Researching and designing Internet infrastructure solutions in rural and tribal contexts requires reciprocal relationships between researchers and community partners. Methodologies must be meaningful amid local social textures of life. Achieving transdisciplinarity while relating research impacts to partner communities takes care work, particularly where technical capacity is scarce. The Full Circle Framework is an action research full stack development methodology that foregrounds reciprocity among researchers, communities, and sovereign Native nations as the axis for research purpose and progress. Applying the framework to deploy television white space infrastructure in sovereign Native nations in northern New Mexico reveals challenges for rural computing, including the need to design projects according to the pace of rural and tribal government workflows, cultivate care as a resource for overworked researchers and community partners, and co-create a demand for accurate government data around Internet infrastructures in Indian Country and through rural counties.

In the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, a record number of Native American candidates ran for office at all levels of government. To better understand how these 104 candidates intersected with Indigenous political issues and movements to increase Native American voter turnout, we study 723,269 tweets about or by these candidates and 15,476 tweets associated with the #NativeVote movement between October 6, 2018 and February 5, 2019. We use a mixed methods approach to identify issues that emerge in the Native Candidates data set, including issues of representation and protean usage of the "Make America Great Again" hashtag #maga. When examining the feeds of selected candidates, we find that there can be a disconnect between the issues that candidates align themselves with on social media and the issues that they are associated with by others. We also find evidence of Indigenous issues spanning a vast political spectrum and being coupled with other issues in different ways by different candidates and audiences. Finally, we examine the intersection between Native American candidates and the\#NativeVote movement to discover emergent issue networks, including networks around voter suppression and Indigenous political action. Critically, we discuss how our interdisciplinary Indigenous feminist approach to social media analysis illuminates issues of marginalized communities in both a systematic and inductive manner that allows us to discover new patterns and issues with limited a priori knowledge about a complex system.

With fewer than 66% of eligible voters registered and voter turnout rates 5-14 percentage points lower than any other ethnic group, Native Americans comprise the least participatory ethnic group in U.S. political elections [42, 57, 49, 25]. While discourse surrounding Native American issues and interests has increasingly moved to social media [55, 56], there is a lack of data about Native American political discourse on these platforms. Given the heterogeneity of Native American peoples in the U.S., one way to begin approaching a holistic understanding of Native American political discourse on social media is to characterize how Native American advocates utilize social media platforms for connective action. Using a post-structural, interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, we use theories of connective action [5] and media richness [14] to analyze a Twitter data set culled from influential Native American advocates and their followers during the 2016 primary presidential election season. Our study sheds light on how Native American advocates use social media to propagate political information and identifies which issues are central to the political discourse of Native American advocates. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the bandwidth characteristics of content impact its propagation and we discuss this in the context of pernicious digital divide effects present in Indian Country.