Tuesday October 12, 3:30-5:00pm

Room E51-095

2020 was a year of pandemic. It was also a time to see what I call “technological settling”: a state of technological expectancy mixed with legacies of settler colonialism. Technological settling points to how American Indians (Native Americans) bear the brunt of technological ebbs and flows. For example, in May 2020, important meetings about placing gas pipelines on Indian lands left Indian peoples unable to speak and be responded to. At the same time, American Indians were featured in first-person online games (fighting for pixelated “land”), and deaths in Indian communities related to COVID-19 outpaced deaths in other American communities. This leads to a question for our work at MIT and beyond: How do policies of land theft and dehumanizing American Indians precede or set the stage for technological innovation and entrepreneurship? This talk responds by using ethnographic examples to explain how centuries-old policies meant to annihilate American Indians have contributed to the perpetual unimportance of American Indians in several key sites of technological innovation: healthcare, environment, and media. I suggest that a re-mattering of American Indians can only occur by making American Indian peoples the centers of technological storytelling/debates and the governing agents/executives within institutions that set technology policy. While this is by no means a complete solution to settler colonialism, it leads to a more equitable fusion between Native America and the technological multiverse…a concept that I have labelled Artificial Indigeneity (AI).

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Co-Sponsored by MIT Anthropology and History at MIT