NativeWeb began its existence in May of 1994 as an outgrowth of the NativeNet listserv mailing lists. Marc Becker, then a graduate student in Latin American History who had worked on HNSource, a pioneering history web site at the University of Kansas, began discussions with Gary S. Trujillo, the founder and moderator of the NativeNet lists, about using this new technology to support and extend the struggles of Indigenous peoples around the globe.

Guillermo Delgado, a Quechua Indian from Bolivia and a professor of Latin American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, along with Susan O'Donnell, a staff member at Cultural Survival Canada, drafted an organizational framework for this new project. Marc began to assemble materials based on this plan on his personal UNIX computer account at the University of Kansas.

Over the next year, participants on this project met at different locations, including an Internet for Native Peoples Conference in November of 1994 in Berkeley, California, a February 1995 meeting at MIT, and at the Ties that Bind Conference at Apple Computer in May of 1995.

April 1995: NativeWeb formally separated from the NativeNet project. During October 1995, the site moved from the University of Kansas to Syracuse University. Slowly, a system of collective webmasters evolved.

July 1997: the site acquired the domain name www.nativeweb.org and moved to its own server in order to access new technologies and to handle the heavy demand from users around the world.

January, 1999: NativeWeb, Inc. was formed as a New York state non-profit corporation.

March, 1999: NativeWeb, Inc. acquired the rights to the domain www.nativeweb.com.

February, 2000: NativeWeb, Inc. holds its first annual board meeting.

September, 2000: NativeWeb, Inc. holds its first "in-person" board meeting in Amherst, Mass.

February, 2001: NativeWeb, Inc. holds its second annual board meeting, and issues its 2000 Annual Report.

Articles

Here are some articles which describe NativeWeb's work.

A History of NativeWeb (January 2002)

A collaborative work-in-progress documenting the history of NativeWeb, with contributions by NativeWeb board members Marc Becker, Carmel Vivier, and Peter d'Errico.

NativeWeb: Internet as Political Technology (January 2000)

Peter d'Errico, NativeWeb board member and a law professor at U. Mass. Amherst, comments on the opportunities and challenges web technology presents for indigenous peoples around the world.

Latin America: The Internet and Indigenous Texts (Winter 1998)

In a special issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly on "The Internet and Indigenous Groups," NativeWeb founder Guillermo Delgado-P. and board member Marc Becker discuss the efforts of Indigenous peoples to gain access to electronic communication in an age of global communication and computer technology.

Interviews in zum Thema with NativeWeb Board members (December 30, 1998)

• An e-mail conversation with Marc Becker, "If Indian cultures are incapable of incorporating new technologies, that might mean that they have become stagnant and are dying"
• An e-mail talk with Shane Caraveo, "We have links to over 2000 web sites that contain information important to Indigenous cultures"

Using the Internet to Strengthen the Indigenous Nations of the Americas (1995)

Susan O'Donnell and Guillermo Delgado in Media Development (3).

Updated: 1 February 2011