Wampum

This is a two page overview of the NORTH AMERICAN INDIGENOUS (.NAI) proposal for a cultural and linguistic top-level domain in the current (ca 2008/9) ICANN new gTLD rounds. The original proposal for a NORTH AMERICAN ABORIGINAL (.NAA) to ICANN was drafted in 1999.

Background

This proposal is the continuation of the original North American Aboriginal (.NAA) proposal¹ for a "sponsored generic" top-level domain operated by a consortium formed by the original proposants -- the Nevada Indian Environmental Coalition, the Treaty 7 Tribal Council, the National Indian Telecommunications Institute, the Intertribal Council on Utility Policy, and the Western Abenaki of Maine, as a shared registry on a cost-recovery, tribal infrastructure development basis, with a core policy that registry data is a public resource, subject to tribal and other privacy limitations, held in trust for the indigenous public.

In the intervening decade the personnel, interests, and abilities of authors of the .NAA have changed, as have the consensus policies of ICANN.

Introduction

There are well in excess of 1,500 indigenous cultural and linguistic entities in North America. These range from the largest, the Navajo and the Cherokee, numbering in the hundreds of thousands of enrolled members (viewed as indigenous legal entities) and culturally and/or linguistically affiliated educational, cultural and linguistic institutions, groups, clans, extended non-clan kinship networks, and individual persons, to groups consisting of a very limited number of culture and language practitioners, to groups engaged in cultural and linguistic recovery, and even peoples adopting an existant related culture and language as their plan for cultural and linguistic survival.

In addition to these general purpose legal, cultural and linguistic entities, there are tens of thousands of individuals creating works of indigenous scholarship, teaching in and administering indigenous primary, secondary, and post-secondary academic institutions, creating works of classical and contemporary music, fine arts and crafts, the culinary arts, clothing, teaching indigenous languages and managing indigenous cultural and linguistic materials.

In addition to these contemporaneous sources of cultural and linguistic activity there are hundreds of thousands of archived documents, recordings, and objects, in holdings of various kinds, in the Americas, in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific, and hundreds, if not thousands, of archivists and archives.

Finally, consistent with our original purpose of creating a means for Indigenous Intellectual Property, also known as Traditional Knowledge, to become incorporated within the evolving quasi-legal ICANN system, and thereby protecting and advancing the interests of Indigenous peoples, implicit in our express choice in 1999 of the Mataatua Declaration, and our long history of work between Indigenous people in the Americas and the Pacific, the proposal includes "light the path" provisioning of indigenous resources for follow-on efforts in subsequent rounds of ICANN's evolving new gTLD process.

Why Generic?

The earliest effort to obtain any form of an indigenous namespace was the attempt by the late Dr. John Mohawk (Sotsisowah) to convince the late Jon Postel to create and delegate a namespace. This effort was doomed by Dr. Postel's choice to use ISO 3166, commonly called "country codes" (though many of its entries, then and now, are non-countries), to manage the task of making changes to the (pre-DNS) host tables. The next effort was a proposal by Mr. Eric Brunner-Williams to Dr. Postel to use X.121, which contains "continental codes", to allow non-national entry into the DNS root, prior to the establishment of ICANN, or ICANN's "new TLD" process of 1999-2001. The proposal died with Dr. Postel as the problem of determining the form and controlling authority of "the new entity", initially the International Ad Hoc Committee (IAHC) and eventually the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), became controlling.

With the possibilities of an pre-generic alternative to a ccTLD exhausted, the focus of our effort became the ICANN gTLD, and we contributed to ICANN's Working Group C, authoring the "sponsored gTLD" model subsequently used by the proposals for .aero, .coop, and .museum in 2001/2002.

There are significant advantages to the "generic" TLD which are overlooked by applicants fixated on obtaining ccTLDs. These are:

• direct immediate use of the ICANN accredited (gTLD) registrars
  
• indirect immediate use of multiple ccTLD registrars via a "public interest (ICANN accredited) registrar"
  
• stability of contractual relationship with ICANN
  
• the "consensus policies" of the GNSO
  
• insulation from government(s)

The offset is the application cost, and the ongoing presumption that Verisign's for-profit business model, copied by Afilias and NeuStar, serves all uses of all namespaces.

Education

Educational institutions, from child-care to Haskell Indian Nations University, the entire gamut of pre-primary, secondary, and post-secondary academic institutions, will use the namespace for their institutional names, their teaching faculty and non-teaching staff, their students and alumni. Implicit in the use of a namespace is literacy, both in the languages of the dominant culture, and in the languages of the students, whether an indigenous language is their first or subsequent language, and our fundamental goal is to preserve and increase indigenous textual literacy, using ASCII, extended ASCII, Inuktitut syllabics, and Cherokee syllabics.

Cultural

Cultural institutions, museums, galleries, ateliers, individual artists, and cultural objects will also use the namespace.

Linguistic

Language standardization committees, preservation projects, writers and oral traditionists (story tellers), and works within the written and oral traditions will also use the namespace.

Non-Indigenous Use

Indigenous people and their cultures and languages co-exist with settled immigrant people and their cultures and languages. Indigenous schools purchase textbooks from specialist educational publishers. Indigenous museums and galleries purchase insurance policies. Much of Indigenous economic activity has consumer or producer dependencies with settled immigrant economic activities. Where the locus of non-indigenous use of the namespace is to maintain and develop the cultural and linguistic interests of an indigenous community, or their economic interests, that use will be encouraged.

Technical

During the first five years of operations, the provisioning side will be carried out using the CORE registry fabric in Europe and the publication side will be carried out using the DNS and WHOIS constellation of WAMPUMPEAG (Western Abenaki of Maine), supplemented by additional DNS constellations, e.g., ISC, PCH, etc. During the second five years of operations, both provisioning and publication will be carried out from facilities within North America.

¹ A Position Paper on some new gTLDs

Your comments are sought. You know who you are.