Proposal+Feedback

It's an interesting problem to be sure, and one to delve deeper into. One of the core challenges is the cultural/political consequences of native education. Canada's has some very evil track record on this, for obvious reasons. That's something to avoid in this to be sure. Not sure access to electricity is one of them as a result. A solar bar would be beneficial for a range of people, and you're right in noting all northern communities might have some issues with passive solar, especially at certain points of the year.

The biggest problem with native education hasn't been access to Western technology, though - indeed, it's arguable that the presence of foreign technologies has been the problem. And that would include a big range of "technology" - e.g, enforcing literacy through Bible studies teaches people Western language and culture, but at the cost of destroying native cultural history and causing significant cultural confusion in the process. Technology only accelerates this process. Not much point giving natives access to solar-powered gadgets that access the Internet if all they're doing is surfing perezhilton.com all day. Nothing against Perez, but is this the ultimate cultural experience? It's a guilty pleasure for people well-versed in Western culture - does it enable or frustrate cultural development elsewhere? I think such things actually create a paucity of authentic local culture experience everywhere, regardless of your background or location. It's probably as toxic for an Inuit in Iqualit as a white trash trailer park dweller in Carrollton, GA, albeit for significantly different reasons.

That said, there are great examples of technology enabling the expression of local voice - e.g. retrieving old languages, creating Inuit programming, etc. A far better solution than merely providing access to the Internet without some sense of how and why they should use it. So, yes, probably looking into more systemic changes vs. airdropping technologies somewhere and hoping the right thing happens. Such strategies really haven't been successful, and is the biggest complaint I have against things like One Laptop Per Child. Why? Is this technology going to transform their lives? If so, how? Laptops and the Internet are content-agnostic - they provide access to things, but not necessarily any decent pathway to navigate such things. Exposure to information is one thing - how a community deals with it is another. And the native experience unfortunately shows that swamping an existing community with foreign information just creates a lot of chaos and confusion.