Getting scientific collaboration with indigenous leadership “right” in a way that respects Native communities’ autonomy and dignity can improve the work and serve as a template for working with indigenous and other populations worldwide, said Al Kuslikis at the final plenary session of the PEARC23 conference in Portland, Oregon. Kuslikis, Senior Associate for Strategic Initiatives at the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, described AIHEC’s approach in his presentation, “Tribal Colleges and Community-driven Computing,” on July 27, 2023. 

The annual PEARC conference series provides a forum for discussing challenges, opportunities, and solutions among the broad range of participants in the research computing community. Building on the successes of the past, the series aims to integrate and meet the collective interests of that growing community. The theme of PEARC23 is “Computing for the Common Good.”  

Working with Tribal Colleges 

The AIHEC’s recipe for healthy working relationships stems from its close relationship with the nation’s 37 tribal colleges, Kuslikis said. AIHEC was established in 1973 by TCUs for TCUs (Tribal Colleges and Universities ). These institutions hold a special place in Native history, he explained. 

“The whole point of starting a tribal college was that, at the time, there was so little higher educational opportunity for tribal high school graduates,” he said. So called “mainstream” institutions were unprepared to provide support for students to succeed in an unfamiliar and in many ways challenging educational environment. “It started out as an opportunity for young people to pursue higher ed goals in their own community.” 

In addition to offering education programs, tribal colleges became important resources for addressing tribal concerns. In addition to workforce development programs, TCUs are focusing on economic and community development, and research in locally relevant areas such as public health, social and environmental science. have become strengths among many TCUs.   

“TCUs became a real cornerstone of tribal communities,” Kuslikis said after the presentation. “They’re a key component of tribal efforts to maintain and foster traditional culture and language.” 

Guiding Metaphors 

Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and in response to the dizzying pace of technological advancement worldwide, AIHEC is entering a critical new phase of the tribal college movement, Kuslikis said. A participatory design approach, in which new technologies are adapted to tribal needs and requirements, finding, and working with partners — particularly indigenous communities — worldwide is emerging as an important component of the organization’s strategy. 

Kuslikis expanded on the tribal colleges’ cultural foundations by describing a common feature of most campuses — a “guiding metaphor,” that encapsulates a traditional narrative that defines the institution’s philosophy and ethics. In the case of the Diné College (Navajo), it’s the corn stalk, which features deeply in Diné spiritual practices. The college’s administration, library and dormitory buildings are all in the shape of a hogan, so that campus architecture resonates with the cultural foundations. 

“[This symbol] conveys in a kind of shorthand what the tribal college is all about, and in a sense, what the tribal community is all about,” he said afterward. 

With 35 colleges at more than 90 sites in 15 U.S. states, drawing students from over 30 states, the tribal college community is both expansive and diverse. Nonetheless, these varied institutions have found common ground in the shared Native experience and common problems facing their societies. 

A Data-driven Future 

Federal funding, including the National Science Foundation and the USDA land-grant institutions program, has helped fuel significant improvements on campus and wider engagement with partners in research ranging from agriculture and forest ecology to public health issues. 

An important and new dimension to these partnerships has been through cyberinfrastructure. Funding from the NSF’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program enabled the AIHEC CI team to conduct a review of the status of CI at the TCUs,  which involved a series of site visits to tribal colleges to assess the physical and human infrastructure needed to support CI applications,  of the colleges’ readiness to incorporate research computing and data science applications in their research and education programs. . 

The site visits’ findings were in many ways encouraging, Kuslikis said. Many campuses already had average connectivity that was comparable to that of four-year colleges nationally. Still, issues with low connectivity at high prices hobble the growth of CI at some campuses, a common challenge with rural campuses of all kinds. The survey, though, and engagement of the colleges in a discussion about CI and the growing importance of research computing and data science helped serve as a critical first step in establishing better CI and opened high performance computing collaborations both with other tribal colleges and colleges and universities elsewhere in the U.S. 

Data Sovereignty 

A vital component in making collaborations work is a framework for what constitutes ethical engagement with tribal communities for non-local institutions. “Data sovereignty” must be at the core of these engagements, Kuslikis said. This is the idea that tribal data needs to be owned and controlled by the tribe in which it originated, with full protections in place for individuals and tribes that choose to participate. 

As an example of a project involving data sovereignty, he cited the Discover program at Navajo Technical University, a partnership with Northern Arizona University. Addressing distributed sensing and computing in sparse environments, it’s a proof of concept that the IoT can be harnessed to perform environmental modeling that protects privacy and data sovereignty in Native communities. A different example can be seen, he noted, in a project being developed with a range of partners to design machine language models using Native languages, a project aimed at preserving and revitalizing those languages that has data sovereignty implications given that much of the language corpus to be used in the project can involve culturally sensitive content 

Another project Kuslikis mentioned was the Indigenous Innovation Network, a tribal college-based manufacturing network employing 3D printing to optimize locally generated solutions for community needs. The project lead is Navajo Technical University with Arizona State University as a primary partner. The IIN is envisioned to engage small scale manufacturing operations in supply chain networks, creating opportunities for revenue-generation, job creation, and most important, opportunities for young people to identify locally-producible solutions to address local needs. 

“The whole idea [is] democratizing innovation,” he said. 

Ultimately, Kuslikis argued, collaboration with tribal colleges and tribal communities more broadly is best accomplished using the “Six Rs” of indigenous research practice: relationship, relevance, respect, reciprocity, responsibility, and representation. 

“[We need to] focus on relationships,” he said. “Everything is connected.” Ensuring that all members of a collaboration — including local communities, researchers, and funders — share standing, and voice is critical for self-organized, locally-driven adaptive projects that feed the emerging global knowledge ecosystem necessary to strengthen and inform local resilience efforts world-wide.