Chain of Narration: Preserving Oral Histories On The Blockchain

all right buenos dias magandang Umaga GM good morning can hear some good mornings back thank you so I'd like to start us off with a quote I have a friend by the name of eche from afropolitan and he loves to say that podcasting is the new oral tradition I have another friend as well her name is Sasha and Sasha is a poet like myself and she loves to say that poetry is the original blockchain what do these two statements have in common these are two people who are pioneering in the digital digital Frontier but despite shaping the tools and the vision for the future they recognize that it is an extension of technologies that have come before and not only an extension of technologies that I've come before but things that are built on Traditions that have existed for millennia so a little bit about myself my name is Ibrahim Leon I come from a community organizing background I'm a Storyteller I like poetry I like photography film things that I enjoy I love connecting I love connecting with people vis-a-vis culture and language and even accents as well I can sometimes just throw on an accent and I do that I miss myself and I connect with people in that way another thing that I enjoy is capoeira capoeira is an afro-brazilian martial art that was practiced by enslaved Africans in Brazil and used as a tool of liberation the interesting thing is that because they had to fight back and could not let people know that they were training this martial art is disguised within a game and a dance and it is closely intertwined with a practice and a culture of music that guides the game it may seem like I'm throwing random facts at you but I would encourage everybody here to take everything that I say as a thread and my hope is that by the end of this conversation we can weave them all together to show a really beautiful tapestry my parents immigrated from Sierra Leone West Africa to Canada and that's where I was born we didn't last very long there by the time I was one years old we were already in California because it was too cold at least that's my assumption I grew up in California but I also grew up in other places around the United States and also places across the sea from the ages of 10 to 16 I lived in a place called tarim in Yemen and we went there so that we could study Islamic Studies and traditional spiritual Sciences while there I studied Arabic rhetoric Arabic grammar Islamic law and jurisprudence poetry and I also received the title at the age of 14 of a half of what is a half of it literally translates into somebody who holds something or who keeps something or preserves something and it is a title given to those who memorize the entire holy book Quran so by the age of 14 I had memorized the Quran but not only had I memorized the Quran but I had also memorized sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad what I found fascinating is that as I began to memorize the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad we were tasked not just with memorizing the sayings themselves but oftentimes on whose authority that saying was narrated and who that person received that saying from and who that person received that saying from I.E the chain of narration storytelling is important and keeping the chain of narration alive is Paramount what I have found in this space and I find this so beautiful is that there is direct correlations between what I already do in my faith tradition in my background as a West African coming from an oral tradition direct correlations between the way that we store and pass on information and the blockchain even the Hadith and the cultural Traditions that I just mentioned it is based on the premise that you don't trust verify because there are canonized versions books that compile the sayings of the prophet but what gives and makes a clear distinction between a weak saying of the Prophet something that you cannot extrapolate Islamic law from and a strong one is oftentimes how many chains of narration go back to the prophet how many nodes are there how distributed is it and how authenticated is it that that person could relay that information truthfully sometimes somebody lied and that weakens an entire chain of narration or someone has a weak memory that weakens a whole entire chain of narration so this is one of many examples that I found where stepping into the blockchain space I found that I could embody who I was as a black West African Muslim I think that this space really cultivates an era of let's try to make history on the blockchain because we're early we see ourselves as early adopters and we want first mover move first mover advantage and we like the idea of making history on the blockchain I propose that not only should we do that but we should make sure that we're actually bringing history and putting it on the blockchain too so in the year 2021 I released my first nft collection titled homecoming it is these photos that you see before you photos from my first trip ever to Sierra Leone West Africa where I spent three weeks getting to know and understand my culture and I titled it homecoming because there was an odd sense of familiarity even though it was my first time going home I released these nfts as a collection and also simultaneously released a mirror article a white paper of sorts where I told people that when you collect my nfts I will use these funds to travel back to my origin by place of origin Sierra Leone for the second time and not only explore but document my culture thankfully people resonated with the story and they resonated with the fact that I was explicit and that I wanted to explore how blockchain technology could be leveraged to preserve my culture people collected and thanks to my collectors thanks to my friends my family and especially my mom my biggest supporter of all I was able to make it to Sierra Leone the photo that you see of me sitting on a drum is right next to a well in my grandmother's backyard every morning the way that I start my day is by going to the well and drawing water out for the household I'd say I romanticized it a little bit but it was also my way to get my workout in and serve the other people of the household on the first morning back as I was drawing water out of the well I saw my great auntie and I remembered the first time that I saw her around the time when I took these photos and how she greeted me for the first time she raised my mother but because I grew up in the west she never had an opportunity to meet me so when she saw me she immediately began to sing and she immediately began to dance so even though I came to Sierra Leone with this grandiose idea and really just an intention when I saw her I immediately knew what I was there to do I wouldn't just preserve stories I would focus on songs and poems because they're such an integral part of our culture and the way that we relay history and knowledge I'm going to show you a video that encapsulates a little bit of what I've been up to since then my name is Ibrahim and I'm a community organizer multimedia Storyteller and archivist originally from Sierra Leone West Africa in the beginning of 2021 I entered the blockchain space curious about the implications for me as an artist and investor I started off collecting nfts and eventually became a dow participator and a dow founder but as excited as I was by the blockchain I recognized that we were barely beginning to scratch the surface of what was possible so at the end of 2021 I decided to release an nft collection titled homecoming with the expressed intent of using the funds that I garnered from that collection to travel to my country of origin Sierra Leone in West Africa and not only learn about my culture but document it and explore how I could leverage blockchain technology decentralized file storage and metadata to preserve my culture the tapestry is a collection of short video format songs and poetry with an emphasis on diversity I collected songs from over eight tribes the tapestry is also a reference to the threads of metadata that tie the story together and Aid in the archival nature of the project I want this to not just be a project about cultural preservation but a tool an archival tool that can be used to standardize the way that we approach metadata and collecting of history and culture so that is a short preview of what I've been up to since I went back to Sierra Leone with the intention of preserving my culture it was truly a beautiful Journey it started off very humbly in my grandmother's backyard but by the end of it I was working with the top Chiefs in the land and what I found is that they were inviting me into their homes multiple of them not just because of who I was and my intention but who my great-grandfather was so it turns out my great-grandfather was a poet himself and that was part of what it really excited me to go to Sierra Leone because a lot of his documents had been destroyed in the Civil War but his son my grandfather said when you get to Sierra Leone you and I will be able to search for it and hopefully be able to dick up some of his remaining documents and I was successful I was able to found not just one but two of his poems which is a great success to me but what I found also was that the path that I walked had already been laid for me Chiefs welcoming welcomed me into their homes and not only gave me introduced me to the people who could sing me the songs but sang the songs to me themselves and I was able to document that on video and as part of what I will be sharing in the web 3 space that is one of the threads that I think is fascinating about my story the fact that even though I might not know exactly where I'm going and I follow one single thread at some point I step back and find myself enveloped in a tapestry that has been woven without my contribution and without my intention when I was in Sierra Leone I came across something very very interesting I realized that what I was doing in Sierra Leone would give me threads that will make me travel across the world including to Brazil now what would take me to Brazil the fact that I love Capoeira sure but besides the fact that I love capoeira for as long as I've trained in the martial art I have always heard in the songs what sounded to me like words of Prayer in the Arabic language however whenever I asked about them people would respond that this is just a shame this is energy and although I did not disagree I felt that I had the direct translations of what was being said because there are words that I say every day even though they might have been altered just slightly when I was in Sierra Leone I heard about a village in the depths of the Jungle where they practiced Islam and had Islamic poems and songs and so I was curious to hear them and document them as well so I traveled to this jungle and and when I was able to find it and sit with the inhabitants of this Village they sang They welcomed me in song they gave me song they gave me ass and how they wanted support to continue to build in their Village but what really stood out to me was the fact that they sang the songs that I hear when I train in Capoeira in the same way the words [Music] and to me that sounds very close to [Music] and the way that they sang this in Sierra Leone was closer to the way that they sang it in Brazil than the Arabic iteration isn't that fascinating so over time in Generations in Brazil I believe that it had become encoded for in order to survive that Islamic tradition and in Sierra Leone it had also changed slightly over time but because it was still imbued with the meaning people knew what it was and so now I come to recognize that the tapestry is something that just is not something that just connects us cross generationally but cross-culturally as well and I have goals of going to pursue threads in Brazil to collect songs and poems over there and to Indonesia and in places all around the world I feel really privileged to be in the web 3 space because nfts empowered me to go and build a community that would support my journey beyond that I have found myself in the public good side of things with Git coin and I was able to get 700 contributions from Individual people to support the continuation of this project so I what I love about web3 is that you're able to have an idea and have people coalesce around that idea and support you directly in a way that is sustainable and you can continue to build on top of that not just that but you can build in an autonomous way where you're not Reliant upon any significant institution and although you may leverage a traditional or Legacy institution or brand you can still be the owner of the platform yourself and Sierra Leone I also had the privilege of onboarding many people into the web 3 space because the idea is not just to provide people with fish but to teach people how to fish themselves so I had onboarding sessions where we're able to onboard dozens of people some of whom have already minted and sold their first nfts and think about that somebody who is an internal yawn being able to access a global decentralized market of people who are interested in supporting the Arts my value proposition is simple the blockchain is immutable the blockchain is decentralized and it allows us to build in ways that are unique to the technology I just proposed that we should not only participate in Degen activities and collect jpegs but think about what impact the nfts that we buy and we sell and we create can have beyond the blockchain I've also been really fascinated by metadata the fact that you can have metadata attached to nfts and use them as strings to connect between seemingly disparate pieces of media on the blockchain so there were instances when I was in Sierra Leone where I noted that people did not know the songs until the elders came out and taught them those old songs that'll be something that I make note of in the metadata there were instances where everybody knew the song and even the children knew the song that is something to make note of the metadata there were instances where I was only able to get an audience with those Chiefs because they knew my great-grandfather that is something that I want to include in the metadata so not only am I working to preserve the culture and make sure that we have we're using decentralized file storage to enable content persistent for important cultural ad artifacts I want to build a front-end interface that utilizes metadata so that we can navigate these stories in a dynamic way I really appreciate everybody for taking the time and being here with me and hearing about what I'm doing in my work with the tapestry thank you for coming and I hope to see you more soon