I’m Chris Mitchell with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and I’m hosting this episode of Building Local Power. Along with me, I’ve got Matt Rantanan, the Director of Technology for the Southern California Tribal Chairman’s Association and Director of the Tribal Digital Village Initiative. Welcome back, Matt.

We also have Hannah Trostle, who is a research associate and has been on this show before talking about coops. She really specializes in broadband research and focuses on rural areas. 

If we had a choice, if you could snap your fingers and either have AT&T providing a mobile broadband package in the same way they do in major US cities on all of those lands over the next year, or we had to wait a little bit longer and maybe in three or four years we see many more of these local tribal initiatives pop up where the tribes are building their own networks, how do you think those two different options would result in different outcomes? 

The next problem with a mobile platform national carrier like that is that they all have data capacity limits, and if you’re gonna call a service broadband, I think it should come along with an unlimited data scenario, because if you’re going to monetize every megabit over your plan and add cost and make it impossible for people to do homework, to do video conferencing tutorial, such like that, there’s no point in going that route. We’d be much better off if the tribes were building networks and services to themselves.

One of the best things that came out of the Santa Fe meeting, which is what happens when all of us get together on this grassroots level, is that communities that know they need this corner me at lunch, sit me down at a table with all five of their representatives, and basically have me go through a Broadband Wireless Networking for Communities 101 class in 30 minutes time, and they’re just feverishly taking notes and gathering my information, and then, “We’re gonna go home and we’re gonna start this, and we’ll call you back as soon as we hit the wall,” and I was like, “That’s one of the coolest things that happened during the Santa Fe ISOC meeting. 

Hannah, I’m curious what struck you at the Santa Fe. Was there any compelling stories about locally provisioned networks that you’d like to share with us?

Because we’re close to the coast, we get a lot of different changes in weather in the mountain regions. Some of that fiber can’t hang on poles. Digging in the ground doesn’t work, so wireless becomes the situation. Wireless is not the best deployment solution for scalability, and some of those rural coops don’t wanna get into that as an alternative. They’re typically running fiber where they already have electrical resources.

So there is an impasse. It’s not a permanent wall, but there is certainly some creative solutions that need to be kind of worked out, and it’s kind of case by case, and once we get a couple of cases that are great, I think we need to really promote their success so that other people can kind of latch onto that and maybe grow that idea.

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One of the things that we’re worried about in cities is that the rapid increase in technology and communication allowing kids that have high-quality access to learn at a much more rapid rate … They have access to more materials. They may be more inspired … In addition to the other advantages they had in the past, that paradoxically, better internet access could result in a greater divide between the have-nots and the haves. Is that something that you’re worried about on the reservations, Matt? 

Well, these kids get back on the bus and go back to the reservation, where they don’t have access to internet, so a lot of families are taking their only vehicle and loading up the kids, driving down to town 45 minutes to a McDonalds or a Starbucks, and sitting there and poaching internet so they can download the homework assignment and then sometimes perform that homework assignment, and then come back home where that vehicle could be used for someone that is bringing money into the household through work, or it could be used for other sources of success for that family, and it’s being tied up just dragging kids back and forth to do internet access.

I think the reaction from the African American community from the Black Panther trailers is incredible. Matt, I know that you and Hannah are both very big into this comic book universe. At the Santa Fe, you were there at the same time as an Indigenous Comic Con event, and I’m curious if you can just talk a little bit about the importance of those sorts of things, that cultural power, in terms of building local power within historically marginalized communities.

I wanna turn to Hannah first while Matt can think about what he wants to say.

We have had a great relationship with all of the artists there. The Comic Book Convention creator, Dr Lee Francis III, has worked with many creative, inspirational people and has an amazing team of folks to put this thing together, and the stories that I see coming out of this, and the excitement that little kids and even adults have when they walk through the show floor and they see and recognize a character from stories that their grandparents told them when they were little kids about how their culture came about and how their people explain the sun and explain rain and explain things like that and explain the creation story, it’s just super cool to see, and there’s so much enthusiasm and excitement. So many artists, so much opportunity, there was some amazing comics to film stars there, to interact with tribal youth and tribal people, to just kind of tie that whole world together, it’s a magical experience.

But I love it. I’m a Comic Con geek, and seeing the core of the indigenous community being able to create and just get the stories out there visually is just phenomenal. 

The other thing I see is that big corporations like that make decisions based on their corporate environments, not on the cultural environment of the community, so I think the network, weird enough that equipment can behave differently, but the architecture and the thought process behind the network would be different than the thought process and the architecture the way we design it.

We’re trying to be all-inclusive. They’re looking for low-hanging fruit and lowest cost to entry. We are also trying to be mindful of cost, but at the same time, if there is a home that’s off the beaten path and we have to generate some other piece of architecture to capture that home, we’re gonna do that, because that’s how we as a community work. I think that might be the two differences that most obvious.