“Wisdom is not a topic that is taught or studied in the curriculum in our schools or Universities, nor is it a practice in modern life. Technology can put a man in space, or a nano-computer in every creature on earth. Yet, technology cannot answer the last question that should ever be asked of anything. And it is an Indigenous question: IS IT WISE?”

The Compatibility of Technology and Indigenous culture

Duke first became interested in Cybernetics, computers and total-systems technology when Bob Olivero, Director of Administration of the Company of Young Canadians, explained some of the basic principles to him in 1965. When he later met George Yost, an architect and MIT graduate, his interest was fanned into flames. He began to explore the connection between the developing science of cybernetics and the tribal systems of the Canadian Indigenous Community.

The idea developed rapidly, and although it was obvious enough to Duke, communicating that idea to someone else was something different. Strangely enough, the university community picked up on the idea first. During the World University Service Tour, Duke hit almost every campus in the country with his ideas about the cybernetic world being a direct development of tribal culture. His audiences were amazed, sceptical, but definitely interested.

“Duke Redbird exploded with a brilliant and intriguing McLuhamist exposition of a future of electronic tribalism in which Western European man, having extended his material and physical being to its limit, would overcome individualism and settle into a technological collectivism for which the Indians, having remained a tribal people, would be already well-equipped.  Indeed, they might even emerge as the ruling class.

Redbird claimed that technological Western man, with his proposals for a participatory democracy with guarantees annual income supplied by technology, is moving back towards Indian society, which originally was a participatory democracy with a guaranteed annual income supplied by nature.  This society would be similar in kind to the Indian society before the white man came.  The Indians, he said, already possess the key to life in the tribal brotherhood - the new North America - which will emerge as the greatest civilization the world has ever seen.“

• Boyce Richardson

“I first became acquainted with McLuhan's  work during the early sixties, it was a time of great change, and I along with Wilfred Pelletier, his brother Tom, Isaac Bulleau, Norval Morresseau , and others both Native and non Native stayed up many nights discussing the differences in world view between Indians and Whites. As a First Nation born on the Saugeen Reserve and growing up in white foster homes, I knew at a very early age that there was something fundamentally different in the way I thought and the white people I was associated with.  During my early years, I assumed that it was a personal anomaly of my own.  After I left the children's aid society and was re-united with my family, I discovered that I was no different from any other Native person but was totally different from white people, particularly, in my relationship with my environment and my universe.  It set me on a quest to find what this fundamental difference was and it wasn't until I encountered the work of Marshall McLuhan that I discovered the secret to the Western European worldview. His writings explained that the entire make-up of Western European technology was simply the wholesale extension of the human body was an epiphany for me. I finally felt I understood the workings of Western  European society.  I began to theorize that the human being is made up of more than a body, but includes a mind, soul and spirit as well.  I began to explore the possibilities that where the white man emphasized the body, then maybe the black man's emphasis would be the soul, the Asian, the mind and Indigenous peoples around the world, the spirit.  It occurred to me that the differences between the races was simply the value and emphasis that each group put upon their particular expression of their humanity. I saw that we had more in common then difference, particularly in 1963, when McLuhan suggested that the businessman of the future would become a hunter of information rather than animals.  I realized that what was missing in white society were the spiritual extensions of Indigenous culture and that the Native could be true to his own culture by using technology as a hunting and gathering exercise, with the added feature of being embedded with the spirituality of the Native, the soul of the Black and the mind of the Asian. I chose then to pursue these ideas through poetry and art, as opposed to academic treatises.”