Just a note before I jump into this post: I am not Indigenous. However, I believe that it is important that native peoples in the United States have the same access to the internet that most of the rest of us currently have.

In her brilliant book Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country, Marisa Elena Duarte postulates that as Indigenous people bring broadband to their native lands, they are going to change how technology is built, used and understood:

“… network backbones inspire compelling visions about the potential of digital technologies in Indian Country. It is while we are imagining those visions — talking about them, investing in them, designing pilot projects and start-ups, creating new aesthetic practices, wiring our government buildings and hosting web pages — that we must pay attention to what we are experiencing and thinking as we weave digital practices as Native peoples into our lives. Digital technology projects function in some sense like a mirror, reflecting back at us what we expect them to help us overcome, with the systems we design revealing our own methods for classifying, categorizing, and making sense of data and information. Through our uses of digital systems as Indigenous peoples, they become embedded with what we believe to be our Indigenous values.”

Essentially, as people become connected through digital means, those structures start to reflect the cultural knowledge and values of those participants. It starts to change how technology is used by us. As many native cultures have a deep understanding of long-term systemic change, they can see and adapt to change, sometimes, better than the Western culture surrounding them. A case in point is the Tribal Vulnerability Assessment Resources program, created by the University of Washington and 50 Native tribes. It espouses not only Western approaches to adapt to climate change but Indigenous ones as well.

This program helps tribes, whether they participated in its creation or not, access coordinated big data about climate change in their areas. It cuts nearly three years of research off of the planning time it takes to formulate an approach and a plan to deal with the changes that, we now know, are coming. This, along with the early understanding of climate change most tribes experience as they’ve watched changes on their land, may put them at the forefront of adapting to a changing world. (You can read more about this program in Hakai Magazine.)

Climate change may also drive greater adoption of broadband and mobile technologies throughout rural places, as people become more aware of needed instant information when disasters happen. The Camp Fire last summer showed this in sharp relief, when it was found that Verizon was, by default, throttling the data access of heavy users. Those users were the firefighters trying to save lives. Needless to say, the government of California was not happy about this. They are already bringing new systems online to counteract this possibility in the future.

As cultures, ancient or otherwise, start communicating through digital devices, it’s changing how all of our technological systems are being used. Another example of this is the explosion of genealogical research being done by lay people all over the world. I’ve seen this first hand, connecting with a history that I didn’t realize I was part of. I’ve found cousins I didn’t realize I had and, this next year, I plan to visit the site where my earliest ancestor was buried back in the 1400s. Without broadband, and the resources available to me because of it, I never would have learned any of this. It’s changed how I view my place in the world and, even, who I am.

This connectivity is giving people new ways to understand themselves, their own histories, and how they integrate with others. It’s also allowing them to influence the online world with different ideas. It’s crucial that we bring broadband to our rural places – all of them – especially Indian Country. Not only is it economically imperative, but could give us a fighting chance in a quickly changing world.