Manifest Connectivity (1.4)

Duarte details that "during the era of discovery, conquest, and treaty making" --or, the Enlightenment-era-- Europeans tended towards 'ranking' global indigenous populations according to their perceived laborious or idle propensities (110). Pacific Islanders were considered too idle to be useful or prosperous; Native Americans were considered lesser to Africans in terms of their labor; and thus a dehumanizing and baseless 'ranking' system was born in which the "non-enlightened" (read: non-European) were considered inferior, and thus deserving of all future damaging policies and maltreatment.

"We have to acknowledge that the US history of the colonization of Native lands, bodies, and waters has shaped the ability of Native peoples to socially organize and communicate" (110). Indeed, after we forcibly removed what dwindling populations we hadn't massacred onto designated reservation lands, as a Nation we left them there to simmer. We 'progressed': Travel, communication, policy, debate, technology. . . yet we did our best to forego including Indigenous populations from the process. How are we then audacious enough to act shocked when Reservation-dwelling peoples lack what we consider basic infrastructure? Especially considering that infrastructure was wrought of European ideals, designed for European-style cities, and funded by Euro-centric, capitalistic, and neoliberal elites. "It is no coincidence that the discourse of Internet entrepreneurship is marked by the discourse of Manifest Destiny. Consider the terms and phrases information wants to be free, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Internet pioneer. For Native peoples, it is as if the imperial urge to westward expansion moved into the cybersphere." (113).

The way to fight back against this cyber-expansion, is to participate. To preclude others from divulging sacred information, tribes must disseminate what is proper, and provide context for what is not. For this to be possible, that 'basic infrastructure' must be in place; and for that to be possible, inventors and scientific minds must work with Tribal populations, elders, and leaders, to develop technologies with Reservation lands in mind. As impressive as retrofitting generators to wind turbines and solar panels for essential power to towers atop high cliffs is, would it not be all the more impressive to innovate technologies with perilous temperatures, treacherous winds, flooding, high cliffs and low valleys, and vast expanses in mind? These technologies would benefit the entirety of the Rural United States; as if benefiting the Indigenous has ever been enough.

This past Summer, on August 11th, 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris announced over $65 billion in funding designated towards assisting tribal communities' connectivity. This includes grants going towards infrastructure; lowering internet costs for eligible tribal families; and providing internet to tribal colleges and universities.

"Native peoples have many ways of knowing, and in the past thirty years or so, ICTs [Information Communication Technologies] have been a means for sharing these ways of knowing and negotiating intertribal and tribal-federal policies toward the treatment of Native lands and waters. Commanding the build-out and uses of their own broadband infrastructures allows tribes to also build information systems, policies, and programs that meet tribal self-governance goals" (114). The long-held assumption, bred from those Enlightenment-era ideals, has been that Indigenous communities lack interest, or gumption, or both, to participate in the digital age. The truth is far from it: Indigenous communities have always welcomed new technologies; they are fluid populations, not static stone renderings stuck hundreds of years in the past. If Manifest Destiny conceptualized some God-given right to American expansion, that right seems to have extended into the digital age. If we assume the platform of Manifest Destiny to be erroneous, then we must extend that same grace into the digital realm. Self-governance is nigh impossible without communication; so by withholding technological communications, or at the very least designing them with everyone but tribes in mind, we stifle their ability to adequately self-govern. We continue the cyclical attempt of keeping tribes spoon-fed; while complaining the whole while we tape the spoon to their hand.

Duarte, Marisa Elena. Network Sovereignty : Building the Internet across Indian Country, University of Washington Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wsu/detail.action?docID=4987329.

Created from WSU on 2023-02-02.