Core Response 1: Thoughts on the Visibility of Indigenous Digital Labor

            

Figure 3. Shiprock Dedication Commemorative Brochure, September 6, [1969], lot X5184.2009, folder 102725169, Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.

As a woman of color, Nakamura’s article on the role of Navajo women (or the erasure thereof) in electronics assembly and manufacture was an especially compelling read for me. As a Korean woman of color, her research presents a topic of particular interest: as she mentions several times, the primary site for labor exploitation in chip manufacturing eventually shifted from “insourcing” through indigenous reservations to “outsourcing” from East Asia. But Nakamura was right in her claim that the stories of Silicon Valley rarely involve the Navajo lands. Even with my prior (albeit limited) knowledge of the global labor economies behind circuit building and their implications in Korea, I was completely unaware of the narrative of the indigenous workers who were involved.

            In discussing the politics of identity constructed as a digital resource, Nakamura states, “The notion that Indians were ‘inherently flexible’ both racializes and precedes the idea of flexible labor that informs much of the research on globalization in the information age.” It took me a while to fully digest the rich implications of this statement: the “inherent flexibility” that is traditionally associated with indigenous groups predates the concept of flexible labor discussed in the global economic sphere — yet still remains largely undiscussed. The difference here is that the flexibility of labor is thought to be attached to the innate racial and gendered identity of the native workers, rather than considered as a circumstance or a grown feature. The erasure of the Navajo narrative from the digital operation parallels the erasure of their presence in the academic circuit, socially and economically.

            I found that the photos that Nakamura pulled from primary sources to include in the article are visually representative of such politics. For example, in Figure 3, an indigenous woman gazes at the camera while working. The shot focuses on her and her technology, the microscope. The male supervisors in the frame are out of focus with their backs turned away from the lens and toward the labor. The camera grants the reader of the brochure a clear access to the worker and her labor, while refusing to allow a similar spectacularization of the men. The Navajo woman as a simple “digital resource” is doubly objectified here: both by the reader and by her white male supervisors. Perhaps more importantly, her eyes hesitantly inspect an unknown audience behind the lens; although we can see her, she is never able to see us.

And even with this privilege to see, most of us still render her invisible; maybe because, as Haraway said, “some must labor invisibly for others to feel, if not actually be, free and empowered through technology use.” Then, the inevitable question: at what cost does freedom and empowerment come, and to whom do they belong?