Building a Culturally Sensitive portal for Indigenous Nations

The eHumanity Project, developed by Indiana University in collaboration with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), aims to create an evolving online cultural repository for the native tribes of the North American continent. By establishing a database from the collections of the Smithsonian Natural Museum of the American Indian and Autry Southwest Museum of the American Indian, a further means of accessing and researching these artifacts is offered to the public free of cost. eHumanity is a social portal providing access to Native American digital artifacts and discussions regarding them. We describe the requirements, implementation, user testing, and speculate as to its generalization for supporting indigenous nations and their heritage. We also present an opportunity space that is ripe for more research and investigation. We conclude by describing a preliminary vision for the next generation of culturally collaborative platform(s) for Native Americans and other indigenous nations.