Symposium with Marisa Elena Duarte

Tempe Campus: West Hall Room 135

In the 1990s, while Jeff Goldblum was selling jellybean-colored Mac computers on TV, many reservation communities still lacked access to basic telephone services. When a Navajo teen from Ganado, Arizona—a teen with no phone service or electricity in the home—won one of these iMacs in a contest, former President Clinton identified the ironic win as an expression of the ‘digital divide,’ with Native Americans depicted as digital have-nots. Conscientious of the marginalization of Indigenous peoples in the US, in 2010, I commenced a qualitative inquiry of uses of broadband Internet in Indian Country, including case studies of tribes that deployed their own community broadband infrastructures. Understanding the political, economic, and social conditions shaping reasons why tribes decide to build their own Internet infrastructures, as well as the ways digital devices in reservation communities shape information flows and political activity, gives insight into how we conceptualize the Internet as a techno-scientific phenomena, in addition to the nature of the digital overlay shaping everyday activity in all of our lives.

Marisa Elena Duarte (Pascua Yaqui) has been working to support tribal libraries for over a
decade. She received her PhD in Information Science in 2013 from the University of Washington. While there, she co-founded the Indigenous Information Research Group, a team of six Native and Indigenous doctoral researchers investigating the impacts of information, knowledge, and technology in Native and Indigenous communities. She is the 2013-15 co-chair of the recently formed Tribal Telecom and Technology Summit, an annual forum for policy-makers, technology specialists, and educators to share updates on information and communications technology innovation and governance in Indian Country. She is the current Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Works in progress include geopolitical conceptualizations of digital systems of devices in Indian
Country, as well as an analysis of epistemic injustice around the Sand Creek Massacre.

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Co-sponsored by CSPO and the School of Social Transformation