When COVID-19 forced schools online in the spring of 2020, Madonna Peltier Yawakie was already working in rural Montana, helping the Blackfeet Nation build its broadband network.
Students had been sent home with laptops, but they had no connections where they lived. Yawakie recalled seeing cars lined up outside tribal government offices and casinos so children could pull a Wi-Fi signal for school.
"The kits, I think they were called jet packs that were provided by a large wireless company," Yawakie said. "But there was no service to a lot of these homes where the kids lived."
Yawakie, though, had been working for two decades at that point helping to build Wi-Fi networks and digital connections on tribal lands.
She founded Turtle Island Communications, known as TICOM, in 2001 with her husband and business partner, Mel Yawakie, an electrical engineer. The company helps tribes design, fund and build infrastructure that big national carriers have long declined to extend to reservations.
Their company is part of a quiet, national success story — a boom in Native entrepreneurs. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the number of Native American-owned firms nearly doubled between 2007 and 2020, growing at more than twice the rate of American business overall.
‘We can have ideas and make those things happen’
Yawakie grew up on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in north-central North Dakota. Her father was a trapper and served on the tribal council. She traces her sense of possibility back to the family kitchen table.
"On Saturday mornings, our dad would talk. It was like a prayer, like a blessing that we have our brains, we have our hands, and we have our feet, and we’re blessed in that we can do things," Yawakie said. "We can have ideas and make those things happen."
She said her mother also shaped who she would become. She said her mother worked as a cook at the local Head Start program for 26 years.
"She was my role model about women working and taking care of their family," Yawakie said.
Yawakie carried her parents’ lessons to North Dakota State University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in business administration and later a master's in community and regional planning. Her future husband, Mel, an electrical engineer, also studied at NDSU.
Mel went to work for the regional phone company, and Yawakie joined the company nine months later, working in a different division. In a position she helped create, she served as a tribal-nation marketing manager, working with roughly 120 tribes across the company's service area west of the Mississippi.
The early break for TICOM came from tribal leaders willing to bet on a small, Native-owned firm in a sector dominated by giants.
"There weren't a lot of Indian businesses that said we do telecommunication, engineering and technical consulting and we can help you to make services better on your reservation," Yawakie said. "I really appreciated the tribes that hired us because they did that because they believed what we said we could do."
On one early project, the incumbent phone company on a large reservation told Yawakie its tribal customers used a lot of long-distance services because they liked it.
"It wasn't about liking it," she said. "It was about not having any options."
A working paper from the Center for Indian Country Development examined the differences in internet access, connection speeds, and prices between households on tribal land and households just off it to try and explain the gaps in service.
The research found that the usual reasons given for rural internet shortages — distance from cities, rough terrain, and low population density explain only part of it. The rest reflects how tribal land is legally held and how past federal broadband programs were ill suited to meet the needs of tribal nations.
In late 2020, Congress created the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program, the first federal program built specifically to fund tribal broadband infrastructure, roughly $3 billion allocated in two rounds.
The result is that the gap between tribal lands and the rest of the country has narrowed since the pandemic.
In 2017, about 27 percent of homes on reservations had no internet at all, according to data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank's Center for Indian Country Development. By 2022, after federal pandemic-era investment, that share had fallen to roughly 15 percent.
‘They control their destiny’
Yawakie argued that the money should be used to build infrastructure that serves Native people instead of running lines onto Native land on someone else's behalf. "That is a form of economic development," she said. "It employs their own people. They control their destiny."
At Blackfeet Nation, the tribe did exactly that, buying the telephone exchange that serves much of the reservation outright in 2020.
At the time, the phone company that served Browning, the reservation’s main town, "was really focused on modernizing other exchanges,” said Mike Sheard, the former general manager of Siyeh Communications, the Blackfeet Nation's tribal broadband company. “They probably would have gotten to Browning eventually, but nobody knew when."
Sheard was there when Yawakie arrived. He recalled students driving into Browning to find a Wi-Fi signal. Some pulled up outside the library and worked from their cars. Some drove to a friend's house, sometimes miles away.
Yawakie's advocacy for the reservation to control its destiny helped drive the purchase, he added.
A report on broadband in Indian Country from the Urban Institute, co-authored by Tomi Rajninger and Amanda Hermans, calls this kind of ownership a form of digital sovereignty — the idea that tribes design and control their data networks.
The report found federal programs have funded the build but not the upkeep. That’s another gap that tribes and their consultants are now organizing to close.
But federal money, even at unprecedented levels, hasn't matched the demand. In the last round of tribal broadband grants, tribes asked for more than 2.5 times what was offered.
The work ahead, Yawakie said, is the upkeep of tribally owned networks. Tribal broadband providers don't yet receive the same federal cost support that sustains rural phone companies and networks.
"It's time to start knocking at the FCC," she said of the Federal Communications Commission. "We need to have access to that funding too."
Yawakie said when she first heard the term digital sovereignty roughly 15 years ago, it referred to whether tribes owned the infrastructure their data ran through.
As data centers expand, as networks gather more information, and as artificial intelligence raises new questions about who controls data, the meaning of the term has changed.
For tribal governments and tribal health-care facilities, she said, the distinction between public and legally private data is becoming as critical as the physical lines that connect it all.
"Who owns the data that we have?" she said. "Who owns our ideas?"
The Upper Midwest Newsroom is a public media collaboration between Wisconsin, North and South Dakota, and Minnesota, made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
