This study examines how Somali Bantu refugee families living in rural Mercer County, Western Pennsylvania, use internet-capable technologies (ICTs) to empower everyday life in the rural United States. Drawing on Mäkinen’s conceptualization of digital empowerment, this study frames empowerment as a process through which refugees use ICTs to cope with challenges and gain control over daily life. Using an ethnographic case study approach, the study focuses on three multigenerational Somali Bantu families (n = 17) residing in a rural farming community between November 2025 and May 2026. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and participant observation across homes, farms, and mosque gatherings, and were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings suggest ICTs play a significant role in participants’ religious, agricultural, community, and emotional empowerment. Participants used smartphones and social media platforms for online religious communication, halal farming coordination, agricultural learning, maintaining social ties, and coping with emotional stress and isolation. ICTs also supported community belonging, transnational communication, and rural adaptation. The study contributes to community informatics scholarship by demonstrating how a refugee-background farming community appropriates everyday technologies to sustain faith, livelihood, and community in a geographically isolated rural setting. Findings aim to inform policymakers, refugee resettlement agencies, and organizations serving refugee communities about the role ICTs play in rural adaptation and empowerment in the United States.
This article advances the concept of Tribal Digital Sovereignty (TDS) as a critical framework for understanding and governing the digital futures of Tribal Nations. TDS encompasses the entire digital ecosystem: infrastructure, software, policy, and human capacity. Drawing on Federal Indian Law, Indigenous governance traditions, and global debates on digital sovereignty, the article situates TDS as both a continuation of longstanding assertions of sovereignty and a necessary response to 21st-century technological challenges. To operationalize this framework, the article adapts Benjamin Bratton’s stack model to highlight how Tribal Nations can exercise sovereignty in digital spaces, for example, by building broadband networks, establishing data governance offices, and developing culturally grounded digital tools. The article concludes by calling for comprehensive strategies that integrate legal infrastructure, capacity building, and economic planning to ensure Tribal Nations are not merely users of global systems but sovereign architects of them. In doing so, it charts a path toward a Sovereign stack aligned with the long-term flourishing of Indigenous Nations in a networked world.
This special issue of the Journal of Community Informatics presents a collection of articles exploring the historical trajectory and contemporary convergence of grassroots telecommunications policy advocacy in Indian Country. The articles in the special edition posit that Tribal Digital Sovereignty (TDS) has emerged as a definitive governance framework for Tribal Nations, evolving from decades of work by scholars and practitioners at the intersection of federal Indian law, telecommunications, digital equity, and tribal self-determination. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a pivotal catalyst for this evolution, recasting broadband from a luxury to an essential lifeline and exposing deep-seated disparities in connectivity. This crisis opened an unprecedented opportunity for Tribal Nations to take a seat at the policy table and invest in infrastructure through historic federal investments through the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. These investments have allowed Tribal governments to move beyond bridging the digital divide toward creating community-led solutions shaped by sovereignty and self-determination. Despite a shifting political and funding landscape, Tribal Nations have successfully transitioned from reactive investments to proactive self-determination in the digital realm. This special issue examines TDS as an umbrella framework encompassing both Network Sovereignty—the authority over physical infrastructure—and Data Sovereignty—the governance of information and its transmission. The articles document how Tribal governments can and are actively institutionalizing long-term strategies, including the development of regulatory codes and protocols to protect governmental and other data. By tracing historical inequities alongside recent advancements, this collection highlights a foundational shift: Tribal Nations are no longer passive beneficiaries of federal policy but are the primary architects of digital futures grounded in their unique cultural, political, and legal foundations.
The history of Tribal advocacy in telecommunications policy is remarkable, yet many people are unaware of it. On Tribal lands, the connectivity gap extends beyond just access to communication technologies, including basic telephone services and now broadband. This reveals deep structural inequalities caused by limited funding, inadequate physical infrastructure, ineffective policies, lack of data, and the government's failure to meet its trust responsibilities. This article provides a comprehensive timeline, organized by decade, of Tribal advocacy in the communications, telephony, and telecommunications sectors from 1980–2020. The article also provides an overview of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) dockets and proceedings, along with responses from Tribal Nations and Tribal organizations. This forty-year span, along with the years 2020–2025 (discussed in the next article), illustrates a body of policy that demonstrates Tribal Nations’ exercising self-determination rights as outlined in their trust relationship with the United States.
This article examines federal investment in Tribal broadband deployment, from the COVID-19 era to the present day. It discusses how legislation initially enacted in response to the pandemic established programs to improve digital access and connectivity in Tribal communities. While these programs did not solve every problem, they enabled Tribes to have greater control over resources to achieve the goal of expanded broadband connectivity. This reassignment of control recognized Tribal sovereignty in ways that earlier initiatives had not, and many Tribes embraced the challenges. Future funding programs must continue to empower Tribes and not mandate how Tribes use their resources. Empowering Tribal Nations to make their own decisions and providing the tools to accomplish that is a foundational part of the federal government’s trust responsibility to federally recognized Tribal Nations.
