The Important and Risky Business of Creating and Supporting Native Technosocial Change Agents
Typically, I like to introduce a new topic related to our events or mission at CGEST in these monthly blogs. This month is different. On October 28, 2019, the CGEST core faculty – which include Drs. Jessica Solyom, Steve Elliott, Tara Nkrumah, Sharon Singer and myself – attended a talk given by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi at ASU. Although Dr. Kendi did not speak specifically about STEM or girls/women of color, several of his points resonated and find application to our work. He began by mentioning that racism, in particular, but any -ism, in general, has a long history of stressing one of two approaches:
Approach 1: Arguing that non-Whites are inferior due to biology (e.g. eugenics) thus such individuals and communities must be destroyed, avoided, controlled by any means necessary.
Approach 2: Believing that non-Whites’ cultural and behavioral patterns are the reasons behind their inferiority and the best way to remedy their deficits is through assimilationist methods including teaching the childlike non-White folk how to assume dominant cultural values, behaviors, and mores in order to succeed.
His remarks encouraged me to stress last month’s thought—fixating on women/girls of color as “fixable” elements does little to recognize or challenge the system. How many initiatives or funding streams have you seen that focus on upskilling girls/women of color? Providing them training to enter and persist in STEM? Ensuring they receive the professional development workshops to “lean in”?
A considerable amount of money and attention have been spent permitting researchers to pursue answers and/or to build programs aimed at fulfilling the promise of the responses. Yet, as below statistics from the National Science Foundation reveal disparity continues and actually is getting worse for some women of color:
In honor of Native American Heritage month, and its commitment to using intersectionality to guide our work, CGEST continues to pay careful attention to the historical happenings of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities. Dr. Kendi reminded us of the U.S. government’s original mantra for managing Native American affairs to “Kill the Indian [sic], but save the man.” CGEST’s work actively avoids this assimilationist approach. In fact, we actively try to consider whether, how, or in what ways technology can be leveraged to promote decolonial, anti-racist practices, services, and solutions that promote the sovereign and self-determination rights of Indigenous communities.
And, in our work, we find ourselves educating colleagues, well intended investors, and researchers. Too often I hear non-Native peoples express their belief that Native American communities actively avoid technology because it separates them from nature and the natural world. Not only is this belief untrue, failing to recognize the increasing role of technology and STEM in advancing environmental and sustainable solutions, it implicitly suggests Native American girls/women need to remove or separate their cultural selves if they are to succeed in technology because Native culture and technology cannot co-exist. This unsophisticated, misguided, and racist thinking hurts girls of color. An Indigenous woman can maintain her cultural identity and still be a technosocial change agent! Technological leaders, educators, and change agents must learn to recognize and understand this.
We work to correct this misrepresentation as well as to raise the percentages of Native American women acquiring and using STEM competencies. More work is needed as Native women are the least represented in science and engineering occupations.
Racial and ethnic distribution of U.S. residents, and of employed individuals in S&E occupations, with S&E degrees, and with college degrees: 2015
Age 21 and older.
Note(s): Hispanic may be any race; American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, white, and more than one race refer to individuals who are not of Hispanic origin.
Source(s): Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) (2015); National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) (2015), https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/srvygrads/. Science and Engineering Indicators 2018
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These data are sobering. Yet, they do not tell the entire story. Countless numbers of women of color, and particular Native women, not only use technology in innovative ways but are leading the way in innovating solutions. In 2017, Medium wrote an article highlighting the participation and leadership of Natives - and particularly Native women – in STEM. Like the innovative Native Hawaiian students Waianae High School, through its Searider Productions, Native youth and Native women are reframing deficit narratives to promote a sense of pride in their community, friends, family, and culture; educating each other and outsiders about their rich ancestry and culture; and advancing their communities with digital media.
CGEST is honored to partner with organizations, schools, and communities invested in this work. More important, we are deliberate in not measuring success by how many girls/women of color enter and persist in traditional STEM fields. To do so is simply measuring the success of too many assimilationist approaches. Instead, we gauge the impact of our work on how well girls/women of color learn to harness, innovate, create, and adapt technology to further their communities. A technosocial change agent is a disruptor and CGEST seeks to cultivate a critical mass of such individuals. Risky business, indeed.
Executive Director
Center for Gender Equity in Science and Technology
Professor School of Social Transformation
Arizona State University
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