Revisiting an Ethnocritical Approach to HCI: Verbal Privilege and Translation
Michael J. Muller · The MIT Press eBooks · 2007
I was looking for serious, constructively critical interpretations of Native American cultural works. I had become frustrated by the seemingly narrow range of choices that were conventionally available. I wanted more. I wanted some sense of what the Native stories were and are, before they had been domesticated into forms that were easy for the dominant culture to assimilate. And I wanted some help in understanding what I was reading, exactly because I was a member of that dominant culture, and I wanted to educate myself to know more than that culture could teach me. Krupat’s work did indeed provide me with ways of thinking about Native cultural works. But, somewhat unexpectedly, his work also provided me with new ways of thinking about the difficult issues in ethics, politics, and epistemology that HCI workers face when they work with users who have less organizational power than they themselves. To borrow a phrase from Barbara Kingsolver (Kingsolver, 1989), Krupat’s work helped me to see myself and other HCI workers in “a new perspective on a power structure in which they were lodged like gravel in a tire.” I found that his analysis of an analogous situation provided both an alarmingly precise description of our problems, and a number of heuristic approaches for solutions to those problems. I will explain. Krupat described the situation of the ethnohistorians during the period immediately after World War II, when the US government was evaluating the claims of hundreds of Native Nations for sovereign nation status. For each nation, tribe, or band of Native Americans, the granting of sovereign nation status led to important advantages in their struggle for cultural survival within a majority culture that operated by different values, different concepts of what constitutes knowledge, different ways of preserving knowledge, different rules of evidence, and above all different ways of making and justifying decisions. A Native Nation that achieved sovereign nation status was allowed to conduct its own limited self-