Currently, Indigenous peoples are utilizing tools such as video conferencing technology, digitization of documents, and radio broadcast over the Internet. The majority of these technologies are used to preserve and promote Indigenous culture, tradition, history, and human rights advocacy. The United Nations and the International Telecommunication Union assembled the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with Indigenous people’s particular needs in mind – seeking to gain equitable access to technologies while retaining “rights, cultural identities, traditional territories, [and] resources.

Government databases collect abundant data about [Indigenous peoples] with no predetermined purpose, and publish it with little regard for context or benefit to [those people]. Instead, [Indigenous peoples] are subjected to research findings from these databanks that continue to reinforce the most negative stereotypes. As such, because colonizers are the ones with the resources to be in control of this information, the Internet, for the most part, is only a modern tool for further colonization. And, there is always the risk that others, who have no stake in Indigenous peoples integrity or survival, will circulate stories, histories, cultures, and traditions devoid of respect for the principles underlying the veracity of those principles. Although there may be reason to believe otherwise, history has shown that the stories of indigenous peoples worldwide . . . have been told and manipulated by others, only to be reduced to fantasy, novelty, myth, and untruth. Indigenous knowledge was validated, discarded, or modified to suit a strategy of colonization, conquering both geography and knowledge systems.