“What’s the difference between you and a private Facebook group?” is a question Alejandro Lakgaxixiwa Mayoral Baños frequently encounters when he brings up his organization’s Indigenous-only app. 

The executive director of Indigenous Friends, a social enterprise focused on Indigenous digital education and autonomy, likens the app to a tipi — the traditional hide-and-wood dwellings of Indigenous communities on the Great Plains that serve as places of ceremony. Strict protocols govern conduct within a tipi. Anyone within a tipi is not allowed to repeat what was said inside when they leave. This ethos is the complete opposite of Facebook’s rules, where over a billion users can say nearly whatever they wish to anyone with a public account. 

Mayoral Banos began speaking with elders about the difficulties they were hearing from Indigenous students in Toronto in connecting to one another — and their cultures — while he was working on a master’s degree at York University in 2015. But he wanted to do more than just connect Indigenous youth to each other. As an academic, Mayoral Baños studied the relationship between Indigeneity and digital technology. Through this app, he and the rest of Indigenous Friends are empowering Indigenous youth to create online communities on their own terms. 

The app is a platform to connect young Indigenous users, but Indigenous Friends’ mission is to build Indigenous ethics into the very code of the apps and other digital tools they create. The organization’s tools are meant to complement the sharing of traditional knowledge and cultural practices, not hinder it. With the recent launch of the app’s third version, Indigenous Friends is not just releasing a new piece of software. “We created a virtual tipi,” Mayoral Baños says. 

Though plenty of the app’s Indigenous users are not from the Great Plains (including Mayoral Baños, who is of Mixtec and adopted-Totonac descent from Mexico City), the app’s terms of use are based on the protocols used in tipis. One of those is confidentiality. “We are not opening the app…to everyone to just go to sign in because that can open the door to discrimination,” he says. Currently, the only way to gain access is through an existing app user, or answering a questionnaire designed by Indigenous youth in Canada that Mayoral Baños describes as exceedingly difficult for non-Indigenous people to pass. 

The app’s Indigenous design also blurs the line between users and developers. There are simply clans. App users all have a role to play in maintaining the app, from the Beaver Clan (responsible for fixing bugs) to the Owl Clan (elders who offer teachings). Each clan has access to different aspects of the app and must work together to keep it viable — Beavers can fix bugs or minor problems with the app itself, but only Owls can send push notifications to all users. 

Indigeous Friends’ app is also heavily reliant on visual and oral communication, one major aspect of modern tech that overlaps well with Indigenous ways of knowing. The app’s ‘sharing circles’, a feature similar to Instagram stories, allows users to record in response to questions from a knowledge keeper — a continuation of the age-old practice of passing down traditional knowledge from a teacher to a student, rather than through the written word. “With mobile phones, you can record and that is translated into the oral tradition,” Mayoral Baños says. 

Indigenous Friends’ mission is to build Indigenous ethics into the very code of the apps and other digital tools they create.

At first, Indigenous elders were skeptical of using digital tech to keep their traditional practices and ceremonies alive. “They saw in the past that digital technology was the enemy — that digital technology was taking the attention of the youth from traditional worldviews and the history of their communities,” Mayoral Baños says. Then the pandemic happened. Elders are very vulnerable to COVID-19. Reserves all over the country began implementing strict lockdown protocols that, in some places, prevented members from leaving or entering. Suddenly, the prospect of broadcasting a ceremony over Facebook Live or Zoom became very appealing. “They were on digital doing ceremonies — and we were happy to see that because a lot of healing was happening,” Mayoral Baños says. 

Indigenous Friends has also developed another app (“another tipi,” as Mayoral Baños puts it) for Niagara Peninsula Aboriginal Area Management Board (NPAAMB) Indigenous Youth Employment & Training, a not-for-profit based in Six Nations that focuses on urban Indigenous youth employment. In March, the social enterprise also hosted INDIGital, a three-week conference for Indigenous people aged 15 to 35 to teach coding, digital design, and Indigenous tech solutions. It also hosted Sagamok, an Indigenous art contest focused on how Indigenous artists are reconnecting to Mother Earth during the pandemic. 

Teaching Indigenous youth tech skills is very important to Indigenous Friends. “There are not a lot of Indigenous youth getting into tech,” Mayoral Baños says. “If you are trying to open a job posting for Indigenous developers or designers, you’re not going to find a lot.” But he says that isn’t necessarily because many Indigenous youth are not interested in STEM fields like computer science. Instead, they find it difficult to grasp the libertarian Silicon Valley culture of tech. “When we go to these spaces, we don’t feel welcome,” Mayoral Baños recalls them saying. “We feel that this space is created with a language that we don’t understand.” 

Mayoral Baños says Indigenous tech creators have fundamentally different values such as focusing on building tech products for communities rather than just focusing on mass market distribution. Attaching these Indigenous values to tech education forms the core of Indigenous Friends’ digital tech program for youth. “You are going to learn about tech, you are going to learn the basics of coding, the basics of digital design, and the basics of social media — but at the same time, you’re going to be learning about your culture,” Mayoral Baños explains. “It’s about how you’re going to be merging both.” 

There are some fascinating parallels between Indigeneity and digital tech. Mayoral Baños says the practice of traditional beading is a great educational tool. “A lot of how binary code works can be explained with beading,” he says. “When you bring this perspective into communities, they are like — I know how to bead and I’ve been doing it for a long period of time.” The mobility of mobile digital tech and its lack of constraining infrastructure meshes well with Indigenous teaching methods used on the land. A hunter doesn’t need to lug a laptop around to teach a group of students about following a trail: they can snap a picture and send it instantly. 

During the pandemic, Mayoral Baños explains, mental health issues have taken their toll on Indigenous youth. Some are trying to find traditional medicines like cedar but simply can’t — they’re unaffordable or simply not available. Using an app like the ones Indigenous Friends has designed, an elder might be able to teach a young person about how to access it. But the idea is not to simply watch an elder performing a remote ceremony. Mayoral Baños says that elder would ideally tell them to go to their local park, backyard, or garden and actually bridge their digital connection to the earth. 

Ultimately, Indigenous Friends is trying to bring youth back to the land through digital tech. “At the end of the day, we cannot try to replace the real world with the digital,” Mayoral Baños says. Digital tech can be incredibly useful for Indigenous communities, but it is also causing immense harm — Indigenous peoples are displaced by lithium and silicon mining all over the world. He says digital tools built by Indigenous people need to not only provide safe online spaces for them to grow and learn, but also connect with action in the real world. “Let’s say you are not going to go back to any ceremony in person, you are not going to engage with community at all, you are just going to use the digital, you are missing a very important part — reconnecting again to the land,” Mayoral Baños says. 

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