That backdrop for your Zoom call speaks volumes
As shelter-in-place mandates drag on, television has had to adjust. News anchors, talk show hosts and the carousel of chattering guests are broadcasting from their homes.
No elaborate studio lighting to make you pop and no makeup artists to hide those wrinkles. Six weeks without barber shops and beauty salons isn’t helping either. But instead of critiquing the faces on the screen, I’m drawn to what’s behind them.
The backdrops – some carefully staged, others slapdash – reveal more about the talking heads than
sector accounted for $2.1 trillion of the U.S. economy. But during this pandemic, many residents of rural Indian Country don’t have that luxury. They are instead fearful for their lives and the lives of their loved ones who lack access to solutions like telehealth or online counseling during this time of isolation.
The internet was always important, but COVID-19 is illuminating the colossal crevasse between the connected and the unconnected, those in the life raft and those left in open water.
The internet is critical for indigenous communities to leverage economic, health and educational opportunities. Today, connectivity is a necessary tool for tracking data and sounding the alarm for missing and murdered indigenous women, growing the number of indigenous language speakers, and cultivating a robust economy in some of the country’s poorest communities.
Yet indigenous communities remain among the least connected in North America.
The coronavirus is showing us why this is a problem. Students sent home from colleges and schools are encouraged to continue their studies online. But many native students return to homes without an internet connection.
These same tribal communities are also the last to receive important updates on health and emergency procedures. Telehealth? Forget it.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly admonished the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for making radio waves called spectrum (a natural resource) and other telecommunications necessities almost completely inaccessible to tribal nations. In 2018, the GAO said the FCC “has done little to promote and support tribes' access to radio frequency spectrum that can be used for such wireless service.”
Now, amid this global pandemic, the reality of the situation looms, as connecting Indian Country can mean the difference between life and death.
Five months ago some of the brightest minds in Indian Country telecommunications came together to create solutions. They gathered in Pu’uhonua o Waimanalo, a small Native Hawaiian community in O’ahu where internet connection was so bad, parents often took their children into town to use the Wi-Fi at McDonald’s to do homework assignments.
The experts assisted the Nation of
Hawai’i to establish a sovereign community broadband network, with much higher speeds and lower rates than their former big telecom service-provider. A group of up-and-coming tribal leaders also deliberated over how to tell the FCC that native communities should be first on their list of priorities.
The group transformed their frustrations into policy recommendations.
In line with those recommendations, on Feb. 3, the FCC opened a 180-day tribal priority window, extending an opportunity for native nations in tribal areas to apply for a license to a small slice of spectrum over their lands – a historic first. Holding these licenses will make it possible for tribal nations to set up their own community broadband networks or make it easier to contract established service providers.
Lately, telecommunications companies have taken steps to make the internet more accessible to many, removing data caps, expanding public Wi-Fi access and offering free broadband to unconnected students. These are nice gestures that will help many, but the benefits will not necessarily extend to rural, tribal areas where data and backhaul infrastructure may not exist.
A few weeks ago I traveled through Navajo Country to deliver telecom equipment and assist Navajo schools in setting up community networks. It was at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Because of COVID-19, policies suddenly changed. Tribal spectrum opened up and it was suddenly possible to bring these students and teachers online. They needed access to information more than ever.
It shouldn’t take a global emergency for tribal spectrum policies to change, and indigenous telecom workers like me shouldn’t be putting ourselves and others at risk. Policy changes leading up to this point could have prevented such risk.
Policy recommendations such as those made in Hawai’i are the beginning of a sustainable solution. They indirectly ask the FCC and Congress to better understand how the government’s trust responsibility to native nations applies to connectivity. And most of all, they call for inclusive indigenous broadband and spectrum access.
This is urgent. The FCC’s implementation of these recommendations are vital to connecting Indian Country to key services. But most importantly, it could save lives.