 So, we're going to have an amazing speaker come up next, followed by a Q&A. Marina Sheehe is an indigenous futurist, consultant, NGO, CEO, speaker and author with broad experience in ITC startups, impact finance, and technology policy. She serves as the CEO of NGO Pueblo Development Commission with nearly a decade in United Nations Consultative Status and a partner with ZIA Impact, providing consulting and strategy services focused on economic development and tribal infrastructure. So come on out, Marina. Hello and good afternoon everyone. I belong to the Tewa people of the Northern Rio Grande Pueblos, I'm married into the Pueblo ZIA, and I also come from Jewish people who came to this continent by way of Spain. I'm very excited that you're all joining us this afternoon and thank you all for being here out of respect. Let me figure out how to use this clicker. Oh, there it is. Great. So I want to share with you all why. So what I just did is contextualize myself in terms of our traditional protocols. For our culture, we have to tell you who we are, where we come from, and what roles we have in this world. And so sharing that with you from a Western perspective, this is the reason I'm qualified to be speaking to you on this topic today. Alexis did a great job introducing most of my background, so I'll just share a little bit more and move on. I do serve on a number of United Nations Technology Commissions from decentralization to the UN Counterterrorism Executive Directorate. And also I'm an appointed legislative advisor by the All Pueblo Council of Governors to 20 Native sovereign nations. I've been working in startups since I built my first startup out of my dorm room in 2001 in PHP and was a self-taught programmer. I moved into technology policy after having worked with the U.S. Department of State in special projects and digital diplomacy. I founded Incubator and Accelerator in Chicago in 2012 where it was a really difficult place to have these DEI conversations and open doors. And I'm very thankful to see how much that has magnified over the years. So excellent. So, so that we start on the same page, I built this talk around some of the conversations that I've been having. And I find that a lot of people don't know who indigenous peoples are or what those words like actually mean. I think people very commonly know that indigenous means from a place. But specifically when we're speaking about indigenous peoples, this has a unique definition. There's a working United Nations definition that states that indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those that have historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the society that now prevails in those territories or parts of them. They form a present non-dominant sectors of society. This actually is not necessarily a correct phrase, but it's part of this definition. They choose to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations in their ancestral territories, their culture and ethnic identity on the basis of continued existence as peoples in existence to their own cultural patterns. For me, I have several additions and they are, you know, does this group of people retain an original identity? Do they pray in the same ways in language of their ancestors? Is their continuous community history, biospheric interaction and relationships? And does that continue post even displacement to the places that we come from? Indigenous peoples make up 5% of the global population and we're located in nearly every country on every continent with every phenotypic and skin tone representation. So there are currently 574 native sovereign nations that are federally recognized in the United States alone. I want you to know that I speak from a U.S. Indigenous perspective, but Indigenous needs are global and when we use technology to solve Indigenous challenges, that can be anywhere in the world. We also know that these, using technology to solve challenges specifically, has the highest demonstrable impact and currently, in terms of philanthropy, we only receive 2 to 0.5% of philanthropy dollars per year moving on to what is tribal sovereignty? I met a lot of people over the past few days and understanding this concept is, I think, somewhat challenging if you're not working with it on a day-to-day basis. So tribal sovereignty is the ability for Indigenous peoples to self-govern. It encompasses legal, cultural, political, and historical traditions that are a complex mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous approaches to governance. It exists as a vanguard against forced assimilation and the loss of culture due to encroachment or dominance or attempted dominance by other cultures, ethnic groups, religions, potential national identifiers, et cetera. Native American people have a separate political status in this country and tribes in what is now the United States are understood under international laws having a limited sovereignty. But this is something that we can strengthen together by assisting tribes in returning to self-sufficiency, land management stewardship, practices in traditional territories, which is land-back, and strengthening tribal economies. Tribes themselves have unique needs and histories as well as relationships to sacred and traditional geographical sites. In the United States, tribes are understood under federal definition to be permanently economically disadvantaged. So why tribal sovereignty is very critical? This is an image of something called the cultural iceberg, and it's very small on the screen. I apologize. You can Google this. It's all over the internet. But essentially, in terms of preserving and continuing our cultural life ways and advancing ourselves against biases that we are primitive or simple or limited, and we have complex cultures that have always been technologically advanced, carrying traditions of our past and to our future, we understand that these cultural life ways span tens of thousands of years in that biodiversity and cultural diversity mitigates biological risks that threaten our species as humans and all others. Indigenous-led solutions, which understand all of the separate things underneath this iceberg as opposed to what's visible in surface culture. You can see that I'm wearing some traditional garments and some modified traditional garments. But what they actually mean in terms of my culture and placement is very unique and not something that an outside person would understand right away. So there's very, very much levels to this. Indigenous-led solutions, biotechnology for exponential impact are the answer to terracide and climate catastrophe. Only Indigenous peoples with lived Indigenous experience, traditional appointment and leadership are qualified to advance and steward Indigenous peoples' knowledge, but all of our relatives here in this room and very far beyond can collaborate, support and help. Why tribal nations need support and tech is that it has outsized impacts and I can't support this enough. I have these two logos here because I want to share a story that happened during the pandemic. We received funds from the Schuster-Minn Foundation to the All-Pueblo Council of Governors in a very small microgrant, a $4,000 grant. The Schuster-Minn Foundation had been supporting frontline workers and health and other spaces and buying them lunch and, you know, $4,000 grant is lunch for 200 people. For our tribal nations, that $4,000 bought 20 Pueblos Zoom accounts and having elders who are non-Western and non-assimilative understand why they needed to move into a digital space was impossible before that point. Even at the brink of us being complete catastrophe, we were losing a lot of tribal members. We lost people that we couldn't afford to lose and we were not able to coordinate collective response across our state in New Mexico. But this $4,000 affected the lives of 60,000 people and a culture that was tens of thousands of years old and like that is such a small amount, it is such a small amount for that size of impact, but software in a tribal community or hardware in a tribal community or digital capacity building in a tribal community will always have those kinds of impacts. When we look at digital tools to increase health outcomes, Native Americans on average live 5.5 years less than Americans of all demographics. So looking at remote digital tools for diagnosis and speaking to doctors that we don't have in our communities and only come out maybe once every other week in some places, that's a really significant impact to our quality of care and the continuation of our lives. Digital tools have the ability to help us reverse attrition. Only 22% of Native Americans live on tribal lands. This forces assimilation and cultural loss with tech jobs and being able to have digitally enabled remote jobs. We're able to participate in the tech economy which has an approximately 30% above market income opportunity. Native Americans face the largest wage gap disparities, highest poverty rates and are continuously the lowest paid demographics with indigenous women making on average 53% per dollar compared to a Caucasian man in the United States. Right now we're still all struggling with broadband access. But we received the most support from federal government for broadband access through the American Rescue Plan Act over the pandemic and received $2 billion in funding which addressed about 20% of the tribal needs. So 80% of the disconnected tribes are still looking for those resources and support. But once that support got there, we also don't have any further capacity for what we should be doing to protect ourselves. In terms of providing cybersecurity, tribes have no support on this, understanding how to build digital remote economies, tribes have no understanding of this. So looking at how we can receive those opportunities, we have to understand that Native sovereign nations are not a business case. We have small rural and remote populations. We have smaller populations than cities. Some reservations have populations that are very spread out. All Native sovereign nations have lower income statistically. So for example, Google came in and did some financial skills work with some of our Pueblos. They charged tribal members for that opportunity. We know that Google has philanthropic arms and it's difficult to see when a large company like that sees our tribes as a business case for that opportunity. Google came in to one of our Pueblos and ran robotics institutes for children. It was great and children loved it and hopefully we'll have some future robotics engineers and technology professionals due to that exposure and experience. But there's no longevity to this program and it was a one off and who knows when the next thing is going to come into our tribal community like this. We also consistently received training to be essentially the digital janitors of the tech world and these rules and training create continuous disadvantage when there are free and open courses and MOOCs that our tribes should be directed to but that understanding is just not there for most tribal members. So what we need is a tech soup for tribal nations. So through the tech for sovereignty initiative plan, which we're hoping to launch fully with our partners this summer and I'm hopeful that we can dialogue either now or in the future I'm open to all of your opinions and thoughts on this. We plan to accept software and hardware donations to support tribal governments to strengthen our sovereignty for a tribally owned enterprises and entities which function as nonprofits and I think it's really hard sometimes for non-Indigenous people to understand that anything that's tribally owned redistributes back in the community and it's this beautiful synergy that you know a lot of other people could experience but because we're in tribal nations we're able to have that enterprise as nonprofit strategy. Also supporting tribal members and tribal member owned enterprises. People who live traditional lives have so much additional work it's like having a whole nother full-time job in addition to your career in addition to you know time with your family like I honestly don't know how some of our tribal members do this but being able to be more efficient and being able to be more effective through digital technologies is something that really opens us up to also participating in our culture and making sure that it continues. So we also are going to be looking to accept donations for capacity building policy and regulatory support for mutual cooperation with our local state and federal neighbors accepting in kind educational and human capital support and creating long-term sustainability for tech sector and impact plan to be support through housing this initiative in a large Indian country serving partner organization and the creation of many multilateral intergovernmental and inter-tribal task forces. We've been speaking about this with a partner I'm not able to disclose that yet but there the impact in Indian country when it comes to one of us or one of our organization spreads out across all of Indian country and it's really tremendous. So we know that tech also lowers all barriers to development with exponential impacts. So lastly but certainly not least the concept of cyber sovereignty which is something that we're also just starting to dialogue in Indian country. All native sovereign nations possess the ability to assert tribal sovereignty and cyberspace. This offers us the opportunity for native sovereign nations to negotiate cyber treaties, protect tribal citizens, our cultural intellectual property which a lot of times you know was taken without our consultation or consent and we are not able to bring back through US law systems but we're able to create that that retention in a digital space. We're able to assert government to government relationships in cyberspace and also presents a sovereign opportunity for native sovereign nations to enhance independent digital economies through our relationships with our neighbors and the enjoyment of unique and independent regulatory environments. We make our own laws in our tribal nation the sovereign nations and we can effectively be partners as it applies to you know our culture and interests to any of our neighbors. It also creates unique circumstances for the enforcement of United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous people and other anti-simulative opportunities so thank you all so much. Would you come take a seat with me? Excellent. So I have a question for you. We just have a few minutes. Thank you for the wonderful presentation. Sorry I didn't tell you in advance what my question would be. The question is we've learned a lot about the impacts of tech in our native communities but what can tech learn from us? So this is a really incredible question. Indigenous-led solutions in any tech sector are going to be unique consequently because our cultures are so radically different how we think about the world how we interact with the world the way we relate to the world in each other and we have a completely non-western perspective so anything that's going to come from Indigenous groups as a solution or as challenges to innovation are going to be unique and on their own. There's a great book by Tewa Mann from Santa Clara Pueblo named Dr. Greg Kehete called Native Science and he asserts a really unique paradigm for Indigenous innovation which if you're looking at other innovation sectors and being in San Francisco this is the epicenter for it. This is going to be something that you haven't seen before and for Indigenous people and knowing how things are within our own communities and this is just a really natural process and it's something that we can assert in any emerging technology not just ones that exist today but any to come. So everything we do has that triple bottom line of you know people and plan and sustainability and you know works like in order to work in a financial sector but you know it anything in our sustainability focus is also going to have an above-market capacity because we have statistically a 400% more success rate in stewarding biodiversity and sustainability opportunities as Indigenous people than 95% of the remaining population so it's really exciting to think about what those opportunities are but we lack the capacity and we lack the understanding and we lack the partnerships so right now we're in an exciting place where we get to build those from the ground up. So just to close us out I guess in addition to answering all the awesome calls to actions that you shared in your presentation I have been I have been bringing Native Youth actually to a lot of tech in the greater San Francisco Bay area for events and I always give them an opportunity to see themselves in that role we need to be able to get kids in those spaces so that they don't feel like they can't be there and if any of you here are in tech I would encourage you to reach out to kids at the high school level and if you are trying to recruit diverse people in tech at least as far as our Bay Area urban native population goes it can't be your sophomores at top tier universities with the 4.0 your talent is everywhere so I would like to encourage you to really rethink some of those guidelines so that you can have a more diverse workplace that actually improves everything you put out so you want to respond to that and have the final word. No I think that's a great initiative and I can't tell you how many kids from the res just need to see what exists outside of their villages and their tribal communities so they can understand what's possible you know we can we can give them opportunities for these remote MOCs and online certifications all day long but if they don't understand how that fits into the rest of the world and they've never seen it never seen it around them so it's really difficult for them to engage but we can definitely lead them down those paths and create innovation like we've never seen before. Well our time is up so let's give a big round of applause for Marina thank you so much.