Dispatches From Eeyou Istchee: Cree Networks, Digital, and Social Inclusion

Abstract

This article offers a fragmentary, partial history of the successes and challenges the Cree of Eeyou Istchee have encountered as they’ve developed the capacity to offer their region and communities a range of traditional, analogue, and digital services through the development and maintenance of different yet interconnected networks. Using social construction of technology (SCOT) and social shaping of technology (SST) theories as a framework, these dispatches offer a glimpse of the complexity and layeredness of two Cree networks as they come into contact and/or overlap with those of extractive colonialism, Canadian settler policies, and traditional Cree law and policy.

Keywords

• digital inclusion
• digital inequity
• indigenous networks
• settler‐colonial communications policy