Community resilience in First Nations includes ties to people both inside and outside the community, intergenerational communication, the sharing of stories, and family and community connectedness. This study, based on a survey of Internet users in the Sioux Lookout region of Northwestern Ontario, explores the link between social networking sites and community resilience. The region is home to some of the most isolated First Nation (indigenous) communities in Canada. Cultural and familial links between these communities are strong, yet until recent use of the Internet, maintaining regular communications to strengthen cultural ties was challenging. This study examines the links between travel and communication online, the ways in which social media are used to preserve culture and maintain communication, and the implications of social networking for community resilience.

This article discusses, from an anthropological perspective, the utilization of digital infrastructures and technologies in the geographical and sociocultural contexts of indigenous Northwestern Ontario, Canada. By introducing the case of the Keewaytinook Okimakanak Kuh-ke-nah Network (KO-KNET) it analyses first how digital infrastructures not only connect First Nations people and communities but also enable relationships between local communities and non-indigenous institutions. Second, and by drawing on KO-KNET’s homepage service MyKnet.org, it exemplifies how people appropriate digital technologies for their specific needs in a remote and isolated area. KO-KNET and its services facilitate First Nations’ self‑determined participation to regional, national, and even global ICT connectivity processes, contributing thus to the “digital de-marginalization” of Northwestern Ontario’s remote communities.

Large-scale infrastructures are typically part of development projects that are global in ambition and local in their impacts. While anthropology has a decent track record of using ethnographic methods in the study of infrastructure, it typically lacks the capacity to provoke statements or attitudes regarding larger development plans. Scenario workshops, initially developed by researchers in the field of foresight studies, turn out to be productive tools in eliciting assessments of the present by talking about possible futures. The European Research Council project InfraNorth conducted scenario workshops in two locations in Canada and Norway in 2023, in which four scenarios were presented and discussed. Apart from speculations about what the future might bring, these discussions provided ethnographic insights that went beyond what we had found before through more traditional means of ethnography. We suggest that scenarios and scenario workshops have the potential to offer ethnographic windows into infrastructural presents by talking about the future.

Indigenous people have been appropriating media technologies for decades to communicate within and outside their communities, to resist outside domination and for self-determination. This chapter traces developments in the anthropological study of Indigenous media, particularly since the 1990s when research in this field co-contributed to the widening area of media anthropology. After reviewing conceptualizations of cultural activism and social change in the context of Indigenous media engagements, it analyses the Indigenization of media by considering locally specific practices of media appropriation, global processes of identity-making and the technological and infrastructural dimension of media projects. By drawing on ethnographic examples from the anthropological literature and from the author’s fieldwork in Canada, the chapter argues that there is a strong sense of sociopolitical activism and agency in Indigenous people’s collective engagements with media. At the same time, Indigenous people’s media practices are related to mundane necessities of everyday communication, social networking, family bonding or individual self-expression. This chapter concludes that media technologies have become an important part of Indigeneity, as a global idea and as a relational practice of collective identity formation, which coexists with the sense of belonging to a distinct local Indigenous community.