The first Intertribal Space Conference

From November 15 to 17, 2022, the first Intertribal Space Conference was held at the Frisco Center in Clinton, Oklahoma. I was there.

The stated goal was to bring the space industry and tribal leaders together and form partnerships that were good for both. The framing that stayed with me was space as a right of Indigenous self determination. Not tribes being consulted about somebody else’s space program, but tribes deciding for themselves what part of this they want.

Oklahoma is not where most people expect a space industry. It is where thirty-nine tribal nations, a spaceport, and the flattest usable land in the country happen to occupy the same map, and the conference existed because somebody noticed that combination was worth convening around.

Dan Hawk and Robin Hawk put the conference on, and iGO owes them for it.

Dan is Oneida Nation, Iroquois Confederacy, and Principal Scientist of the Intertribal Space Agency. He was a nuclear reactor operator on fast attack submarines in the Navy and a power plant operator before he came to aerospace. Working with the Wisconsin Space Grant he co founded the First Nations Launch and the Tethered Aerostat Program, and later supported tribal college satellite work including BisonSat in 2015. In March 2022 he addressed the United Nations Legal Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

The theme he set for the conference was AIM for the Moon, and the substance of it was Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge sitting alongside satellite technology and space policy rather than underneath it.

He and Robin convened a first of its kind conference in a town of nine thousand people and got the space industry to come to it.

At the Intertribal Space Conference sign — At the sign, Clinton, Oklahoma, November 2022.

With Dan Hawk at the conference — With Dan Hawk, who put the conference on with Robin Hawk.

At the conference sign — With Emmy Jewell, aviation professor, professional pilot and human factors researcher.

I met Craig Smith there, and toured Infinity One, Oklahoma's spaceport at Burns Flat, for the first time. A 13,503-foot runway on the high plains, built for an aircraft program that ended, waiting for whatever came next.

At the spaceport sign for the first time — The spaceport sign, first visit.

With Craig Smith on the runway at Burns Flat — With Craig Smith on the runway.

Sunset on the runway at Burns Flat — Sunset on the runway.

Thirteen months later, iGO became a tenant.