to which you’re accustomed? Do you have trouble replicating them? How soothing/healing is that when you have to labour to first remember the word, then make the sounds that constitute the word? I don’t have an answer for this yet. Perhaps someday I can discover why this question keeps coming back to me. That’s an Aboriginal type of literacy – to recognize that there’s a reason why something keeps coming back to you.

Blue – the fifth colour of the rainbow, which some Aboriginal cultures understand to mean truth. Knowing the truth means staying true to your vision, where commitment is most important. Blue is also used to symbolize the colour of the sky. With the coming of the Europeans, the skyline changed, and now contains the tools of technology, such as towers and satellite dishes, that send and receive signals. Blue refers to the skills required to communicate using technology.

For the purposes of literacy programming, I will keep this discussion to computers and on-line learning. I recognize that there are many other types of technology, and, in fact, Laara Fitznor, Doctor of Education at OISE, recently reminded me that our medicines and tools for communicating with the Creator can be considered “technology.”

I shared with Charles Ramsey, Executive Director of the National Adult Literacy Database (NALD), that I had been invited to speak at a First Nations forum in Paris in October on Maintaining a Cultural Identity in a Digital Era. The program will focus on “Aboriginal New Identity,” for which forum organizer, Fulvio Caccia, says “Literacy is a key.” I needed a sounding board for how to shape my participation in this event that I see as an opportunity for getting Aboriginal literacy international recognition. Charles shared with me an incident in which he had a request from Pat Paul, Maliseet from the Tobique First Nation, New Brunswick. Pat asked Charles to write to some of the Aboriginal listservs to ask for the mailing addresses of publishers who might publish Aboriginal stories. Among the many responses was one from a woman in Australia who said that she had a web-site, and wondered if Pat would be interested in posting one of his stories. Charles and Pat sent, “Geow-lud-mo-sis-eg: Little People.” That posting resulted in a flood of events that fall into several categories: