Coinciding with Native American Heritage Month, NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association’s Smart Communities program has published the Smart Tribal Community paper, “Broadband as a Bridge from Heritage to the Future,” on the impact that broadband access can have on Tribal communities.
The paper is based on a conversation held at NTCA’s SRC Live! conference earlier this year and features Kim Harber, senior vice president of Madison Communications (Staunton, Ill.), and member of the Smart Rural Community Advisory Council, Mikhail Sundust, executive director of the Digital Connect Initiative, a subsidiary of Tribally-owned Gila River Telecommunications Inc. (Chandler, Ariz.), and Morgan Gray, a law student and recipient of the Foundation for Rural Service James L. Bass Scholarship. The paper was compiled by NTCA Vice President of Policy and Industry Innovation Josh Seidemann.
In the paper, Sundust and Gray talk about digital inclusion initiatives in Arizona and Oklahoma and how fiber broadband access has helped support and even revitalize Tribal culture. Gray also talks about how the Chickasaw Nation partnered with Rosetta Stone to create a language program for its people, bolstered by a fiber network.
The full paper can be accessed here.