“Now after COVID-19 hundreds of thousands of Indigenous kids are not at school, or were not at school for at least the first round of the pandemic, [their] education was not continuing and they weren't able to do homeschooling like maybe some kids in Vancouver are able to do, or like in urban centres across the country. The issues were present before COVID-19, and COVID-19 exacerbated those issues and created new ones,” says Williams. 

A reason why this lack of accessibility still occurs is how funds that are allotted at the government level, are dispersed.  “Thankfully, government is working to be responsive to how to flow resources to underserved communities to address this, however, the challenge is that in an effort to do that quickly, often those funds go to the incumbent service providers - the big telecommunications companies - in Canada, and this is part of why the digital divide exists.”

Williams goes on to discuss in the episode that the companies that provide internet services in Canada often do not see the “return on investment” in bringing internet infrastructure out to remote, small communities being high enough to justify building it. But because of this, these remote, but many, communities still go without access. 

For many of us with “digital privilege,” another factor that Williams mentions, the idea of not being able to access internet and some kind of device to communicate and “compute” on, whether that be a smartphone, tablet, computer or all the above, is unimaginable. Those of us with this privilege have been able to access these tools as soon as they were readily available to the general public, whether in our own homes or at least through schools and workplaces. Those of us in the Generation Z and Millennial generations have been using them most of our lives. Even before the pandemic pushed most of our lives online for the foreseeable future, education around and access to technology and the internet is required for the advancement of Indigenous sovereignty and economic reconciliation for Indigenous peoples in Canada. It is one of the (many) necessary steps to start repairing the damage that has been done to these communities.

With technology being so required now to access education, jobs and other resources to live and survive in the current global society, Williams is concerned about the intergenerational effect the current barriers to technology is having and will have on Indigenous communities.

“The reason why it’s now considered a human right, which I think is correct, is because now this is an intergenerational issue,” states Williams. “I spoke about the thousands of kids at home in K-12 and post-secondary who don’t have access to internet at home right now, so are not advancing their education perhaps the same way as students who do. But if we think about even pre-COVID, the tens of thousands of Indigenous kids who don’t have access and haven’t since they were born…It just means that the people who are designing our future which is highly technologically reliant and integrated don’t have connection to a massive amount of the population who don’t have this basic access. It is troublesome to me that we could be looking at generations of Indigenous people who haven’t had the access and won’t have the skills or the confidence necessary to succeed in post-secondary or careers that require this sort of digital literacy.” These are exactly the issues and barriers that the First Nations Technology Council is trying to eliminate, under Denise Williams’ leadership, and the leadership of many other Indigenous technology professionals and educators.