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VISION
OF THE FUTURE
The Deer Lake, Fort Severn, Keewaywin, North Spirit Lake,
and Poplar Hill First Nations share a collaborative vision for community
wellness and development. We call our vision the Kuh-ke-nah Network
of Smart First Nations, an integrated scalable network resource
that each community will contribute to and draw from.. We share
similar conditions and a future of self-governance - a transformative
challenge that they plan to meet together.
Our goal is to use Kuh-ke-nah to re-construct the protocols
of work and service delivery in our communities, to re-articulate
local standards of living, and to re-determine our socio-economic
interface with Canada and the world. We aim to do this work in partnership
with government and business, ideas and capital, infrastructure
and services. The Kuh-ke-nah Network envisions a geographically
contingent cluster of First Nations sharing a common telecommunications
resource. It foresees local construction of Information Technology
Centres where connectivity is managed, applications converge and
where citizens, learners, clients, and professionals interact.
Kuh-ke-nah will bring community access to new generation
services such as electronic democracy and commerce, health informatics,
distributed learning and delivers new ways of meeting local demand
for information-based skills and competencies. The Kuh-ke-nah project
builds a bridge between knowledge-intensive expertise and local
needs, creates new opportunities for telework in communities, and
proposes a new standard of interoperability between First Nations
and Canada.
Smart Communities designation for Kuh-ke-nah acknowledges
the commitment and investment that these First Nations have already
made. Demonstration project status will lever new partners and applications
and attribute confidence to this locally initiated undertaking.
It will position Kuh-ke-nah as a model for emerging nations worldwide,
as a schema for regional cooperation and development, and as a method
for empowering individuals and communities to make informed choices
about their future. Being recognized as a demonstration site also
engages Kuh-ke-nah in a formative cycle of improved practice - a
direct means for sharing expertise among project partners and learning
from project conditions and constituencies.
Our First Nations will use this project as a way to adjust
to changing circumstances. It is a valued networked solution with
the potential for improving First Nation's access to the social,
cultural, and economic mainstays of Canadian well-being. It is a
logical next step for communities who introduced wireless local
area networking in advance of residential telephony. It also expresses
a broadly-based political consensus that technological synergies
will meet acute health and education needs in communities.
Kuh-ke-nah reaches back at the same time that it moves
forward. It engages Indigenous concepts such as open systems/non-linear
thinking and recontexualizes traditional processes such as lifelong
learning. Kuh-ke-nah uses new media to demonstrate how many and
diverse voices can communicate in one world. It establishes a collaboratory,
a place where human needs and technological capacities are shared
and innovation is an outcome and an ingredient of a renewed learning
relationship between First Nations and Canadian society.
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