The First Americans

[Commentary] I write this flying back from the Native Public Media and Native American Journalists Association joint conference in Tempe, AZ. The weekend left me with conflicting conclusions. On the one hand, I saw excitement, entrepreneurship, and a host of innovative approaches to bring telecommunications and media infrastructure to Native lands. I saw clever and information-filled websites, learned about new radio and Internet news outlets, and sensed high hopes that upcoming spectrum auctions would hasten the arrival of wireless and high-speed broadband to Indian Country and other Native areas. On the other hand, high-speed broadband service remains a stranger to most Native Americans—and by “most” I mean 90-95 per cent of them. It has been aptly remarked that the nation’s first Americans are also the least-served Americans when it comes to the availability of communications infrastructure. And get this: only about two-thirds of our sisters and brothers living in Indian Country have even plain old telephone service! No gigabytes for them, no DSL, a paucity of wireless, very little ability to make that 9-1-1 emergency call that can spell the difference between survival and death. Not even a pay phone nearby. Most folks reading this will be, like me, hard-put to even grasp how crippling these gaps are. So today’s reality in Indian Country is not a slowly-shrinking communications gap that is on its way to closure. It is instead a widening communications gap consigning yet another generation of Native Americans to a future bereft of the tools they need to become fully participating citizens in Twenty-first Century life.