Knowledge capture to end digital divide

FOR Cate Ballantyne, chief executive of the Pilbara-based Karlka Nyiyaparli Aboriginal Corporation, digitisation means a lot more than turning important records into pixels.

Karlka Nyiyaparli, which represents the traditional landowners in the east Pilbara region that includes the town of Newman, is the state’s biggest Indigenous corporation in terms of annual income.

Yet, despite the financial strength of the group, which had more than $60 million in revenue during the 2022 financial year, Karlka Nyiyaparli faces a challenge that many in more cosmopolitan parts of Australia would find hard to imagine.

The Nyiyaparli people’s cultural knowledge, including its language, is dying out and there is a race on not just to store it, but to keep it alive.

The Nyiyaparli living language program is trying to use cutting-edge digital methods to engage its younger people through games and the like to keep their language, and other important cultural activity, alive.

For instance, with the involvement of marketing consultant Simon te Brinke, and supported by the Roy Hill Foundation, Karlka Nyiyaparli launched a book called Jirntalpa Karnti on the flora of their region.

Importantly, elements of the book, including each plant species, have a digital code that allows a reader to hear the pronunciation or view related video through a smartphone app.

“To simply record the language is not enough,” Ms Ballantyne said. “You need tools to engage people in its use.”

Ms Ballantyne said digitisation went beyond convenient record keeping, saying it was not sufficient to just record information and stick it on the shelf, especially when it came to language.

“It can’t be a museum piece,” she said.

“It will die out.”

Such a threat of extinction is not limited to traditional language, and the Nyiyaparli project is just one of dozens across the state to capture and keep alive Indigenous knowledge for scientific, cultural, and commercial reasons.

One place where those issues converge is in the guardianship of cultural sites on mining leases across the state.

As was seen in the case of Juukan Gorge, preserving and using Indigenous knowledge is becoming increasingly critical to all stakeholders in mining tenements.

It is a quirk of history that much of the state’s formally recorded cultural knowledge is held and, in effect, owned by resources companies that have conducted cultural surveys across lands they were exploring or developing.

Government agencies also had similar databases.

Much of that knowledge was inaccessible to the Indigenous people who had provided it. It also meant knowledge was accessible to people for whom it may not have been culturally appropriate.

For instance, many Indigenous people limit access to certain information on the basis of gender.

In 2016, Karlka Nyiyaparli took part in a collaboration with peer organisation Yinhawangka Aboriginal Corporation – along with major miners BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue Metals Group, as well as involvement from the National Trust of Western Australia and the Indigenous Land & Sea Corporation – to find a safe way to return cultural and heritage information to Indigenous custodians.

The group emerged with a concept called The Keeping Place, an Indigenous charitable organisation that has adopted and adapted the technology of ASX-listed firm K2fly to store cultural information in a way that is sensitive to the requirements of each user group: native title organisations, indigenous ranger programs and other organisations operating within Australia’s Indigenous information and land management sector within.

K2fly was spawned by the need for resources companies to manage infrastructure assets but has expanded to offer solutions for many aspects of operational management such as mine leasing commitments and reserves reporting and governance, often with a mapping element.

The Keeping Place brings together that geographic information system mapping technology and relationship management software in a secure environment for cultural heritage and land management knowledge.

The Keeping Place chief executive Bradley Brown said the group, which now has 11 organisations as users, was not meant to be just a repository of cultural knowledge but about empowering Indigenous people.

“We very much have an ESG [environmental, social and governance] objective,” Mr Brown said.

“A lot of companies go out there onto Indigenous lands and collect all sorts of data, flora, fauna and Indigenous heritage data and all the stories that relate to Indigenous people and the information that comes from their country.

“Although elders and community members know that knowledge inherently and it is within their mindsets, it ends up in a report or in a dataset which is then used by industry, miners, oil and gas or agricultural firms, and those groups and some other groups will then use that data to make money.”

Mr Brown said that left Indigenous people without any control of knowledge which was originally theirs.

He said the concept of Indigenous data sovereignty sought the return of that knowledge to the original providers to give them fair access to it and greater control over its use.

For those outside the Indigenous community, a comparable issue may be the growing matter of privacy as individuals seek to rein-in the use of their data, often provided freely to third parties but subsequently exploited in unexpected ways.

Mr Brown said a significant issue around Indigenous knowledge was that much of it was simply memorised and verbally passed on from generation to generation.

“The Keeping Place is about taking that knowledge and recording it in a digital format and making sure it can’t be lost,” he said.

“Elders are getting older, and information can potentially be lost.

“This is a GIS [map] platform that ties it back to place, to country, family group, to skin clan group and the like and stores that information for future generations.

“The great thing about The Keeping Place is if a member group signs up they get their space and they are the ones who can access that space.”

But it also connected that specific Indigenous information with a broader range of datasets, from mining tenements to hydrological surveys, including publicly available data.

Mr Brown said the digitisation of this knowledge and the connectedness of the data meant traditional owners were kept up to date with developments on their land, reducing the knowledge gap between traditional landowners and the companies they deal with.

An example of this asymmetry of information was the notification process around tenements, he said. If a resources company was issued a tenement, it would know instantly via email whereas other stakeholders may initially be left in the dark.

“The Indigenous landholder group may find out, if they are lucky, four months later by letter, by which time [the resource company] may have already accessed their lands,” Mr Brown said.

“Users of The Keeping Place platform get notification the next morning.” Another group operating in this space is private Indigenous-owned company Winyama, a consulting and training business run by Andrew Dowding, who found his cultural heritage and Indigenous anthropology background increasingly involved mapping and associated technology, including data management.

Mr Dowding said through his time working with elders, he realised there was both a great need and big obstacles that his business could not satisfy alone.

He ended up creating a joint venture with Perth geospatial company NGIS. Winyama has also become the Australian partner of Indigenous Mapping Workshop, a group started in Canada that is now active in places including New Zealand.

“We needed some technology back of house to help scale it and also create a wider impact because there is a time limit to some of being captured,” Mr Dowding told Business News.

“Elders are passing away every day and if we don’t collect this information in the next decade we lose a big part of Australia’s knowledge base about traditional land.”

He said Winyama’s mission was to make an impact by giving people in communities lasting skills.

“We are a capacity builder for technological skills, it’s sort of addressing closing the digital gap that exists in Indigenous communities,” Mr Dowding said.

“We are an Indigenous technology incubator where we are incubating the next generation of Indigenous technologists and technology leaders.”

He said a big part of Winyama’s work involved training staff in a variety of digital skills, from flying drones to managing databases.

The company operates with a range of workers, typically those in land management, be they Indigenous rangers or staff in Aboriginal corporations.

The training includes tasks that vary from safely storing cultural knowledge to dealing with fire planning.

“Native title organisations are so under-skilled and they need a lot of digital skills, especially geospatial, because they manage a lot of land,” Mr Dowding said.

Unsurprisingly, a major obstacle to rolling out digital skills to Indigenous populations that inhabit Australia’s remote interior is the capacity of the communications network.

“It is a real challenge,” Mr Dowding said, adding he had to carefully scout locations for training because in many cases one person downloading Google Earth meant the rest of the class was unable to access the internet.

“If you don’t have 4G or even 3G or even a computer to run it off, that is where the digital gap really is, it is in infrastructure. “The 5G rollout is very important.

“We have high hopes from 5G and also in Tesla’s Starlink.”

Winyama has also been involved with what is called two-way learning, involving Kimberly school science teachers in a project to combine Western science with local Indigenous knowledge and use digital methods to take that into the classroom.

This particular concept has already received recognition at the highest level, with a digital twist.

Last year, Marble Bar teacher George Pantazis won the Prime Minister’s Prize for excellence in science teaching in primary schools for his work in two-way learning that integrated the local Nyamal language, copyrighted a digital seasonal calendar and used virtual and augmented reality as part of the project.

Another approach to this kind of learning using augmented reality is the Genestream project, which started with a physical sculpture at the Twin Creeks Community Conservation Reserve, just north of the Porongurup Range.

The sculpture, which can be walked through, offers a connection between local flora and fauna and the connection with Indigenous people represented over time.

The Twin Creeks installation is the first of 100 or so artworks proposed around the country, although the founders of Genestream have gone beyond the physical to roll out this concept more cost-effectively.

For instance, Perth digital agency Markr helped create an augmented reality version of similar sculpture that can be located near Mount Magnet and reflects regional biology interpreted by local artists.

The series of such ‘installations’ is aimed at providing travellers the ability to engage with local knowledge when they are at a designated location.

But not every digital project is one that seeks to protect Indigenous culture. Curtin University has been at the centre of a digital health platform called SWAMSmob designed specifically for the South West Aboriginal Medical Service.

It involves building a software application to enable Indigenous patients to access telehealth and information 24 hours a day.

The app is uniquely programmed for Aboriginal identity and cultural practices, offering ‘men only’ and ‘women only’ areas.

Its creators claim the app will also help to increase digital literacy and technology education among Aboriginal users.