Smoke Signals Were Cool, Anyway

Typically fouled up service by our government is cutting off internet service to the Navajo Nation because ... they live on a reservation. Remember, that isn't their idea, it was the government's way of treating the natives of the country we wanted to take from them.

Finding that they contracted with OnSat, a satellite service, because there weren't enough telephone lines for another service, your government at work/play decided they had violated their obligation to find the most effective and cheapest service. Nothing in the contract seems to relate to a service's being actually obtainable to be effective and cheap.

The thousands of Navajo Nation residents who rely on the Internet to work, study and communicate across their 27,000-square-mile reservation will be out of luck Monday, if their service provider shuts access as planned.

"It's going to be a sad day," said Ernest Franklin, director of the tribe's Telecommunications Regulatory Commission.

A tribal audit last year revealed that Utah-based provider OnSat Network Communications Inc. may have double-billed the tribe, and it raised questions about how the tribe requested bids for the Internet contract.
(snip)
The USAC told Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. in a March 28 letter that it is withholding money for OnSat for 2006-07 because of the possible overbilling and because the tribe didn't comply with federal rules that require it to select the most cost-effective service or equipment through a fair, open and competitive bidding process.

The USAC asked the tribe to prove OnSat provided the service it is billing for and has not overbilled.
(snip)
Each Navajo chapter received a grant for computers and Internet access from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Native American Access to Technology Program in 2000. But it wasn't possible to establish dial-up access -- or create a wireless grid -- because the reservation largely lacked wired telephone service.

So the tribe's Division of Community Development contracted with OnSat in 2001 to provide satellite Internet service to the chapter houses -- even though satellite Internet technology is costly, slow and unreliable.

I guess you could say they are being scalped.

Isn't it amazing that our government continues to misadminister the original owners of this country? We really keep finding ways to make fools of ourselves in Indian affairs.

I guess I feel personally somewhat responsible for some of the misapprehension, because my father was the government appraiser who decided the price our government would offer for a small tribal town so that nearby Lake Texoma could be put in. The story I always was told about that relocation held that the chief of the tribe took the money and bought a hearse so that his wife could be driven around town lying down. Chuckles accompanied the story, since of course this showed that the natives of this country just weren't like us - and we were better.

I believe I'll go plant some more good native greens, so that when our great system makes it impossible to afford things that we ship using fossil fuels, I won't starve. I should plant a smidgen of fish with them, for fertilizer, remembering Squanto.

Maybe I could start learning smoke signals, for when our energy grid fails.

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Sadly, the ugly head of rank bias is raising itself over a gay candidate who has served his community well, but now, ooops, somebody decided that being gay was something they ought to punish.

This is embarrassing.

All this time I've been pounding the tom-toms about how Texans are unfairly stereotyped, how this area isn't the festering hive of bigotry that some would have you believe.

We are reasonable and enlightened people, I have said. The notion that we're a bunch of intolerant backwoods barbarians is an imbecilic stereotype, I have said.

Then somebody reportedly goes and wages an ugly, anonymous e-mail campaign against a Plano City Council candidate because he happens to be gay.

And somebody on the Collin County Commissioners Court suddenly and inexplicably wants to review the candidate's job performance as head of a successful court program there.

Well, thanks a lot for making a liar out of me! Thanks for making me look like a doofus!

Maybe we need to institute smoke signals in Plano, where civilization seems to have gone into hiding.