NATV
Challenging
Media Frontiers.
by Ken
Freed.
.
A
look into the past, present and future of TV on Native
American lands.
Within
three years after the first telegraph line reached Denver
in 1863, Indians trying to protect their ancestral lands
from occupation launched a campaign to disrupt
communications among the Colorado settlers. Raiding
parties cut wires, chopped down poles and attacked trains
carrying supplies for the lines. The attacks did not
relent until 1867 when army troops were posted along the
telegraphy routes.
Today in 1996 the
situation is reversed.
Rather that
fighting to halt the development of telecommunications
infrastructure, modern Native American warriors are
fighting hard to develop and control digital broadband
services on their reservations. Yet there is cultural
resistance from within. For example, the highest points
for antennas usually are sacred sites that must be left
alone.
What does the
future hold for Native American TV (NATV)?
"Native Americans
talk about the Information Superhighway as this distant
thing that does not effect them," says Alex Looking Elk,
"but if we don't get access to the Information
Superhighway soon, we may become road kill. What good is
a dead culture?"
Looking Elk is a
known as the chief advocate for new media in the National
Congress of American Indians. Until last March he served
as director of economic development for the Standing Rock
Sioux Tribe, whose reservation spans the border between
North and South Dakota. The reservation has eight
districts, only two of which have cable TV. Looking Elk
since has joined Laducer & Associates in Rapid City
to offer broadband technology to tribes across the
country.
Media
Sovereignty
"Access to
broadband media depends on who controls the system," says
J.D. Williams, general manager of the Cheyenne River
Sioux Tribe Telephone Authority, which operates telephone
and cable TV services on the reservation north of Pierre,
South Dakota.
"If the local media
company is tribally owned," he says, "they tend to look
first at the telecommunication services the people need
most &emdash; Internet access, telemedicine, dbs, even
interactive TV &emdash; and then ask how to deliver these
services in a rural setting. If the system is owned by an
outside company, all of their decisions tend to be based
on the reality of limited revenues from the reservation,
so they create little or no solid connections for our
small communities. At the same time, Indian nations need
to enact a universal commercial code to do business with
outside companies in a manner recognized by American
courts."
"Sovereignty is the
main issue," says communications consultant Randy Ross,
who has worked with the New York Foundation for the Arts,
the Smithsonian Institution and related organizations. He
is an enrolled member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of
Oklahoma with family roots in the Rosebud Sioux
reservation in South Dakota.
"Tribes now control
air space and mineral rights on their lands," Ross says,
"so why should they not also control the
telecommunication rights? How can we become a
self-determining people when we have to buy access from
the media moguls who hold the most power because they can
afford to buy the most bandwidth at the spectrum
auctions?"
Ross cites as an
exemplar of self-determination the Cheyenne River Sioux
Tribe Telephone Authority, formed in 1977 with a loan
from the Rural Electrification Administration. The CRST
Telephone Authority serves about 2,600 telephony
subscribers in a 4,600 square mile area, one subscriber
per mile of line.
CRSTTA has become a
principal business leader on the reservation. The company
bought out the local pay TV company to set up Cheyenne
River Cable TV, which maintains 900 customers in four
communities. Most recently, CRSTTA entered the dbs
(direct broadcast satellite) business in a deal with
Hughes' DirecTV, which already has 400 customers. (TCI's
PrimeStar also is active in the region.)
Since CRSTTA owns
part of South Dakota's first all-fiber network, will
interactive TV be next? Answers J.D. Williams, "The
difficulty with supplying two-way broadband services in a
small community is that it's hard to justify the cost of
putting it in when there's probably not going to be
enough revenues to pay for it. Of far more immediate
concern are people in the middle of the snow zone of the
reservation where there's never any TV signal at all, let
alone any cable TV."
Hunting
Bucks
"To improve the
infrastructure takes lots of money," agrees Teresa
Hopkins, information technology coordinator for the
Navajo Nation, which covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico
and Utah, "but there are both cultural and geographic
limitations to be considered."
She describes the
situation on the Window Rock Navajo reservation in
Arizona. "The reservation is like a separate country
inside a state." she says. "With a total area of 20,000
square miles and a population of 200,000 enrolled
members, the area is too big for microwave and has too
many sacred mountains for terrestrial
broadcasting."
Hopkins reports
that only five Window Rock townships have telephony
services and that only 33 percent of the residents there
have telephones, these provided by an independent
company, Navajo Communications Corporation. NCC also
operates the reservation's only cable system, which
passes 10 percent of the homes.
To place the
telecommunications situation into context, she notes that
only 51 percent of the Navajo people have indoor plumbing
and 54 percent of the people are heating their homes with
firewood. "We bridge 200 years here," she says, "from
those living in the traditional ways to those like our
chairman with a T1 data line in his office."
For T1 links to
five locations at Window Rock, Hopkins says, NCC charges
about a quarter million dollars a year. Because T1
service to schools (it's primary use) can be deemed as
"human services" under FCC rules, the tribe is claiming
eligibility for a 60 percent reduction in rates, a
contention NCC is still considering.
"We're hoping the
market opens up for competition under the new
Telecommunications ACT," she adds, "but we really don't
know what's going to happen next. USWest was going to
extend service to the New Mexico portion of the
reservation, and NCC says we can deal with whomever we
want, but NCC still controls the
rights-of-way."
Obtaining
rights-of-way remains a barrier to broadband deployment,
she remarks "You have to get permission from each
individual family.
If there are ten
families in a mile, and if one family replies 'no' for
any reason, that family can hold up everything for the
others.
"A microwave TV
system could avoid this problem," she continues, "but
it's 70 miles from Window Rock to Tuba City alone, and
erecting towers every 12 miles in between could destroy
the landscape. Most of us are still very traditional
people who hold the land sacred. We'd rather have the
land than have modern conveniences. We're willing to
travel overland to the grocery and movie theater, which
is why most of the technology at Window Rock is
concentrated in five locations."
Beyond a desire to
protect their physical resources, another major obstacle
cited by Hopkins is a lack of fiscal resources. "We're
willing to cost share infrastructure for health services
and schools, but first we need the revenues to share."
Tourism and artistry cannot support broadband system
construction.
Games
Galore
"The Navajo council
approved a referendum to allow gaming," she says,
referencing how East coast tribes that have become
prosperous from gambling on their sovereign lands, "but
the Navajo people voted against gaming by nearly 70
percent. And Indian gaming bills in the Arizona state
legislature have not passed because the state says the
bills don't give them enough money. Arizona receives less
federal money than the neighboring states because so much
of Arizona is reservation land, which the state seems to
feel is the tribes' fault "
Arizona tried to
close down gaming in the Fort McDowell Apache
reservation, Hopkins recalls, but the tribe eventually
won the day in court. She attributes such actions to the
cultural climate in Arizona. "Remember that many people
in Arizona did not want to recognize Martin Luther King
Day, and there are parts of Arizona that still do not
recognize daylight savings time, so it's 7 PM in one spot
and 8 PM in another. That's just how things are
here."
Other tribes also
have explored gaming as a revenue source to finance
broadband development, but the road has not been easy.
Alex Looking Elk
recalls what happened when the Prairie Knights Casino at
Fort Yates, South Dakota, asked the local telephone
company for broadband data lines. "The telco said the
tribe needed to pay for the fiber trenching since the
location was not part of their five-year plan. They also
said the projected revenues would not be worth the
expense of trenching lines into remote areas. So, the
tribe decided to wait.
The casino opened
and started making money. A year later, the telco was
trenching fiber to the area, and they announced the route
actually was part of their five-year plan, after all. The
casino eventually was linked up without explanation.
Little things like this pop up all the time out
here."
Looking Elk further
asserts that the income from gaming usually turns out to
be less than expected. "There's a misconception among the
tribes that gaming would let them rake in the money hand
over fist, like the tribe in Massachusetts that was able
to give away profits to the members. But this has not
proven to be the case elsewhere.
"In most cases, the
casino is built by an outside casino management company
and all profits have to repay the huge debts incurred by
the management company before any money becomes available
for social services or technology. The situation is
better where a tribe can secure capital on their own, but
even then, gaming is not a panacea."
Randy Ross asks a
more fundamental question, If tribes have the right to
offer online gaming on their sovereign reservations,
what's to stop them from offering online gaming
nationally and internationally? "The tribes could work
out compacts with each state and with each country," he
says, "but the jurisdiction here is unclear, so we'll
probably see this slugged out in the U.S. Supreme
Court."
Also, because
gaming revenues are not being shared among tribes, one
tribe's windfall is not necessarily going to feed any
other tribe. As ever, indigenous people compete among
themselves for resources. "The solution is vertical
integration," proposes Ross. "Somehow, we have to get the
tribes to act collectively for economies of
scale."
War
Councils
J.D. Williams
comments that numerous federal agencies (Bureau of Indian
Affairs, Health and Human Services, Department of
Education, Department of Agriculture, National Science
Foundation, and others) administer hundreds of federal
programs serving Native Americans, but projects often are
uncoordinated and work at cross purposes. He says all
efforts have failed to create any integrated federal
strategy for developing an accessible telecom
infrastructure on tribal lands.
Such a national
strategy would be valuable, says Looking Elk, but there
are obstacles. "Given limited resources, every tribe has
to make a decision whether to invest money into business
development or give money to barely meeting basic needs,
such as medical care. Basic needs wins out almost every
time, so technology gets pushed onto a back burner. At
some point, we must make a commitment to technology, but
no one is yet brave enough to step in there.
"For example,
tribal governments need to get involved in the push for
HDTV," Looking Elk advises. "As sovereign nations, we
need to get active in the international debate over
digital TV standards. We need to speak up about the need
for a standard method of converting HDTV signals into
conventional analog signals. Without that standard, when
stations convert to digital broadcasting, the poor will
have to throw out their TV sets as useless since they
will not pick up the signal."
"Now that the
Telecommunications Act has passed," says Randy Ross,
"we're seeing a bunch of backpeddling by everyone because
the law covers technical issues we haven't resolved yet.
Technology once was ahead of the law, and now the law is
ahead of the technology."
Looking Elk voices
concern about how the new Telecommunications Act
specifically will effect tribal autonomy. "The new law
sets federal and state rules for developing technology,"
he says, "but there is not one mention in the law of our
tribes as sovereign nations. Our tribes have been
programmed by BIA to look for a handout, so the new law
assumes that the tribes will acquiesce to state and
county laws, that the Indian nations will accept whatever
they are given."
Smoke
Signals
Meanwhile, back at
the reservation, Ross sees more work ahead. "Our people
are more excited about the reintroduction of the buffalo
on our land, and the birth of a white buffalo, than they
are about the introduction of any telecommunications
technology. And tribal leaders, while very wise about
preserving the natural balance, do not yet see how the
new technologies could change things for us. We actually
are more threatened than ever before, if only because of
the brain drain as our young college graduates end up
working for media corporations instead of returning home
to operate community networks."
"We need to educate
the federal government leaders as well as the tribal
government leaders," says Looking Elk. "but the main
problem is that federal laws do not recognize the old
treaties as real and binding. Granted, there's nothing in
tribal laws or the old treaties to address spectrum
frequencies in the air, but just as these treaties are
written in general enough language to be extended last
century to cover telegraphy, so they can be extended
today o cover the new media technologies."
The best hope, he
says, is that there has been a cultural renaissance in
the past few years as the elderly pass on their
traditional knowledge and language to young Native
Americans who are eager to learn all they can about their
heritage. This renaissance is fueling the flame of Native
American themes in the popular culture, especially the
essential concept that everyone is related inside the
"hoop of the world," an image that may be useful in
winning public acceptance of interactive mass
media.
"Satellites in
orbit around the earth make it possible for all people to
communicate, " Looking Elk says. "So, the idea that we
are all part of one interactive circle of life can help
take away people's fear of the new technology." He adds
that talking about the Internet in terms of the World
Wide Web also fits in with American Indian views about
the "web of life," a vision of the world that could
prompt the public to be more responsible with the
freedoms afforded by the new media.
"A conflict is
growing between the return to spiritual integrity and the
advance into technological frontiers," he concludes. "We
now need to find a way of sharing the best of both worlds
in the 21st Century." 
.
