ABSTRACT
American Indians, for their relatively small numbers, are among the world's most culturally diverse peoples. According to David Maybury-Lewis, ethnicity is like kinship, where people recognise themselves as belonging to the same ethnic group and feel like distant kin, 'but so far back that no one can trace the precise relationship'. 'Bulletin boards' and 'listservs' were among the first new technologies available to allow rapid, relatively open-format, multi-user communication of American Indians issues. The role played by CD-ROMs in American Indian ethnicity is not as clear as that of the listserv or the Web, but the great importance of this technology appears to be its use in making accessible historical documents and in preserving culture. The World Wide Web has seen the most dramatic use of new technologies by American Indians. The proliferation of Web pages has made it difficult for many people to distinguish those pages developed by American Indians from those developed by the wannabes.
