The tech we pass down

My niece asked me recently if she could watch me code.

She is eleven years old. She sat cross-legged on the floor beside my desk for about twenty minutes before the novelty wore off and she wandered back to her book. But I keep thinking about those twenty minutes. Nobody sat next to me when I was eight and showed me that this was something I could do. I had to figure that out much later, in a much more roundabout way.

That is the gap we are trying to close. It turns out that closing this gap is connected to everything else we do at chuchua.tech.

Why "sustainable tech" means more than solar panels

When people talk about sustainability and technology, they usually mean energy use: server farms, carbon footprints, or the rare earth metals in our devices. Those are real concerns, but they are not the ones keeping me up at night.

What I think about is institutional sustainability. I think about the quiet crisis of communities building a deep dependency on systems they do not own, cannot repair, and cannot escape.

We have seen it happen too many times. A government program rolls out a shiny new platform for child and family data. The community gets trained on it. Years pass. Then the contract ends, the company gets acquired, or the politics shift. Suddenly, there is no technical support, no documentation, and the community is left with a locked system full of irreplaceable records. The technology was never really theirs to begin with.

Sustainable tech means designing every project with an exit strategy that isn't an exit. What happens to this system in five years when we are not the ones running it? If the answer is "it breaks and knowledge is lost," then we need to rebuild the question from the ground up.

Mentorship: The pipeline of people

The most important infrastructure project an Indigenous tech shop can run is its pipeline of people. Not servers. Not software. People.

Right now, when a Nation needs technical help, the default is to hire outside consultants or engage external vendors. There are valid reasons for this because local capacity is genuinely limited and technical expertise takes time to build. But every time that happens, there is a hidden cost beyond the invoice: the knowledge leaves when the consultant does, and the community stays dependent.

The alternative is harder and slower. It means investing in young people from the community who are curious about technology. It means treating mentorship as a long-term infrastructure commitment, not a side project. It means making space for kids to sit next to you while you work, even when they wander off after twenty minutes.

Neil and I both carry the awareness of how different our paths could have been with different early signals. Indigenous representation in tech is still shockingly low. That is not inevitable. It is a consequence of choices, and it can be changed by making different choices.

At chuchua.tech, we are trying to be intentional about those choices: taking time with young people who are curious, being visible and explicit about what we do, and making it clear that software engineering, network design, data governance, and UX work are needed careers right here on Simpcw territory.

Want to help us build internal tech capacity for your community? We are neighbours who know how to build this infrastructure, and we work collaboratively. Let's start a conversation.

Reach out to us here or email us directly at hello@chuchua.tech.