The Beginnings

National Indian Telecommunications Institute, NITI, was founded in 1995 as an answer to the lack of cultural programming in Indian Country. The goal of founders of NITI was to use the Internet to preserve and enliven cultural aspects of Native American life. This included language and cultural preservation as well as education, economic development and self governance. NITIs goal is to provide the tools and training necessary to Native Americans so they might create their own literary, artistic and educational content themselves, in their own voice.  For too long Native American have been studied and written about by Non-Indian Academics and Clergy.  Native Americans want to correct false information and represent ourselves in our own voice and our own style.

Half of the total United States Native American population lives on remote and isolated reservations in rural America.   Educational, literary and artistic services available to urban Americans were not available on inaccessible reservations.  Those at NITI soon learned that the dream of delivering museum exhibits, concerts and music events to reservations via the Internet was blocked by the fact that most reservation Indians were lacking not only internet connections but also Plain Old Telephone Service, POTS. NITI soon became an advocacy agency as well as a content provider.

The National Science Foundation made an initial grant to NITI to train reservation teachers how to make Culturally Appropriate Curriculum.  A highly successful model for teaching classrooms teachers of Native Americans was created by NITI under this grant. NITI trained classroom teachers of Indian children from Maine, North Carolina, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, and Hawaii. Model lessons created in this program can be viewed at the NITI web site. www.niti.org

In conjunction with the Comanche Tribe, NITI has created an Interactive CD of the Comanche dictionary. The model used is sought out by other tribes. NITI trained every tribe in New Mexico to create their own Virtual Museum. As each of these projects was completed, more tribes from farther away requested the same and similar programs in their area.   As technology progressed, video conferencing was better able to be delivered over the internet. NITI hoped that cultural content development training could be delivered over the Internet

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