Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country by Marisa Elena Duarte (review)

marisa elena duarte's Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet across Indian Country offers a reconceptualization of what the spread of and access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) mean for Native communities across the United States. Through case studies of contemporary programs from tribes throughout the country, as well as intertribal government agencies and organizations, she deconstructs the false dichotomy separating Indigenous peoples from technological development. Drawing upon numerous fields, including library science, information technologies, Native American studies, decolonizing methodologies, and tribal governance, Duarte puts forth an argument that ICTs constitute yet another form tribal communities utilize to continue the work of sovereignty and self-determination.

Duarte employs both the applied and theoretical, shifting effortlessly between normative arguments and empirical case studies. Chapter 1 breaks down the fallacy of technology as antithetical to Indigeneity, the dichotomy becoming intertwined with the narrative of Native disappearance, particularly through tribal dispossession of lands contemporary with the spread of telegraph and railroad lines during western expansion (10). Chapter 2 defines her methodology as "reframing" and presents the necessity of acknowledging the relational nature of ICTs for tribal communities, in that they are tools for implementing shared community goals rather than marks of "progress" (29, 33). Chapter 3 explores the relationship between tribal sovereignty and ICTs through interviews with contemporary programs, including the Pascua Yaqui and Hopi tribal radio stations; Tohono O'odham and their use of various ICTs, including two-way radio; and intertribal groups, in particular Native Public Media (38, 45, 47, 50). Likewise, chapter 4 deals with the challenges to implementing ICTs by analyzing Internet service providers, including Southern California Tribal Technologies, and tribes that have implemented service, including the Coeur d'Alene, Cheyenne River Sioux, and Navajo Nation (59, 68, 77, 83). Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the way ICTs relate to self-determination and sovereignty, respectively, noting that ICTs are not end goals in their own right but a step in a series of goals that tribes hold for themselves. In this way, ICTs remain steeped in a history of colonialism. Just as they do with water, land, and mineral rights, tribes must contend with corporate entities and the extreme emphasis on individualist, private property rights encoded in US legal systems to ensure that their communities' rights to assert the ICTs of their choice, in accordance with tribal knowledge, remain upheld. Applying these tools to tribal goals requires acknowledging the continued struggle for self-determination and sovereignty. Duarte concludes in chapter 7, reiterating the need to rethink and remove the "nationalist progress" message imbedded in ICT rhetoric and discontinue equating "premodern"—Indigenous peoples—with "antitechnological" (122, 132).

Network Sovereignty states that information flows like water between relationships of all kinds: familial, intertribal, legal, and economic; so, too, moves her subtle, radical argument (12). She is at her best when combatting conventional views of tribes as backward and, worse, vanishing. She asserts the fluid use of ICTs to further Indigenous desires as counternarrative. For tribes, ICTs are not conclusions but utensils (89). ICT build-out into Indian Country is not foreign to it but can be likened to traditional trade networks and intertribal policy learning, such as the proliferation of gaming, among other economic developments; digital environments are yet another space in which tribes must navigate as the third sovereign among competing government and economic interests.

Duarte speaks power to our tribal communities, where the practical is also always cultural. From the Hopi prophecy of Spider Woman weaving the world together to the way the Kumeyaay took strategic advantage of a wildfire that made space among sacred manzanita plants to lay foundation work for a tower, tribes found room for ICTs alongside existing traditions (126, 95). Here Duarte emphasizes the way in which ICT pursuance hinges on the relationships such technologies can facilitate, be they better tribal government access to federal grants, increased economic development on tribal lands, improved language literacy of tribal youth, or larger job placement for Native veterans returning from...