Natives in Tech

This is not a new issue. The theft of Native knowledge and erasure is something we deal with to the present day. Whether it's MMIW posts being removed from Instagram or Google creating a competing language learning platform for Native peoples, the issue of erasure and theft has taken a new form: bias in tech and data sovereignty. These issues might not be well known by people that are not within the community. Native people occupy a small sub-community on different social media platforms and within technology. But we've seen these things before: dictionaries and books that encapsulate knowledge from our communities and white washing history to remove our histories from our lands. What do we do from here? We speak up, we stand against the work of big tech to silence our voices, and we build solutions to these problems for ourselves as we've done for millennia.

We are attempting to bring attention to these ideas:

• Native erasure in technology such as social media
• Data sovereignty as it pertains to language and culture
• Building Native-centric solutions to these problems using open source technology and
• Leveraging Native technologists working in these problem spaces

Native people represent an estimated 2+ million people in the United States. The systemic erasure of the population here reflects the same situation abroad where settler colonialism has debased and destabilized Native people for resources the world over. To intervene in the consumption and theft of Native land, Intellectual Property, and cultures, Indigenous people must face a myriad of complex challenges. Native-centric technical content is hard to come by and there are very few outlets that produce feature or create content that speaks to this intersection and issues.

We plan to solve the problems above by:

• Creating video and written content that educates Native and non-Native people alike about these ongoing issues with large tech companies that do not center Native people in their services, especially services intended for Native audiences
• Creating video and written content that educates Native people about the issue of data sovereignty and how our communities are affected by data mining, terms of service, end-user agreements, and copyright in order to protect them from making their knowledge available to suspect organizations and groups
• Building Native-centric solutions to these problems and present them as better alternatives than what the larger tech companies offer
• Working closely with Native technologists in the field who are building these solutions already to inspire and provoke discussions in Native communities

Our solution serves:

• Native community members who work in technology, or in a cultural revivalist capacity who may not understand how technology, especially non-Native solutions, impacts their work
• non-Native peoples who don't understand these issues or who think their intentions working within the western capitalist system helps but that actually ends up hurting Native peoples
• Native technologists whose solutions serve Native communities but have been overlooked because they have a smaller reach than larger tech companies
• Native technologists who are looking for solutions that are Native-centric but are having difficulty finding them in their own communities
• Non-technical Native peoples who are starting to experience issues in technology and want to understand what they can do to combat the problem and inspire them to get involved in the discussion to rebuild similar tools for their communities.

We plan to use social media to engage each of these target groups, involve them in the discussion as we develop content for people like them, and use their experiences to center Native peoples in the problem space.

We are attempting to address anti-racism in tech, specifically human bias, by creating content and Native-centric platforms with and for those who have experienced these biases and erasures themselves, and for non-Native folks who are uneducated about such experiences and learning how these actions are a repeat of what Native people have experienced in the past. We hope that by developing content we can be a catalyst for further conversations within other Native communities and inspire more Native people to build solutions by seeing other Native technologists who have already begun to apply solutions and speak about these issues in their own communities.

We are already established as an organization but we could use the funding to help push our ideas out there even more within media. We already have in place:

• A website that states our mission and goals
• An Open Collective to receive funding from individual donors
• A blog using Ghost CMS
• YouTube channel
• Social media presence on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram
• A Slack channel with over 110 Native peoples in tech

Although we have established ourselves in media, we believe we are poised to grow within this space and to increase our reach. For example, we have on average, reached 30K impressions a month on Twitter. This is quite large for even a small organization like ourselves but we still retain a small following: around 1K followers. We like to further grow in this space and expand our reach and our position as SMEs in this particular space.

The problems are old but the ways in which these problems present themselves are new. There are ever-expanding ways in which technology and its negative impact on Native communities are hidden from view: end-user agreements, data mining but spun by good PR, open-source solutions with no open source licensing to back them up. There are the technical solutions and then there is the technical legalese that we also need to learn that can be confusing and even confounding to technical and non-technical people alike. The solutions we propose are innovative in the sense that they are Native-centric, they are open source so that any community can use them, and they are addressing the issues we face that large tech companies are unwilling to budge on whether because of bias or erasure that is either intentional or unintentional. We expect that through highlighting the work we are doing in this space and others, as well as building upon the work we've already done, we can continue to be catalysts for this work to decolonize technology.

We currenlty serve around 110+ Native peoples in our Slack and thousands of non-Native people who are interested in learning about these issues first-hand whether through social media, blog posts, or as allies in our Slack channel. We hope to serve another 100+ Native peoples in technology in the next year. We strive to serve 500+ Native peoples in technology in the next five years. We think we can reach thousands of non-technical Native people in the US as well as many hundreds of thousands more who passively are learning about issues that we bring up. Outside of Native people, we think we can impact around 50K non-Native people who are interested in these issues by growing our social media presence. In the next year, we hope to grow our follower count on all platforms by 10K. In the next five years, we hope to grow that number by 50K. We hope this garners us additional support from the non-Native community that will be of great benefit going forward.

We use a few things to help measure our progress:

• Twitter analytics to measure our reach and impressions
• Open Collective to measure the financial support for the projects we work on
• YouTube analytics and Umami to measure how many people we reach through our visual media and our blog
• Surveys that we will gather from Native people in tech to see how much our impact is having on them

We can use these technologies to compare our growth and measure how effective we are over time.

Our team includes:

• Coty Sutherland (Waccamaw Siouan, Volunteer, Redhat) - Board of Director
• Nick Sahler (Taíno, Volunteer, Netflix) - Board of Director
• Adam Recvlohe (Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Volunteer, SimSpace Corporation) - Board of Director
• Shea Vassar (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, Part-time, Independent Contractor) - Social Media Manager

We are volunteers that all work for large or mid-size tech communities that have been activists in our communities and outside when it comes to Native presence in tech. We think we have a solid team of folks with different technical backgrounds and expertise that speaks to not only the issues like erasure that Native people face when it comes to technology but can propose solutions to curb that trend.

Our team is composed of mainly Native people within the tech space and we are going to be adding additional Native women in tech to the board very soon. We want to ensure that we have a balance of opinions and experiences on the board so that we can speak as best we can about the communities we want to serve.

We are applying to solve in order to create content around Native issues as they pertain to technology. We would like to:

• Create technical content for Native people in tech
• Create video and written content around Native issues in tech like erasure and bias
• Develop workshops that brainstorm ideas for how to solve these issues
• Work with Native people in tech to highlight their solutions to these issues in their own communities

We are seeking help with:

• Funding for writers and content creators of technical content
• Funding for technologists to share their solutions and craft them in ways that allow any community to use
• Additional funding for our existing social media manager to work more on our social media campaigns
• Funding for various needs that each project has that will help it to increase its reach and usage
• Network with the broader Native community that can bring more attention to our work
• Collaborate with Native technologists whose technology we can leverage

We would like to partner with:

• Austin Serio and his work already with Solve
• Michael Running Wolf and his work with Indigenous in AI
• KŪ KAHAKALAU and her work in the Native tech space
• MiT faculty working in tech with offline and decentralized architectures
• Dr. Elizabeth Rule and her work on the Indigenous Guide to D.C.
• D. Fox Harrel and his work with VR/AR

We will use this prize to bring more attention, and better solutions, to issues around involvement and erasure in Native communities here in the US and aboard. There are a whole host of open source solutions that are available to Native communities and there are Native technologists working in these industries that are fighting against these new forms of colonialism that need to be highlighted, their work recognized, and their solutions propagated to other indigenous communities where similar issues are faced. It takes time and a lot of effort to make this happen. But look at what we've done so far with just a few volunteers. We've hosted a couple of conferences, had meetups where Native talk shop about technology, deployed solutions to communities with Native-centric themes and ideas, brought together Native technologists in one place, Slack, to further get these ideas out into the Native world. Given what we've accomplished thus far, I see we can accomplish even more with funding that really can put us in a position to have our voices heard on the same level as Instagram and Google, the same companies who are developing and using technology that is harmful to Native communities. We've seen these things before: non-Native people coming into Native communities and extracting our knowledge and selling it back to us through dictionaries, and books. This is continuing to happen because to this day and we need to elevate our status in order to stand against these actions and work.

One of the main goals of our work is to develop technical content as well as content that centers indigeneity in technology. In order to engage Native peoples in these discussions, we have to explain in simpler terms how their tech knowledge and work impact their community. We've heard stories over and over again in our communities how we are taken advantage of in order to improve the publicity of larger companies or other non-Natives looking to take advantage of the little technical knowledge that some folks may have when meeting with these companies. Do elders understand copyright? Do language revivalists read the terms of service when they make their content available to non-Native-centric technology? Do they understand the implications of what happens to their data when it is owned by a publishing firm? These are very important questions that our communities need to understand. We shouldn't have to pay non-Native peoples to learn to speak our languages but that is what is happening. We know that knowledge is power and that is what we seek to do with funding: empower Native peoples with information and educate them on these modern-day issues that have their foundations in the past. And in talking about them we can reach out to the technologists on the ground that have solved some of these problems and learn from their expertise to spread knowledge around to more Native folks looking to build similar solutions in their communities.