Insights → Rural areas' technological needs require solutions that are not readily apparent or possible from an urban perspective. Urban hand-me-down solutions are not enough. → There is no single location for the rural in computing. Rurality is diverse: It is in almost every country on Earth and so resists easy definition.

Native American communities are disproportionately affected by a number of behavioral health disparities, including higher rates of depression, substance abuse, and suicide. As mobile health (mHealth) interventions gain traction as methods for addressing these disparities, they continue to lack relevance to Native American youth. In an effort to explore the design of relevant behavioral mHealth intervention for Native American communities, we have developed ARORA (Amplifying Resilience Over Restricted Internet Access), a prototype behavioral mHealth intervention that has been co-designed with Native American youth, a community advisory board, and a clinical psychologist. In this paper, we qualitatively analyze our co-design and focus group sessions using a grounded theory approach and identify the key themes that Native American community members have identified as being critical components of relevant mHealth designs. Notably, we find that the Native American youth who participated in our focus groups desired a greater level of didactic interaction with cultural and behavioral health elements. We conclude with a discussion of the significant challenges we faced in our efforts to co-design software with Native American stakeholders and provide recommendations that might guide other HCI researchers and designers through challenges that arise during the process of cross-cultural design.

With fewer than 66% of eligible voters registered and voter turnout rates 5-14 percentage points lower than any other ethnic group, Native Americans comprise the least participatory ethnic group in U.S. political elections [42, 57, 49, 25]. While discourse surrounding Native American issues and interests has increasingly moved to social media [55, 56], there is a lack of data about Native American political discourse on these platforms. Given the heterogeneity of Native American peoples in the U.S., one way to begin approaching a holistic understanding of Native American political discourse on social media is to characterize how Native American advocates utilize social media platforms for connective action. Using a post-structural, interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, we use theories of connective action [5] and media richness [14] to analyze a Twitter data set culled from influential Native American advocates and their followers during the 2016 primary presidential election season. Our study sheds light on how Native American advocates use social media to propagate political information and identifies which issues are central to the political discourse of Native American advocates. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the bandwidth characteristics of content impact its propagation and we discuss this in the context of pernicious digital divide effects present in Indian Country.

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Researching and designing Internet infrastructure solutions in rural and tribal contexts requires reciprocal relationships between researchers and community partners. Methodologies must be meaningful amid local social textures of life. Achieving transdisciplinarity while relating research impacts to partner communities takes care work, particularly where technical capacity is scarce. The Full Circle Framework is an action research full stack development methodology that foregrounds reciprocity among researchers, communities, and sovereign Native nations as the axis for research purpose and progress. Applying the framework to deploy television white space infrastructure in sovereign Native nations in northern New Mexico reveals challenges for rural computing, including the need to design projects according to the pace of rural and tribal government workflows, cultivate care as a resource for overworked researchers and community partners, and co-create a demand for accurate government data around Internet infrastructures in Indian Country and through rural counties.