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Datacenter Gives Internet To 70 Percent of Navajo Nation
Nerval's Lobster writes "The Navajo Nation cut the ribbon August 13 on an $8 million data center that has been under debate and development since 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton expressed shock that a 13-year-old Navajo girl who just won a new laptop couldn't connect to the Internet. At the time that girl won the laptop in a school contest, the Navajo Nation--a 27,425 square-mile region that covers portions of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico--had barely any IT infrastructure. The incident helped drive debate among leaders of the Navajo Nation, many of whom said they believed adding telecommunications and computing facilities were secondary to other concerns for the chronically poverty stricken region. The 50,000-square-foot facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico includes 25,000-sq.-ft. of datacenter and an equal space for computer training and business incubation, according to Nova Corp., an IT services company owned by Navajo Nation and formed in 2004 to execute an IT plan to create the "Digital Navajo Nation" (PDF). The drive to get it built also helped push development of a $46 million broadband project designed to cover about half of Navajo territory with 550 miles of fiber, 32 new cell towers and upgrades to another 27. It will eventually connect more than 30,000 households and 1,000 businesses."
Just wanted to post some fact check data here. I live 10 miles from the data center, was interviewed for a position there (turned down the consequent job offer) and am friends with the data center administrator. First of all, the article is incorrect - the data center is in Shiprock New Mexico on the Navajo Nation, NOT in Albuquerque. This is a 240+ mile difference. It's a common occurance that news articles written by people outside the area tend to make. Everyone not from New Mexico thinks that Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos are the only places in New Mexico. Also, the data center was not built with grant funds. The grant funds went towards the fiber optic project. NTUA, the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, invested their own capital to build the data center. In fact, what the ariticle does not make clear is that NTUA houses and manages the data center. What makes this unusual is that NTUA is the utility for the Navajo Nation (water, sewer, electricity, etc.). Building and running a data center is a little out of their core compentencies. Having said that, however, they've done an impressive job. The data center is state of the art and well built. They have power feeds from two different bulk electric utilities, two massive backup generators, two buildings of UPSs, and a state-of-the art NOC. What they don't have, in my humble opinion, is a completely fleshed out marketing team. But then I don't know exactly what their marketing strategy is anyway. As far as being racist goes, the only comment I've seen so far which I would say is blatantly racist is the one about "every liquor store in the region" putting up a website. That's kind of harsh, and is a really bad sterotype. Again, however, that's just my opinion. This is a free country after all.
Thats funny, I thought the Apaches and Commanches were offshoots of the Sioux
Uh, no. Apaches and Commanches are quite unrelated to the Sioux (and each other), much like, say Chinese, Turks, and Tai (even though all those folks live on the same continent too). Apache is a Na-Dene language, most of the other speakers of which live in Alaska and the NW of Canada. Commanche speak a Uto-Aztecan language, all of whose speakers originally hail from either the Wetern US or NW Mexico.
The Siouan languages and cultures, by contrast were found in the central USA, roughly in the Mississippi watershed (with a couple of prominent exceptions in what is now New England). And yes, they were quite different peoples. Siouxans lived on riverbanks and were basically a settled farming people before Europeans came with their diseases and horses, making Buffalo hunting a more profitable living.
The Apache and Commanche OTOH were hunters from way back (in the Apache's case, living a bit more off of raiding nearby settled communities as well). The introduction of horses basically turned them into the New World's equivalent of the Mongols and early Turks.
They may look similar to the melanin-deprived, but they are very, very different.