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Indigenous Circuits

By Lisa Nakamura |<br>January 02, 2014

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The Internet and computing have become an absolutely integral part of everyday life. Some would say too much so. As debates about whether we are too chained to our digital devices continue to flourish, historians and other humanists find themselves asking different questions. Where did these devices come from, whose labor created them, and what social and cultural forces collided to make their creation and adoption possible? Scholars of digital media and the digital humanities are starting to delve more deeply into the history of computer culture, looking for parts of the story that may have been neglected, buried, or otherwise left out of existing accounts of Silicon Valley and the rise of the Internet.

I am a professor of digital media at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where I teach in the American Culture and Asian Pacific Islander Studies Department, and the Screen Arts and Cultures Department. I have published two books on how people of color were represented in the text-only Internet of the nineties as well as the more visual Internet of the 2000s. The artifacts I have studied have all been digital ones, such as chatrooms, websites, and MMO’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing games) such as Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

Figure 1: William B. Shockley (1910-1989), © Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.

For my latest book project I wanted to take a different research path and became interested in the history of people of color as workers in Silicon Valley’s computer chip industry. Stanford University’s Special Collections and University Archives is home to boxes of both organized and unorganized material on William Shockley, a towering figure in the history of Silicon Valley. Shockley was best known for having co-invented the transistor with Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, and his story has been covered in fine histories such as Hoddeson and Riordan’s Crystal Fire: the Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age. However, I was less interested in Shockley as the “Father of Silicon Valley” and more interested in Shockley’s later years, when he became a very public advocate of scientific racism, also known as eugenics.

Just as the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. was gaining traction, Shockley loudly and publicly espoused the claim that African Americans were less intelligent than white Americans. He hardly could have chosen a worse time to advocate this position. His lectures on eugenics at Stanford were picketed by student activists. Shockley denied charges of racism, citing data that he interpreted to mean that Asians and Jews were more intelligent than white Americans. This claim mollified nobody, and despite having used his position in the American Academy of Sciences to give a series of unpopular and unwelcome lectures on the virtues of eugenics, he attracted few followers. The sperm bank that Shockley opened to distribute the sperm of Nobel Prize winners free of charge to women interested in improving the race attracted no donors other than Shockley himself.

Despite his shortcomings, Shockley was a brilliant scientist and an influential entrepreneur. Shockley was as well known for being a legendarily poor manger, as he was a masterful hand at hiring the best talent. I was curious to see whether his opinions influenced his hiring decisions, and by extension, those of other CEO’s in Silicon Valley’s formative years. Could it be possible that the Asian “model minority” stereotype, and the scarcity of African American and Latinos in the computer industry, might have something to do with hiring practices based on opinions like Shockley’s? Could he have had a hand in stacking the deck for and against racial groups that he thought were inferior or superior? Might Shockley’s loudly espoused racism have deepened the “digital divide” and prevented the computer industry from being more diverse?

I’ll never know, because at Stanford I came across a box of materials that would change the direction of my research entirely. This box contained Fairchild corporate newsletters and annual reports for shareholders that depicted Navajo women bent over microscopes soldering together integrated circuits. I had no idea that indigenous people in the U.S. had played such an important role in the early history of computing devices. As an ethnic studies scholar I had some knowledge about Native American history, but I had never heard or imagined that such a thing could have existed. It flew in the face of all my knowledge about Silicon Valley and racial minorities. It became clear that this was my next project.

Figure 2: Ribbon cutting at Fairchild Building Dedication, Shiprock, New Mexico, September 8, 1969. Image courtesy of Northern Arizona University, Cline Library Special Collections and Archives, Nakai, Raymond Collection.

I learned that from 1965-1975 the Fairchild...