White Bear Media Project

White Bear First Nation (1992, the 1993-4 on contract)- Community Animator.

Background Context

This project began while finishing up the term funding on the Rural Access Initiative project at BU. I was working from the University end of the dialogue, with collogues on several reserves to develop a rule-set and necessary support structures for harnessing the First Nations autodidactic learning preference, as a way to facilitate their success in post-secondary institutions which also lean towards that approach to learning.

In the course of these activities, the Use of Video in Fostering Autodidactic Learning Skills came to the fore. When the RAI project ended, there was a felt need to further the refinement of these concepts, which gave rise to a four-part community development project we called the White Bear Media Project, at White Bear First Nation, Saskatchewan.

The four parts of the White Bear Media (Community Animation) Project were:

  1. Teasing out the rule set and needed support structures for the support of First Nations post secondary students if one was to take the "cultural imperative" of autodidactic learning seriously and endeavor to harness that latent energy to enhance their success.

  2. Be open to ways that such developments could be integrated into the First Nations K-12 system as appropriate, in order not to disrupt what might otherwise be a pedagogical continuity from birth to school entrance, from K-12, and from post-secondary through to community life. This was definitely flagged as secondary to objective number one, as we were not directly involved in the K-12 system.

  3. Assist the Band to secure and begin operations of a community owned and operated radio and community television station. The band was considering this initiative at the time, and I saw it as being consistent with our prior work with media use and autodidactic learning skill development.

  4. The band council wanted a further item added on to the proposal, which I saw as having marginal relationship at the time, but as it was no big problem I agreed to have it added. The significance and relevance of this aspect of the project was not to become evident until the second part of this project, in which we investigated possible reasons for its being shut down just as its success was becoming apparent. We were to look into ways that the band could structure its Social Service delivery system so as to fit the local situation. The Band had taken over local service delivery from Indian Affairs, complete with their structures and was finding that the system they inherited was not serving their felt needs.

Approach Used

The Band had had difficulty with contracts before and preferred an employment relationship. With reluctance, I agreed. At the end of two months, it became clear that in the transition from contract mode to employment mode, there had been no allocating of funds for the operation of the project, simply my salary, and that it would not be possible to proceed. The intention was that money which was usually left over at the end of an academic year due to student drop out would be transferred over to the project. The problem was that by Christmas, I had done everything that could be done without budget, and the project faced collapse before funds came available.

Over that Christmas holidays, I thought through the situation and came back with an amendment on my contract reverting it to a contract with my company Mamascatch Communications enabling me to use the tax deduction savings to begin work, and purchase some preliminary equipment in order to get started. I calculated that I could carry on this way for two years at which point I would break even...no gain and no loss over the whole project. That is, I would zero out. I hoped that such an extended period would not be necessary. It turned out that way, as there never was money left over at the end of either of the fist two years, and at the end of the second our project had its funding cut as well.

I located second hand equipment (still and video) taking the approach that I would buy about 10% of what they would actually need, with purchases targeted upon highly functional and useable resources. The idea was to get them sufficiently into the activity that they would be well enough informed to make the purchases of he other 99% of their equipment on their own. In the end I also sold them most of my own equipment at a loss in order to assemble even close to the 10% target. The philosophy used was "Community Development", or as I renamed it Community Animation. in order to distinguish it from its current, "purely economic" connotation.

Just before the funding was cut from the project, I came across Joel Barker's book Paradigms and found that the description of what he described as "paradigm pioneering" described my approach on this project almost perfectly. I used exerts from his description as a framework for my final report.

I worked throughout the project in close collaboration with the director of the post Secondary program, Rod Dignean, and the Band Council / Education Committee Chair, Bruce Standingready.

By the end of 15 months, I had a prototype of a "rule set" which needed to be tested out. We ran tests on a group of Post secondary students during the April to September break, inviting them to propose projects under the guidelines of the "rule-set". When he funding of the project was cut midway through the tests, I continued on my own to see them through to completion. The disruption interfered with part of the rule-set being implemented, but it was completed with enough parts intact that I knew what I needed to know about its further implementation.

The investigation into the possible reasons for the funding cut continued at my expense for over a year, in order t ascertain if the shut-down was due to problems inherent in what we had developed, or for external reasons. I did not want to spread our results without knowing about obvious flaws.

I continue to keep in touch with participants as much as possible under the circumstances.

Current Status

Findings To Date