Community Involvement
Equity Is Who We Are
Generosity and Willingness to Share
Equity is who we are as Indigenous peoples. Indian Country is well known for our continued generosity and willingness to share across our communal existence. Bigfoot Communications is built upon a foundation of these values of equity, sustainability, community and cultural preservation, and traditional environmental knowledge.
7-th Generation Approach
Our actions are guided by ancestral wisdom gained through careful and quiet observation, resilience, and resourcefulness to overcome adversity, ensuring our continued existence. This wisdom fuels our desire to ensure that our services and the resources that sustain them will continue to be available for those not yet born and whom we will never meet.
Our 7th-generation approach to service is a strategy for continued existence. While the triple bottom line of sustainable business operations places an equal share of responsibility on people, our planet, and our economic well-being, the 21st century has too often placed a premium on the bottom line of financial success.
We know, because our ancestors showed us, that placing our priorities of serving the community in a manner that places a premium on our relationship with the people we serve will inform our actions and result in the financial well-being necessary to support our operations. The relationship we have with the people of the Colville Reservation will offer lessons of respect and how to offer the best service across the entirety of our service area, from Hells Gate and back.
Digital Equity
Digital equity deficits have long plagued the Colville Reservation and nearly all of Indian Country. Digital equity is often defined in terms of access (how do we even connect to the World Wide Web, if the available technology cannot meet today’s needs? If the technology is not even there?), affordability (costly rural broadband infrastructure deployments, costly capable electronic devices, costly low earth orbit purchase and subscription costs), and adoption (digital skills development). Our strategy to address these deficits is to work in partnership with local community-based organizations, support existing tribal services, and make available our digital equity programs. Sharing our resources across the communities we serve honors our roots as a tribal enterprise and defines us as an Indigenous-owned and operated service.