McDonald's Wi-Fi is Not a Solution: Challenges to Digital Divide Research in Indian Country Amid COVID-19

Before the onset of COVID-19, researchers estimated that Native Americans in rural geographies had significantly less access to Internet even though FCC data sets indicated adequate rates of connectivity and coverage in those regions. An ongoing investigation of factors and conditions shaping Internet access and connectivity through a joint cooperative network backbone serving four tribes and rural counties in northern New Mexico reveals discrepancies between the on-the-ground reality and FCC reports of coverage and connectivity. The impact of COVID-19 also reveals conditions shaping the capacity for various technologists in the region to rapidly deploy much-needed services to severely affected rural and reservation locations. At its midpoint, the project also reveals the challenges to digital divide research in Indian Country amid COVID-19, which raises ethical and logistical concerns for HCI researchers, digital ethnographers, non-profit technologists, librarians, digital literacy advocates, and tribal government leaders.

Marisa Elena Duarte (Pascua Yaqui/Chicanx) is an assistant professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her 2017 book Network Sovereignty (UW Press) is about how tribes command the build-out of Internet infrastructure toward increasing exercises of tribal sovereignty. Her current work is on Native American and Indigenous approaches to social media for political mobilization, as well as deepening understanding of tribal network sovereignty through analysis of shared network infrastructures. She currently teaches courses in Justice Theory, Learning Technologies for Native Education, Indigenous Methodologies, and Digital Activism.