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  • Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country by Marisa Elena Duarte
  • Miranda Belarde-Lewis (bio)
Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country
by Marisa Elena Duarte
University of Washington Press, 2017

My son does not always like to go with me to Zuni when we return home to visit. His eleven-year-old brain has a hard time comprehending why there is very little Wi-Fi on the Zuni Reservation. Most of the year we live just outside of Seattle, and he takes the immense amount of connectivity for granted, just as I do. He wonders about it and asks why the internet does not work "the way it's supposed to" while we are in Zuni. [End Page 118]

There are many assumptions and mysteries about how the internet is "supposed to work," and for digital natives, the folks who have grown up immersed in digital technology, there is a common assumption that the internet has always been a fixture in our lives. However, if you are from a rural Indian reservation or have ever spent an extended amount of time on one, you know that the internet does not always "just work" and that it is a very recent phenomenon—one that has changed everything about how we process and access vital information.

In Marisa Duarte's first book, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country, her goals are to create understanding; she methodically builds a case "introducing Native and Indigenous thought . . . into the broad fields of science, technology, and society studies" and to "introduce Native and Indigenous thinkers to the language of information science and sociotechnical systems" (6). She highlights examples of various broadband deployment activities in diverse Native communities in order to display how each of these projects is directly tied to strengthening the sovereignty of Native nations.

She begins the book in Yoeme, the language of the Yaqui people, a transnational Indigenous community dealing with the complexities of the geopolitical borders between the United States and Mexico, multiple jurisdictions, competing interests for access through the border, with people, water, information, and technologies flowing back and forth. Duarte is part of a growing number of Indigenous scholars whose research is informed directly by their tribal heritage and the real-world issues affecting their family's safety and health. In this case, the tribes of the southwestern United States provide ample evidence for the implications and the tribal decision making that must occur to be able to control the connectivity within one's own territory.

Anyone caught up in the recent debates and the horror of the ruling from the Federal Communications Commission to repeal Net Neutrality will be doubly infuriated by the historical restrictions and limitations restricting free flows to the internet in Indian Country. Duarte writes, "We do not just infer the existence of exclusion; we suffer from it, and our ways of knowing are shaped by the complexity of that experience" (15). Throughout the book, Duarte carefully articulates how the project to build a broadband backbone through Indian Country is layered with colonial legacies of Manifest Destiny, with the potential for broadband and fiber optic cables to follow in the same colonial path as telegraph wires and railroad tracks. Yet while she continuously breaks down the inner workings of how colonialism, mechanisms of state-sponsored violence, and genocide can continue into the present day through the lack of investment into the Information Communication Technology (ICTs) in Indian Country, the overall tone of the book is proactive and hopeful.

In the chapter "Sociotechnical Landscapes" Duarte discusses six [End Page 119] programs in the Southwest: KPYT-LPFM Yaqui Radio, a smartwall and two-way radios used by Tohono O'odham law enforcement, KUYI Hopi Radio, the Native Nations Institute, the Knowledge River Tribal Librarians Oral History Project, and Native Public Media. Each of these projects leverages what is available to it to either work around the barriers of freely accessible internet access or work to provide relevant and timely information to those who need it most—tribal peoples, tribal leaders, and policy makers. While the six programs show a breadth of issues, needs, challenges, and solutions, they are localized in the...

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