MARISA ELENA DUARTE
Network Sovereignty BUILDING THE INTERNET ACROSS INDIAN COUNTRY
“Duarte shows that tr ibal ownership and use of information and communication technologies technologies have the potential to deepen the t he meaning and ex perience of tribal sovereignty, sovereignty, serving as a s a means to undermine colonialism.” — Andrew Andr ew Needham , author of Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest
“Te strength of Network Net work Sovereig Sovere ignt ntyy is when the stories capture examples of sovereignty and technology in action.” —Mark Trahant , author of Te Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars: Henry M. Jackson, Jackson , Forrest J. Gerard and the Campaign for the Self-Determination Self-Deter mination of America’s Amer ica’s Indian Tribes
“In Network Sovereig nty, Duarte Duar te looks at the psychological psychological and philosophical implications of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in a technological age. She provides accessible and relevant releva nt examples exa mples of American America n Indians searching searchi ng for ways
to use new technologies to address very real social, cultural, and political challenges.” �IdleNoMore: And the Remaking of Canada —Ken Coates, author of �IdleNoMore:
Charlotte Coté and Coll Thrush Series Editors
������� ����������� Bui ldin Build ing g the Inte Interr net across Indian Country
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Network Net work Sovereign Sovere ignty ty was was made possible in part by a generous grant from the Tulalip
Tribes Charitable Fund, which provides the opport unity for a sustainable sustai nable and healthy community for all. Copyright © ���� by the University of Washington Press Printed and bound in t he United States of America Composed in Charter, typeface designed by Matthew Car ter �� �� �� �� �� � � � � � All rights r ights reserv res erved. ed. No part par t of this thi s publication may ma y be reproduced reproduce d or transmit tra nsmitted ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mecha nical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, w ithout permission in writing writi ng from the publisher. University of Washington Press www. ww w.washi washington.edu ngton.edu/uwpres /uwpresss Librar y of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library Names: Duarte, Marisa Mari sa Elena, author. Title: Network sovereignty sovereignty : building buildi ng the Internet across Indian Countr y / Marisa Elena Duarte. Description: �st edition. ed ition. | Seattle : University of Washington, [���� [����]] | Series: Indigenous confluences | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN ����������| ISBN ������������� (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN ������������� (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: LCSH: Indians of North America— A merica—Communication. Communication. | Indians of North America —Computer networks. | Broadband Broadband communication systems— United States. | Telecommunication Telecommunication systems—United systems —United States. | Internet— United States. | Indians of North America—Government relations—History— ��st century. | Information technology—Gover nment policy—United States. | Information technology—Social aspects—United States. | Digital divide— United States. | Sovereignty—Histor y—��st century. Classification: LCC E��.C�� D�� ���� | DDC ���.����—dc�� The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for In formation Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Libra ry Materials, Materia ls, ���� ���.��-����. ���.��-����. ∞
To tribal youth: Keep learning lear ning,, and practicing practi cing listenin li stening g to the mountains, mountain s, the earth, ear th, the animals, the stars, as much as a s you read books and play videogames. videogame s. Care for your families, fami lies, hope, hope , create, and embrace em brace joy.
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Pref Pr efac acee
Ackn Ac knowl owled ed gm gmen ents ts
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������� �. Network Thinking � � � � � � � � � . Reframin Reframing g ICT ICTs in in Ind Indian ian Cou Country ntry �� ������� �. The Overlap between Technology and Sovereignty �� ������� �. Sociotechnical Landscapes �� ������� �. Internet for Self-Determination �� �� � � � � � �. Ne Netw twor ork k Sov Sover erei eignt gnty y ��� � � � � � � � �. Dec Decolo oloniz nizing ing the Tech Technol nologi ogical cal ��� ���������� � � � Notes Not es
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Glossary Bibli Bi bli og ograp raphy hy Ind e x
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Lios enchi enchim m aniavu ani avu.. Inepo Ine po Mari Ma risa sa Elena El ena Duar D uartete tetea. a. In hapc hapchi hi Marco Ma rco Anto Antonio nio Duartetea Duartet ea into in ae Angelita Molina Duartetea. In wai Carlos Antonio Duarte tea into in wai Micaela Calista Duartetea into in wai Alejandro Antonio Duartea. In havoi Agustin Agusti n Ruiz Duarteteak into in haaka Margarita Margarita Cervantes Duarteteak. In apa Juan Juan Molinateak, yo’owe yo’owe yo’owe, into in asu Maria Amacio Molina Tosaim Kavaikame. I write for my relatives, and I write for my friends, who work hard
to uphold their tribal ways of life. The word is bound to the breath, and t he breath is bound to the spirit. The T he word is a loose bead running on a cord cord conne connecting cting the breath and the heart heart and the mind. The mind mi nd is filled with ideas, and these ideas are like stones. The stones are the children of the earth’s fine inner workings, upheaved from mountains and polished smooth by rivers, oceans, and winds. w inds. Every stone belongs somesome where.. Every ston where stone e comes from somewh somewhere. ere. Eager to pleas please e one another another,, human beings rush about filling their heads with ideas the way ch ildren fill a basket with stones stones when they go scrambling scrambling about about the desert or or the rocky beach. beach. At times I would take breaks from thin thinking king about about the impacts of the Internet in Indian Country Countr y and walk to a section sect ion of Cabrillo Beach, a shoreline shoreline in Tongva Tongva territory, off the southern coast of Los Angeles, A ngeles, and listen to the ocean tumbling rocks against the shore. At times I visited Lake Washington and beaches on the shores of the Puget Sound—the Salish Sea—under the gaze of Mount Rainier. For one autumn season I meditated every morning in a friend’s yard filled with wit h stones and watched the light change against aga inst the t he Tucson Tucson Mountains and Mount Lemmon, ranges filled with stories of pilgrimages, pilgrim ages, miracles, spirits, and survival. Young Y oung children throw rocks at at one another out out of curiosit curiosity y and spite. spite. Adults throw ideas at one another a nother out of curiosity, and sometimes also al so out of spite. We can forgive a child throwing a stone. It is more difficult to forgive an adult for hurling a monstrous idea at another human being. bei ng. When teaching students about racism and colonialism, I remind them, t hem, “You “You are educated human beings. Remember that your job is to promote knowledge and wisdom, and not ignorance. Even top professors are capable of fomenting ignorance.” I based this work on the following risky ideas: ��
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�. Human beings are also herd anim animals. als. They are capable of organizi organizing ng
beyond the level of the individual. They orchestrate activity at the level of a community, and articulate their identities based on geopolitical locations and status. En masse, t hey become swept up into into communal systems of belief. �. Human beings are inherently creative. They create systems and struc-
tures in this world through the use of tools. The physical manifestation of these systems and structures str uctures reflect human beliefs over time. �. The present-day present-day use of of the word word technology is is laden with present-day beliefs about progress, scientific scientific and ethical advance through computing, com puting, and the superhuman conquest of time, space, history, and environment. envir onment.
There is a belief that t hat being able to speak in code—that is, programming code—parallels code—pa rallels the t he decoding of the human human genome and the dark matter of the multiverse, and that somehow this process of coding and decoding is meaningful for all mankind. mank ind. These beliefs derive from a Western Western European Enlightenment history of ideas. Like a magic bullet, the word information can at once comprise programming programm ing code, genetic code, and the nearly immeasurable mass that one nanoparticle passes off to another when they collide collide in the vacuum between bet ween all other known and measurable subatomic particles. �. The large-scale large-sca le forces forces of Western European modernities have resulted in the creation of a global class of humans referred to as “natives,” “aboriginals,” or “indigenous” persons. Across modern nation-states, nation-states, that nomenclature refers to a historiographical moment, when nation-state authorities autho rities were charged with classify classifying ing all resid resident ent human beings as subjects or nonsubjects, citizens or noncitizens, slaves or workers, and Ame rican , Abor Aborigina iginall, and Indigenous are emso on. The words Native American bedded with a tension of belonging and yet not belonging to the t he modern nation-state. For an American Amer ican Indian, India n, it is to be called by all non-Natives an alien al ien within withi n one’s own own territory, terr itory, in the shadows of one’s one’s own grandmother mountains. �. Various fields of science are at present dominated by those who believe that techno-scientific techno- scientific advance must come from a Western European his-
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tory of ideas and not from, for example, Tsalag Tsalagii histories of ideas, Hiaki Hiak i histories of ideas, A:Shiwi histories of ideas, Anishinaabe histories of ideas, Chamoru histories hi stories of ideas, and the like. Only recently recent ly have a few scientists working in their universities come to agree that Native ways of knowing compose a source of scientific understanding. “Native ways of knowing,” “Indigenous knowledge,” knowledge,” “Native systems of knowledge”—all these phrases refer to a complexity of understanding about the nature of the human universe. As scientists—and espec ially as information scientists—we are only at the beginning of our understanding. I’m Yaqui. I’m a woman writing in the sciences. I often write and research far from fr om my home, the Sonoran desert landscape around a round Tucson Tucson and the northnort hern Chihuahuan desert in southern New Mexico, and I often write through fields of science that, thus far, are inadequate in terms of language and a nd theory for scoping the lived realities of present-day Native and Indigenous I ndigenous peoples. peoples. If the word is a loose bead on a cord connected to the breath, the heart, and the mind, and I am try trying, ing, from my lived experience and ways of knowing, to share that t hat word (or (or words) words) with another a nother human being b eing who does not share the t he same ethical ethica l orientation (heart) or ways of problem-solving (mind), (mind), then what can be the significance of the word I seek to share? The risks risk s I have taken as a thinker are a re lesser than the risks risk s I take as a writer, assembling these ideas like rocks in a basket, which I now present to you in this form, as a manuscript. This is the nature of writing. Once a story is loosed into the world, it no longer belongs to the writer. It belongs to those who hear it, and especially especial ly to those who retell it. At a certa certain in point I can no longer insist on what is right and wrong about an idea that I have written. w ritten. I can ca n only say, say, “I thought quite quite a lot about selecting selecting this thi s particular idea and explaining it in this particular way.” The rocks get taken from the basket, broken into smaller pieces, polished, or transferred into the baskets of others. But what about the basket? That is the real contribution contri bution here. I am weaving a container for others to reuse. What might m ight the Native and Indigenous peoples of the world have to say about their experiences with information and communications technologies? tech nologies? What might our experiences exper iences as Indigenous peoples teach us about the ways we we conceptualize conceptual ize this ineffable, ineff able, somewhat immea immeasursurable phenomen phenomenon on we pursue, which we are calling ca lling “technology”? “ technology”? How does it relate to our dedication— itom herensia, itom lu’uturia —to uphold our tribal ways of life?
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I pray for the words to have meaning, and for the w riting to be clear clea r and
inspiring. As the methods are true, so is the writing w riting here. Lios enchim hiokoe hi okoe utessiavu utes siavu.. Marisa Elena Duarte
���� ����������� � �� ������� ����� ��������� �� ������� the thinking, thin king, research, and writing wr iting that shapes this work. I would would like to ac-
knowledge Jose Antonio Lucero and Bret Gustafson, Gustaf son, who, through their thei r work as directors of the Global Indigenous Politics group with the Social Science Research Council, helped me think more deeply about early assumptions of my work. Compañeros Simón Trujillo, Cuauhtémoc T. Mexica, Shawn Walker, Walke r, Jeff Hemsley, Robert Mason, and members of the SOMELAB at the University of Washington also helped me conceptualize ideas a round networks and organized human action, act ion, in digital environments, in the borderlands, and in the space of civic engagement. The many scholarly conversations conversation s I enjoyed enjoyed within withi n the Indigenous Encounters forum and the Native Organization of Indigenous Scholars at the University Universit y of Washing Washington ton also helped me focus on the particupar ticularities and beauty of politics and creative work in Indian Country. Of course, many thanks to the members of the Indigenous Information Research Group at the Information Informat ion School at the University of Washington: Cheryl Cher yl A. Metoyer, Metoyer, Miranda Hayes Belarde-Lewis, Sheryl Agogo Gutierrez Day, Allison B. Krebs, Juan Carlos Chavez, Sandy Littletree, Lit tletree, and Ross Braine. Brai ne. We work together with one heart. My school is the t he iSchool. Great respect and honor to Cheryl Metoyer, Maria Elena Garcia, Raya Fidel, and David Levy for helping me prepare this work in a rigorou rigorouss and readable fashion f ashion and for f or pushing push ing me to thin t hink k at new heights. Many thanks tha nks to Ranjit Ra njit Arab, who helped edit many drafts. draft s. My family, I love you and write w rite for us to overcome violence v iolence and tragedy, for all of us to flourish together in a joyful way, in this world and in those beyond. This project was funded in part through t hrough the Institute of Museum Museum and Library Services Washington Doctoral Initiative, the Social Scienc Sciencee Research Council Dissertation Proposal Develop Development ment Fellowship, Fellowship, the t he Mellon-Sawyer Predoctoral Fellowship through the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and through higher h igher education funding through the Pascua Yaqui Tribe.
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Introduction All night n ight long in Room ���� they had discussed a network of tribal coalitions dedicated to the retaking of ancestral lands by indigenous people. Almanac nac of the Dead D ead —Leslie Marmon Silko, Alma
�� �������� ��, ����, ����, ������ ������� � �� ���� ��� ���� �� ������ and Canada were organizing flash mobs to protest Canadian prime minister Stephen Step hen Harper’s Harper ’s plans to break treaty obliga obligations tions to tribes in order to make way for the construction construc tion of a transborder oil pipeline and tar sands extraction. extrac tion. Earlier that month, to protest the unresponsiveness un responsiveness of of Parliament regarding
First Nations rights, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat commenced a six-week six-w eek hunger strike. Native peoples representing many tribes drum drumming ming under the banner of Idle No More protested in malls, parks, pa rks, across major high ways, before embassies, and on college campuses thr throughout oughout Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; katchewa n; Toronto; Toronto; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Tucson, Tucson, Arizona; A rizona; Minneapolis, Mi nneapolis, Minnesota; Los Angeles; Seattle; and Vancouver.� In Mexico, on December ��, the Indigenous peoples’ collective Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional Nacional marched marc hed en masse through five cities in Chiapas, protesting the unjust and immoral im moral capitalist economi economicc development policies and drug cartel violence promulgated through the administration of former Mexican president Felipe Calderon and current c urrent president Enrique Enr ique Peña-Nieto Peña-Nieto.. � People of my own tribe, the t he Yaqui Yaqui tribe, in i n Sonora, Mexico, blockaded shipping and transportation between the cities of Obregón and Guaymas.� Two years before, a young man from the tribe used his smartphone to record and post a video of Mexican state police beating up tribal people for hauling water from a river dammed to divert the flow of water that runs through the sacred �
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homelands. The state government agreed that th at the dam had been built without
appropriate tribal consultation and, in return, offered to pay for university scholarships for all tribal youth. Record numbers of Yaqui youth applied and
got into school. The state government reneged and refused ref used to pay the tuition. tuit ion. Independent Independ ent journalists posted photos online of parked sem is blocking all a ll interstate traffic passing through Vicam Switch, a predominantly Yaqui community on Interstate Highway �� in Sonora, a primary nort h-south route route in the t he country. No more than an obscure myth for most Americans, December ��, ����, marked the end of a five-hundred-year cycle according to the Mayan Daykeepers. But for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, this date predicated a beginning, an opening up. Moreover, as Laguna writer Leslie Marmon Silko Almana anacc of the Dea Dead d, Indigenous peoples of the indicates in her ���� novel Alm Americas Amer icas had been preparing prepar ing for this thi s calendrical calendr ical shift shi ft for centuries. centu ries. De ad is a To many Indigenous peoples of the borderlands, Almanac of the Dead guide, a manual for understanding how those of us separated by the legacies of colonialism would experience life in the interstices of cities, states, and nations; mass media and voicelessness; the regulated marketplace of ideas and the black market; guerrilla warfare and political persuasion. persuasion. In the book, a group of spiritually minded Indigenous individuals congregate in a seedy hotel room in Tucson to lay out on the table, beside cigarettes and beer, their observations,, insights, and v isions about observations about tribal t ribal peoples all over the Americas, A mericas, including those who had settled there from Africa, working incrementally to reclaim spiritual spir itual and political relationships with their homelands, and how, how, at a certain certai n point, the accumulation accumulation of this activity would visibly visibly manifest. In In short, all night long, in room ����, they talked story. Through the course of my education, both spiritually and politically as a Yaqui Y aqui woman, yoem hamut, and a professional librarian and information scientist, I came to recognize recogniz e the value of stories as the currency currenc y binding multiple parallel paral lel and sometimes incommensurable worldviews, worldviews, including ontologically distinct Native and Indigenous worldviews. Already attuned to the deeply Indigenous concepts of relationality, interconnectedness, and emergence, as a scientist I picked up the poststructural study of networks—social (actor) net works, social media networks, sociotechnical networks—as networks— as one one point through which Native and Indigenous scientific principles could inform and be informed by Western methodologies.� Moreover Moreover,, I studied networks and the tech nical systems through which they physically manifest, with an eye toward Silko’s prophetic prophe tic reading: What are the technologies that will allow us, as Indigeno Indigenous us
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peoples, to reclaim our lands and ways of being—spiritual being— spiritually ly,, socially, spatially,
ecologically, and politically? I had read the works of Western scientific theorists who predicted the identity-based iden tity-based mobilization of Indigenous peoples, enabled through the availability of social media. Throughout Throughout my entire upbringing, I had been privy to kitchen table conversations, conversations by fires late at night in deserts, at powwows, in aunts’ living livi ng rooms, in the back of trucks, about the ways that we, as the grandchi g randchildren ldren of elders, spiritual spirit ual leaders, and milita m ilitary ry generals ge nerals— — survivors—would have to re-order our ways of being to usher in new worlds of possibility for Indigenous peoples. On December ��, I set aside my stack of scientific articles art icles on technica technicall wireless networks and traced the flurry of stories about Idle No More, More, the Ejército Zapatista Zapatist a de Liberación Nacional protest, and a nd the Yaqui blockade of Guaymas via Facebook. These parallel Indigenous protests were not covered by CNN, NPR, or the BBC. For three years, my colleagues and I at the University of Washington Information School had been looking for contemporary examples of Indigenous peoples harnessing social media toward political mobilization. We We all had examples e xamples of small-scale focused mobilization, bilizat ion, but Idle No More’s politica politicall mobilization was the first fir st of its kind that was transnational, transnationa l, fast-paced, self-organ self-organizing, izing, emergent, dyna dynamic, mic, and showing clear signs of generating public responsiveness. Many times before the hashtag #idlenomore of December ���� appeared, appeared, I had imagined ima gined how Indigenous peoples might organize across national boundaries using social media, but I had never seen a transnational tran snational Indigenous political movement emerge so quickly through th rough social media networks. From a scientific perspective, this occurrence occu rrence means mean s that by December ����, ����, Indigenous people throughout Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Canada, and the United States—the Englishspeaking Indigenous world—had world—had established multiple multiple trustworthy trust worthy and reliable mobile mob ile digital social socia l networks across various social media platfo platforms rms and a nd de vices. It meant that an aspect of Indigenei Indigeneity, ty, as a paradigm of social and political protest, protes t, had becom becomee digitized, infrastruct in frastructurally urally through broadband Internet, Internet, personally through consumer mobile devices, socially through social media adoption, and discursively through flash mobs, hashtags, and memes. � Native and Indigenous scholars have argued, mostly from a first-world English-speaking English-speak ing (United States and Canada Ca nada)) context, for Native peoples to frame the contemporary relationship between recognized tribes and the nation-state as one based on the need for Native peoples to leverage selfdetermination determi nation toward building buildi ng a just world for themsel themselves ves with regard to, and in spite of, ongoing colonization. colonization. Policies of sovereignty and a nd self-determination
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are to be understood as stepping-stones toward a more flexible, morally IndigI ndigenous vision of governance.� At present, and in part par t due to the way that information and communication commu nication technologies tech nologies (ICTs) (ICTs) have shaped US domestic domestic and global hegemony, hegemony, the leaders of Native nations must understand underst and how informainfor mation flows, the disciplining and transfer t ransfer of knowledge, and technological innovation nova tion and surveillance surveilla nce function within the t he multivalent power power dynamics of contemporary colonial arrangements.� More fundamentally, this means understanding when, where, and how autonomous Indigenous peoples can leverage information flows across ICTs ICTs for the purpose of meeting social socia l and political goals, in spite of the forces of colonization. As my late friend and colleague Allison B. Krebs (Ani (Anishinaabe) shinaabe) taught me, this is a continuation cont inuation of what Vine Deloria, Jr. (Dakota), (Dakota), asserted during dur ing a ���� White House presentatio presentation n on library services ser vices in tribal tr ibal lands. It is our right as Indigenous peoples to know the origins of our current status as colonized peoples.� It is our right to know this so that we can speak spea k back to unjust governmental power. power. It is our right to mobilize, enact, and a nd determine our own trajectories as Native and Indigenous peoples. While Whi le the protests of December ���� representt a particularly striking represen st riking mode of political mobilizing and government interactions, Native and Indigenous peoples have endured centuries of colonization in part because of daily ordinary habits of sharing information and ways of knowi k nowing ng with w ith one anothe a nother, r, workmates, workm ates, al allie lies, s, and a nd frie f riends. nds. Uses Us es of social media and the undergirding undergir ding systems system s of devices devices are becoming, becomi ng, in Native and Indigenous contexts, common modes of sharing information and knowledge critical to Indigenous self-determination. In the United States, the tribal command of broadband infrastructures and services serv ices represents one way that Native peoples leverage leverage large-scale large -scale ICTs toward accomplishing accomplishing distinctly Native governance goals. While t hese goals are particular, and depend on each tribe’s ways of approaching its mode of self-government, self-gov ernment, because of the future f uture US reliance on pervasive per vasive high-speed Internet as a means of interacting with wit h citizens and administration, admin istration, tribal leaders will want to make sure that, at minimum, mi nimum, tribal administration administ ration buildings, buildings, schools, and libraries libra ries have access to robust and affordable broadband Internet Inter net devices and serv ices, including wireless capabilities. As governments, tribes possess the means for acquiring the infrastr ucture and serv ices that make social media and mobile devices work from deep within Indian Country. I write this book to (�) weave Native and Indigenous thought more firmly and productively into the broad fields of science, technology, and society studies; (�) introduce Native and Indigenous thinkers to the language of
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information science and sociotechnical systems; and (�) share what I have learned thus far about the uses and implications of broadband Internet Internet in Indian Country with w ith colleagues in the t he sciences, students, educators, educators, policy makers,
tri bal leaders, and the tribal t he general public. We have work to do, getting our people connected. We have have work to do, sharing with one another the t he millions of stories about our strategies for effective negotiation, our failures, our visions for bringing about a healthier world world for our our children and a nd the grandchildren grandchi ldren they will one day bring into this world. ICTs are an important medium for this intergenerational and intertribal transmission of knowledge. This book is a scientific narrative, nar rative, following following the arc of a scientist walking walk ing on the path of discovery with w ith the rigor of specific methodological interventions. I am the scientist and the writer, w riter, and I am also Indigenous, Ind igenous, specifically, specific ally, a Yaqui woman wit with h an a n intellec inte llectua tuall lineage li neage born b orn out of the t he part pa rticul icular ar exige e xigencies ncies in the US-Mexico borderlands. I grew up hearing tribal tri bal stories and border stories. I grew up respecting the value of tribal peoples’ knowledge and also the life experiences of self-made individuals, especially especial ly those who reside reside in the liminal limi nal and jurisdictional interstices between countries, institutions, and cities, not to mention languages and ethnic identities. I grew up attu ned to the finer meaning of Native storywork, understanding how elders and other wise and thoughtful ty pes transform the present web of meaning and therein create new possibilities for ways of being, acting, and thinking when they talk story. At present, it is still st ill common c ommon in academia ac ademia for pract practicing icing scientist sc ientistss to attempt atte mpt to delegitimize the intellectual intellectua l and scientific contributio contributions ns of Native and Indigenous thinkers, as well as the participation of women. Many scientists are unfortunately unfor tunately not responsive to the mani manifestations festations of story storywork, work, the interventions of feminist scientific approaches, approaches, or the intellectual i ntellectual claims claim s of Indigenous research. Many scientists are financially and intelle intellectually ctually invested in discrediting or marginalizing marginal izing the contributions of Native and Indigenous Indigenous thinkers. thin kers. As Indigenous Indigeno us thinkers thin kers are well aware, a mechanism of colonization colonization is the sub jugation of Indigenous knowledge. Thr Through ough centering Native expe experiences riences and weaving weavi ng together Indigenous and a nd information inf ormation scientifi sc ientificc methodologies, methodologie s, this th is book challenges the shadow of epistemic injustice.� However,, this However thi s work is not intended intended to serve as a s an exhaustive ex haustive Indigenous critique of techno-science; tech no-science; rather, it is intended to open up new ways of thinking about digital technologies, and specifically of high-speed Internet, in Indian Country. Sociotechnical conceptualizations are a relatively new analytic lens in the general field of Native and Indigenous studies. Indigenous approaches to studies of the Internet and ICTs are also new. Thus, this exami e xamination nation focuses
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on the intersection of a few disciplines, di sciplines, epistemological epistemological landscapes, and knowlk nowledge domains. Each chapter builds on ideas framed i n preceding chapters, so that, by the end of the book, the general reader in Indigenous studies has increased knowledge about information scientific approaches and the general Internet studies researcher has increased knowledge k nowledge about about Indigenous experiences and approaches. Together we will have an increased understanding of the place-based nature of the Internet and how jurisdictional borders shape
access to this inte i ntegral gral communi communications cations infrastructure. infrastruct ure. This wor work k is organized not according to the chronology of historiography but according to the way findings revealed themselves to me, the Indigenous scientist, as I began methodically asking the question “What is the relationship between Indigenous peoples and ICTs?” This book is organized into eight chapters. Chapter � utilizes the example of Idle No More More to introduce a basic way of understanding flows of information infor mation within wit hin the relat relationship ionship betwe b etween en the t he technic tec hnical al and the t he social soc ial and how these the se flows manifest in Indigenous contexts. contexts. Chapter � explains how the scientific inabilityy to perceive the rhythms inabilit rhyth ms of coloniali colonialism sm has led to the current cur rent need for a way of understanding the impacts of ICTs in Indian Countr y beyond the depiction depi ction of Native peoples as have-nots in a technically techn ically advancing postcolo p ostcolonial nial global order. Chapter � builds on the lessons learned in the first two chapters to explain the close c lose tie between access to technical systems and a nd contemporary contemporary exercises of tribal sovereignty, giving examples from five cases of Native ICTs projects. Chapter � looks at the inner workings of four sociotechnical systems in Indian Country and a nd one intertribal multi-organizational forum: the tribally owned broadband Internet networks operating out of the Southern Southern Californi Cal ifornia a Tribal Chair C hairmen’s men’s Association, Coeur d’Alene, Cheyenne River Sioux, and Na vajo Nation and the Tribal Telecom and Technology Technology Summit. Chapter � utiliz utilizes es these cases to identify the practical needs of tribes who command their own Internet infrastructures. infrastruct ures. Chapter � theorizes the sociotechnical dimension of future exercises of tribal soverei sovereignty gnty and a nd what this means in terms term s of how we conceptualize the technological fabric woven throughout Native homelands. Finally, Chapter � approaches colonial assumptions about social studies of technology and lays out an approach that we, as scientists and Indigenous thinkers, can take in decolonizing the disciplinary practices and discourses surrounding technology studies.
