Review of Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country, Marisa Elena Duarte

TL;DR

Sarah Alyssa Montoya reviews Marisa Elena Duarte's *Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country*, arguing that the book offers a necessary intervention linking internet infrastructure to colonialism and settler colonialism but is weakened by a descriptive approach and thin theoretical engagement. Montoya concludes the text's "uneven development makes it difficult to appreciate Duarte's intervention."

Key findings

Montoya reports that Duarte argues there is "no totalizing discourse that can adequately address the needs of all Native communities," and that framing internet politics as "mere access" allows the settler state to "paternalistically deploy itself as a benevolent savior"; instead each community must self-govern and build ICT infrastructure reflecting its own "geopolitical ecologies and histories" (p. 43). Duarte's stated intention is threefold: integrate Native and Indigenous approaches into information studies, introduce information studies language to Native peoples and scholars, and consider how Native communities and tribal governments negotiate online representation and infrastructure creation (pp. 6–7). The book closes with a two-pronged approach: policies around Native ICTs reflecting the right to self-governance, and the decolonial potentials of information flows, with Duarte claiming a decolonial reframing "reorients the technique of applied science toward meeting the goals of tribal communities" (p. 136). Montoya's critique is that the text favors description, resulting in "sparse engagement with theory or feminist theory," selective citational practices, organizational issues, and oversimplified theorizations of sovereignty, while the interviews "provide little clarity or momentum."

Methods

This is a book review essay; no primary empirical data are collected or analyzed. Montoya situates colonialism and settler colonialism as central to the creation and maintenance of computer and internet technologies and their material infrastructures, drawing on Abbate (1999, pp. 36–38) and Wolfe (2006, p. 388). The review describes Duarte's fieldwork sites: Pascua Yaqui's KPYT-LPFM radio station and manager Hector Youtsey (pp. 38–39), KUYI Hopi Radio and station manager Richard Alum Davis (p. 46), Tohono O'odham Police Chief Joseph Delgado on a telecommunications network spanning two settler states (p. 41), plus TVDNet, the Southern California Tribal Technologies (SCTT), the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the Navajo Nation.

Limitations

The review states that Duarte's text favors a descriptive approach, engages sparsely with theory and feminist theory, cites selectively in Native studies and information studies, reiterates or oversimplifies core concepts such as sovereignty, and that its interviews provide little clarity or momentum. Evident from the text: as a book review, this piece presents no original data or systematic analysis, and its assessments rest on Montoya's reading of Duarte rather than on independent evidence.