FCC Chairman Wheeler at National Congress of American Indians

I want to emphasize the importance of establishing a reinvigorated Tribal consultation process to address three primary goals:

• Goal number one: broadband infrastructure expansion. Getting high-speed broadband connections to every home, every business, every school and library, every healthcare provider, and every 911 center, in all corners of the country, is a top priority for the Commission. Nowhere could meeting this objective be more impactful than on Tribal lands.
• Goal number two is to free up more spectrum, both licensed and unlicensed, on Tribal lands. Increasingly, when we talk about broadband connectivity, we’re talking about wireless. We will be bringing more spectrum capacity to market, including on Tribal lands.
• Goal number three is to ensure that the diversity of broadcast voices in Indian Country better reflects the diversity of human voices in Indian Country. The groundbreaking Tribal Priority in the Commission’s radio broadcast licensing rules make a critically important, affordable, long-adopted technology a wide open opportunity for Tribal Nations.

I am happy to announce that the Commission will release a Public Notice seeking nominees from your governments to seat a reinvigorated second Task Force in the summer. The Task Force has important work, including acting as a sounding board for FCC proposals and developing additional recommendations for broadband deployment and adoption. We hope and expect that many members will recommit, but we also need more regional representation from across Indian Country, and the inclusion of more subject matter experts from new areas of Tribal government institutions. When I look at for the kind of results that are possible, a number of goals are top of mind.