when pueblos New Mexico has begun the complex process of installing fiber optics at Jemez Day School, a kindergarten through sixth-grade school run by the Indian Bureau of Education.
Upgrading a school’s connectivity meant jumping through hoops, even if there was fiber optic across the street. The U.S. federal government’s E-Rate program, which provides “universal service” funding for telecommunications and internet to schools and libraries, also said early on that it would not fund separate projects. John Chadwick, digital equity coordinator for the New Mexico Department of Education, said the program would spend money to follow the same path and bring fiber to tribal schools, libraries and local school districts. He says he didn’t want it.
So Chadwick told him what he was told. If Pueblo wants to provide internet to students, it will need to partner with the local public school district. But Chadwick said some Pueblo leaders balked at the idea. “I thought I had taken a big step forward,” he says. Some leaders of the pueblos of Santo Domingo, San Felipe, and Cochichi saw this as a further violation of their autonomy.
Nevertheless, for Chadwick, this was clearly a situation in which he needed to step aside. Negotiations would have to take place between the pueblo and the district, which are sovereign nations. It looked like it might never happen until Santo Domingo’s former governor spoke out in favor of the idea. But in its leaders’ view, it was the tribe’s obligation to provide internet to students, even if it meant working with the school district.
This began a three-year process of working with schools. However, due to good timing, the school was able to upgrade to a 100 megabit per second (Mbps) fiber connection shortly after the start of the pandemic.slow speed considered to be “underserved” In federal infrastructure law.
Broadband — high speed internet — Important for learning. Without this, students may have difficulty submitting or even accessing school work.and the pandemic focused attention About inequitable access to broadband services in education. On the other hand, for some students and public schools, the main reasons may be: affordable price Problems for people and schools in rural areas are also due to inadequate internet infrastructure.
That’s especially a problem on tribal lands. According to one federal estimate, in 2020, 18 percent of people living on tribal lands How to access broadband (Outside tribal areas, the number was closer to 4%). In rural tribal areas, about 30% of people did not have access to broadband. The federal report decries, among other challenges, the following: Fragmented bureaucratic processes and lack of funds to cover initial costs.
As a result, whether Native American students have sufficient internet access for modern learning depends on where they live.
Although the majority of Native American students attend school through the public education system, those who attend schools managed by tribal governments or the Bureau of Indian Education have difficulty accessing the Internet at school or at home due to terrain that makes fiber optic installation difficult. There may be little opportunity to do so. , community poverty and historical land ownership patterns create obstacles.
Situations vary widely from place to place, tribe to tribe, and even within tribal branches. So how are some of them coping?
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
In South Dakota, some members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe found it difficult to obtain broadband.
There are nine federally recognized tribes in the state, and the Oglala Sioux is one of the largest. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is a rural area, spanning a land area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut.about 19,000 people live there, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. That makes running broadband across the reservation expensive, said Nakina Mills, a member of the Oglala Sioux tribe in Pine Ridge.
Mills was elected to the tribal board during the COVID-19 crisis. In her current job, she works as a tribal education specialist for the National Indian Education Association, a national nonprofit organization focused on educating Native Americans. She typically spends her time supporting the “educational sovereignty” of the tribes that run the schools, working on policy and programming. So she wasn’t used to working with broadband, she says.
During the pandemic, students at Pine Ridge’s 23 K-12 schools relied on hotspots. With students out of school, assessment scores have declined, Mills said. Therefore, even with minimal internet access, students’ academic performance still decreased. But the pandemic has provided a compelling example of why broadband is a worthwhile investment.
It wasn’t always obvious, she says.
The reservation has a high poverty rate, which Mills estimates affects about 70 percent of the area’s students. When poverty is this severe, people must make sacrifices to obtain basic necessities such as shelter, food and electricity, Mills said. As a result, Wi-Fi and broadband have become lower priorities. As a result, getting internet at home remains a challenge for many families, Mill said.
Bringing broadband to the region means pursuing federal funding. However, tribal leaders are sometimes wary of doing so. “Because of historical trauma and events like what happened to the federal government and our people, it’s important to make sure there’s a real intent to help build infrastructure,” Mills said. . ”
There has also been recent investment by the federal government. For example, a $35 million federal grant announced in March is funding textiles in Bennett and Oglala-Lakota counties, home to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The funding is aimed at helping connect seven educational facilities, 3,300 people, and numerous businesses and farms, according to . release From the United States Department of Agriculture.
llama navajo indian reservation
When the pandemic began, the majority of students at Pine Hill School, a tribal school on the Rama Navajo Indian Reservation, did not have internet access at home.
Due to forced closures, schools needed to increase internet access and received CARES Act funding to do so. The leaders called Margaret Merrill, a former teacher and owner of Oso Internet Solutions, an internet service provider for the Ramah Navajo Chapter of New Mexico, part of the Navajo Nation.
Merrill felt the need to act quickly. Her company has worked closely with tribal governments and communities to set up hotspots that offer K-12 students and students returning from college the opportunity to complete assignments.
It was an immense challenge that required creativity, Merrill said. This landscape itself makes access to the internet difficult. This region, known as the high desert, is characterized by valleys, mesas, and mountains. The settlement has a volcanic crater.
It wasn’t just for school. Merrill said he focused on building infrastructure because he knew the community was losing older people. School staff and elders also live on the southernmost tip of the reservation, sometimes in polygonal hogans, the sacred dwellings of the Diné culture (according to Merrill, a woman’s fingers are interlocked and her hand is (Sometimes it’s built to look like it’s holding up a pregnant belly). In recent years, communities have invested in Indian Health Service projects to provide water and electricity to these areas. Still, just a few years ago, it was in a dead zone, Merrill said. There is no internet. No cell phone signal. There is no way to report in case of an emergency.
However, the company successfully installed fiber to Pine Hill School, a medical clinic, and tribal government buildings. In 2022, we were able to begin connecting homes with support from the FCC’s Emergency Connectivity Fund. Those funds are limited to schools, so the company spent its own money to run fiber to the homes of 26 seniors, building on the missing fiber to connect to schools, Merrill said. added.
Within about five months, nearly everyone had access to the internet, Merrill said. Chadwick, of the New Mexico Department of Education, noted that Pine Hill School was one of the only schools in the nation to apply for and receive emergency connectivity funding for fiber optics.
However, some households still did not have access to the Internet. Some people did not have electricity at home. Because of the terrain, the internet relies on wireless signals, and one family lived so far away on the other side of the volcano’s crater that they couldn’t get a signal, Merrill said.
For Merrill, fixing this is part of a fierce and unfinished vision for digital equity that is deeply tied to a sense of community. She says everyone should be able to work and study from home.
The company is currently working on a project through the Navajo Nation to connect an additional 600 Llama Navajo homes to fiber optics with funding from the American Rescue Plan Act. By 2025, when construction is complete, Merrill estimates that about 85% of the families living there will be connected.
She added that this would allow them to address other elements of digital equity, such as education on how to use digital tools. Merrill hopes the investment will spur further doubling efforts. Unemployment is high, with many people living on reservations on weekends and looking for work in larger cities like Albuquerque and Phoenix. Improved internet connectivity could foster economic development and allow those interested in returning to the appointment system to work remotely or attend telehealth appointments; she claims.
20/20 Foresight
After all, the process of improving broadband can be time-consuming.
For example, Tse Egai High School in New Mexico began the process of going online five years ago and just reopened this summer, said Chadwick of the New Mexico Department of Education.
There is a “checkerboard” that must be fought against. This is the result of a historical process that divided indigenous land grants and conflated private and tribal ownership. Today, this means that installing fiber in an area may require crossing land owned by the federal government, state governments, tribal governments, and private owners. Chadwick says the permitting process will be complicated.
There are barriers to those building broadband infrastructure for tribes, and ensuring tribal students can log on to the Internet may require advocates who can overcome obstacles such as cost and availability. Yes, says Chadwick.
“We need champions who really recognize that this is a valuable tool for their future,” Chadwick says, adding: It requires a lot of effect and requires a lot of patience. ”