[1st-mile-nm] Sovereignty Is More Than a Designation, It Is a Responsibility: Brian Tagaban - ISOC Blog

[Richard Lowenberg]

The latest Internet Society blog features an interview with Brian 
Tagaban with great photo (a subscriber here), who moderated the 1st-Mile 
Institute co-organized Indigenous Connectivity Summit, held in Santa Fe 
last Nov.

RL
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Sovereignty Is More Than a Designation, It Is a Responsibility

By April Froncek
Managing Editor

https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2018/05/sovereignty-is-more-than-a-designation-it-is-a-responsibility/

The Internet can provide access to healthcare, education, and economic 
opportunity, but many indigenous communities face challenges to Internet 
access and inclusion. Brian Tagaban, Director of Government Policy at 
Sacred Wind Communications and former executive director of the Navajo 
Nation Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, is at RightsCon this 
week – the world’s leading conference on human rights in the digital age 
– to discuss the digital divide in indigenous communities in North 
America. He’s there as an Internet Society fellow and joined by other 
fellows Bill Murdoch, an IT specialist at the Manitoba First Nation 
School System and the First Nations Health & Social Secretariat of 
Manitoba, and Madeleine Redfern, the mayor of Iqaluit in Nunavut, 
Canada.

We spoke to Tagaban at the first Indigenous Connectivity Summit. The 
event was the start of a critical conversation about how indigenous 
communities can connect themselves to the Internet on their own terms. 
He detailed the time, diligence, and effort required to build a 
regulatory framework, and hoped that other Summit participants could 
“see how things are possible, celebrate success stories, share those 
success stories so that they can be built upon, and gain exposure to the 
political circumstances, social circumstances, geographic circumstances” 
that other communities faced. With Tagaban’s extensive experience with 
telecom regulation, he was hopeful that indigenous communities could 
develop their own effective and informed means of regulation.

“In my work with the Navajo Nation, I was privileged to travel the 
world, learning other regulatory regimes, exploring the concept of 
sovereignty. Sovereignty is more than a designation, it is a 
responsibility. When I was on an international stage, I realized that 
our nation, the Navajo Nation, is young. We’re infants in this game.”

“With a diligent effort, an honest effort, an effort that is conducive 
to your neighbors, you can have a regulatory regime that can meet the 
needs of your community.”

Closing the digital divide is a matter of global responsibility. We all 
must work together to bridge the digital divide and to foster an 
inclusive digital society. We must work together to #SwitchItOn     
https://www.internetsociety.org/shapetomorrow/switchiton/ .


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Richard Lowenberg, Executive Director
1st-Mile Institute     505-603-5200
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504,
rl at 1st-mile.org     www.1st-mile.org
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