The digital divide for Indian Country got better under Biden—will that progress go away?

On Michigan's upper peninsula, in a remote region of boreal forest and secluded waterfalls, three major watersheds come together and eventually connect to the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes. Some three dozen citizens of various Indigenous nations assembled there in August on the traditional homelands of the Lac Vieux Desert Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, by a little town aptly named Watersmeet.

Their tribes have concerns about harmful and addictive online content, AI stereotyping them, and longstanding distrust of the rest of the United States. Yet on those late summer days, they aimed to ensure that they too can reliably access the internet to participate fully in today's world.

It was the fifteenth Tribal Broadband Bootcamp. Cofounded by Matthew Rantanen in 2021, the gatherings catalyze Indigenous people across Indian Country to build their own broadband internet companies. Attendees splice fiber optic cable, parse internet service provider (ISP) business models, learn law and policy, and more.

Mixing hands-on sessions with hitting the books mirrors Rantanen's own story. For decades, the Cree Nation descendant has been both an IT industry leader and someone climbing onto rooftops to install antennas himself. With a 6'4" frame and long hair, he made a memorable figure inside the Beltway as a member of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Native Nations Broadband Task Force from early 2011 to late 2017.

Rantanen told the Daily Dot his bootcamps encourage Indigenous people not to back away from an arena where, "you only get a quarter of a bottlenecked internet," and instead, "find resources and make our own ISPs, net neutral ones too, because even with some of the great federal government incentives like the FCC's Lifeline program to serve communities, no one's really going to serve us except us."

The Bootcamps are bridging the internet access gap between tribal lands and the bulk of the U.S. It's one of the most unequal parts of the digital divide. That term refers to connectivity inequalities, usually in terms of economic or infrastructure disparities.

But with better connections come worries about how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people interact online, especially in light of the troubled history between the two, a history whose effects continue to reverberate in today’s increasingly polarized country. Now tribes are also on alert that the incoming Trump administration may further hinder efforts to connect Indigenous people to the internet, a realm evermore vital to functioning and thriving in the contemporary world.

Digital divide dissidents

Since 1996, U.S. law has mandated that "rural, insular, and high-cost areas" such as tribal lands enjoy telecom services "reasonably comparable" to those in cities. The same law requires the FCC to regularly determine if advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed countrywide in a reasonable, timely fashion.

FCC analyses of the digital divide have often been criticized, including by the Government    Accountability Office (GAO), for overstating internet access in Indian Country. Using December 2022 data, the commission claimed this year that, compared with only 7% of the country overall, roughly a fourth of U.S. citizens on tribal lands lack fixed terrestrial broadband. This figure does not include those with less reliable means such as weather-dependent satellite dishes.

Rantanen, like many, says the divide is actually steeper, in part because of Indigenous people’s longstanding—and understandable—distrust of the federal government.

"In the past, every time tribes in the United States got counted, they got killed. Well, maybe now they're not killing us, but why are we being quantified again—that concern leads to a lack of participation on reservations when there's some federal contractor going around tallying us without interacting with our tribal governments appropriately,” he said.

"Such FCC data is poor," Rantanen went on. "If a rez has 47 houses, but only two with standard U.S. Postal Service addresses—maybe on a county-maintained sidestreet—they don't count 47, they count two. Or their marketing depicts internet coverage what-ifs as actual."

Lacking decent internet access makes it difficult for those on reservations to obtain healthcare, jobs, education, and, arguably, 21st-century citizenship. For the 2.5 million people who live on tribal lands, a lot is at stake.

"As soon as you walk across the line onto the rez," Rantanen said, "it doesn't matter if the world's biggest, most technologically advanced city sits on the other side—as soon as you cross that line, social services stop. Internet access stops. Equal citizenship stops."

Changing the whole framework

Geoffrey Blackwell, National Congress of American Indians general counsel and chief of staff, addressed the digital divide this summer on that organization's podcast. "When this whole problem area was first identified," he said, "it was a real surprise to people in government, in cities, in parts of the country that didn't realize there were communities that were disconnected."

"It's not just about getting cell service or fiber or internet," Blackwell said, but also controlling "their own data on their own terms." Emphasizing autonomy follows "those past eras [that] created such problems," decades and decades when, for "the problem of families and communities in Indian Country lacking services, a lot of solutions were coming from the federal government."

In 1928, the Department of Interior-commissioned Meriam Report found that the U.S. had violently dispossessed tribes of ancestral lands, moved them onto "restricted reservations as a war measure," then "undertook to feed them and to perform certain services for them which a normal people do for themselves." The report stated that temporary, necessary aid in time became paternalistic "control so exercised as to impede the development of initiative or self reliance."

Not long after, the 1950s saw relocation and assimilation campaigns combine with Congress terminating scores of Indigenous governments' statuses as nations.

Such injustices, Blackwell said, meant that "in the late '60s and early '70s, the whole framework had to be changed to a return of home-rule [...] tribal sovereignty and self-determination. So the same thing kind of happened with the digital divide" recently. Namely, "it really is going to have better solutions if [they] come from Indian Country, not from outside."

Networking from within Indian Country

Tribal Broadband Bootcamps typically begin with crimping. Participants cut ethernet cables, untwist their four pairs of wires partially, straighten them in the proper order, plug them into plastic RJ45 plugs, and crimp them down so the newly lengthened ethernet can reach out to, say, switches, then to routers, and ultimately to the larger internet.

Crimping serves as an icebreaker. Bootcampers sit together, welcoming new friends as they arrive, discussing mutual acquaintances and interests and technology, growing their personal networks. Many August attendees were from Lac Vieux Desert Band's utilities department, looking to expand from waterworks into broadband.

Rantanen says tribal folks learn best from other tribal folks—what many educators call peer learning. Expertise is developed and shared, flowing fast across comfortable human networks like bits and bytes flashing across resilient fiber optics. August's participants even toured a power-redundant facility in Watersmeet Township that regenerates fiber optic signals and peels them out to homes.

At Bootcamps, geographically adjacent tribes often learn for the first time that each of them has already been pursuing digital sovereignty. That lets them share tower climbers and avoid cross-border spectrum interference. Post-bootcamp, participants join Discord chats where build-your-own-ISP questions are asked and answered daily. A tribe in California might talk with one in upstate New York about hosting data and redundant system architecture. That way, if disaster strikes one region but not the other, systems can be quick-rebooted from across the continent. Rantanen said Indian Country is learning they can share a greater wealth of digital resources than they'd thought.

Early into the August bootcamp, by some chance or cosmic will, non-Indigenous workers stopped out in front to dig trenches to boost fiber capacity for an area telecom company. Rantanen and team members from Merit Network, a Bootcamp sponsor backed by Michigan's public universities, asked for a field demo. The crew supervisor agreed, so long as the observers stayed far enough back for OSHA compliance. 

The workers and Bootcamp attendees eagerly discussed controlling the heads of boring machines and measuring utility poles—where telecommunication wires are the lowest—so trucks have enough clearance. 

“We want to demystify broadband," Rantanen said. "You can learn about horizontal boring out of classroom textbooks, but seeing it happen, seeing the water flowing and splashing and the guy walking atop the drill head with a scanner, makes it an attainable reality."

A longtime dispute with the federal government

Tribal efforts for digital sovereignty are presently in the grip of grave disputes with the federal government. One controversy in particular comes up over and over in Bootcamp law and policy discussions.

The disagreement revolves around who should own and manage a 500 MHz portion of the 12 GHz spectrum band over tribal lands, used for fixed wireless connectivity and likely for future technologies as well. Much of the electromagnetic spectrum outside visible light—X-rays, gamma rays, this 500 MHz part—wasn't widely discovered until decades after tribes entered into treaties with the federal government.

Spectrum isn't mentioned outright in the treaties. But the Supreme Court has long upheld the concept of reserved rights, ruling in 1905 that the treaties are "not a grant of rights to the Indians, but a grant of rights from them, a reservation of those not granted." That is, rights not specifically ceded belong to Indian Country by default.

The FCC, authorized by Congress to manage wireless spectrum generally, disagrees. A 2018 GAO report states, "Representatives from three of the tribal entities we contacted said that they view spectrum as a natural resource that should be managed by the tribe. FCC officials, however, told us that spectrum is not considered a reserved right under treaties with Indian tribes, as it is not explicitly stated."

The Daily Dot asked the commission if that still reflects its stance on spectrum for tribal entities, and if so, how they square it with the Supreme Court ruling.

FCC Deputy Communications Director Will Wiquist replied, "We'll decline comment."

Could the next administration resolve the spectrum dispute and mend that divide?

Rantanen described the Obama-era FCC as highly collaborative.

"Under Chairman Julius Genachowski and the Office of Native Affairs and Policy, established in 2010, we tackled policy making and rule making. Commission bureaus would talk with our task force about how concepts under consideration reflected on and affected Indian Country. 'What if we opened up this chunk of spectrum?' they'd ask. 'How would that affect tribes?'"

President Joe Biden is "the president who's done the most for Indian Country in general, tribal people in his cabinet for example,” Rantanen said. “Kamala Harris is part of that group.”

He’d hoped that a Harris White House was going to give the FCC a chance to carry on the cooperative thought process he’d witnessed in the Obama years.

But what he saw at the FCC during Trump’s presidency was a sharp contrast. “The FCC sessions turned into a system of, ‘Here's what we're going to do—now you go explain it to your tribes or whatever.’ In fact, there were efforts by his administration not just to cut assistance, but to reduce what's considered Indian Country, to meddle with tribal sovereignty."

The difference between 2024’s leading presidential candidates' potential impacts on the FCC and spectrum, Rantanen said, can be summed up this way: "Had Kamala won, the commission would have been a place to do good work. To sometimes get yes for an answer, sometimes no, sometimes maybe. With Trump, I fear the only answer will be never."

Tribes and reconciliation

Over his 23 years of working to bring internet access to Indian Country, Rantanen said he's seen tribal leaders sometimes refuse connectivity for fear of online predators and porn corrupting children. Eventually, though, tribes find they need the internet, whether to apply for federal funds, outwit the 'white tape' barring green energy installations, prepare kids for college, or entice them back home after university or trade school has trained them for work that depends on solid internet access.

Lately, fears center on the internet's polarization and bigoted AI stereotypes. Rantanen, who drives an AI-equipped Tesla Cybertruck, sees many advantages in artificial intelligence. Yet he's had to teach tribes not to cut corners with it, for instance by not inputting—or surrendering—proprietary tribal information to a large language model in exchange for a quick summary of it for grant applications.

The way the world sees Indian Country through AI lenses is another worry. "Our issue is," Rantanen said, "AI makes every Indigenous person look like that late actor Richard Harris with make-up on, the Hollywood whitewashed Indian. Every Indigenous person has to be a Plains Indian with their traditions reduced to a tepee, campfire, and peace pipe."

Such reductive stereotypes diminish the humanity of those misrepresented, an othering that furthers us-versus-them sectarianism.

The grass-touching, community-oriented Bootcamps may seem an odd match for the selfie-driven, cyberpunk world of today’s internet. Heather Marsh, a software developer and philosopher who grew up in an extremely isolated village in northern Canada on the unceded lands of the Tahltan Nation, coined the term endogroup for a type of closed-off, zero-sum social structure for the accumulation and transfer of power.

How might rival sects reconnect when harmful, addictive thought bubbles online so often discourage branching out beyond cultish endogroups? Marsh told the Daily Dot, "As we have learned in studies on addiction, secure connections to sources of true happiness create a resilience against the compulsion to seek simulated euphoria. This applies whether the simulated euphoria is from drugs, overuse of addictive types of online engagement, or endogroup belonging."

"Membership in endogroups, such as those in online thought bubbles," Marsh continued, "makes a person far more susceptible to unquestioning acceptance of group beliefs, even if supporting information is easily disproven. This faith can become so extreme it results in an alternate reality, their own endoreality, most effectively challenged through strong outside connections." Whether in the moment or stretching across timespans, such links can be with kindhearted people—or even with plants, nonhuman animals, the environment, or creative projects.

Recent incidents of suppressing Indigenous voters, setting fire to ballot drop boxes, and terrorizing election workers underscore the polarization in the country now. But, Marsh said, "the most effective way to combat sectarianism and the formation of hostile and insular endogroups is through promotion of connection across the endosocial barriers" resisting it.

"There are only three types of interaction: connection, which is a balanced exchange; sublation, where one person is overpowered by the other; and violation, where one is attacked by the other. Increase of connection leads to a decrease in the other two."

That implies that by encouraging stronger mental health, selfhood, and dignity, hours spent splicing fiber optic cable and discussing legal strategies produce better outcomes than hours spent staring at cultish propaganda on glowing screens.

Connecting future minds

As anthropogenic environmental degradation dries up watersheds and rivers, and fewer and fewer migrating birds alight on telecommunication wires, digital problems likewise imperil both Indigenous people and the rest of the U.S.

If there's something Trump and Harris supporters probably agree on, it's that the election stakes were high, the situation dire. Growing distrust of institutions, celebrity thought leaders, and even neighbors hasn't stopped the public from searching a spam-clogged, profiteers' internet for answers—whether from human chatmates or AI chatbots, as it's sometimes hard to tell the difference.

"All these reservation people," Rantanen mused, "but they're not connected. It may be that the minds we need are not on the internet yet."

He paused, then added, "We need to get them online."

That way, he said, this time, we can all find our answers, together.

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