The digital divide is a canyon on American Indian reservations, where less than 50 percent of residents have phone lines and only 8 percent have Internet access.
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Most of the country’s 32 tribal colleges, located on reservations, have access to the Internet, but they lack the ultra high-speed T3 connections of most universities. “Because Indian areas are so remote and so behind, there is no impetus for companies to go in there,” said Suzette Brewer, spokeswoman for the American Indian College Fund. But last week, representatives from IBM Corp., Pacific Bell, Microsoft Corp., the Dandin Group, and Tachyon Inc. accepted an invitation to discuss the problem in Palo Alto, Calif..
Carrie Billy, executive director of the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities, said the government is trying to make investment on reservations attractive to high-tech companies. American Indians, she said, “are potential users, and a potential workforce.”
This fall, the Federal Communications Commission began financing the extension of phone service to about 300,000 American Indian households. The service costs $1 a month.
Providing Internet service will be a larger task. Located mostly on Indian reservations, where unemployment rates can reach 75 percent, tribal colleges receive $3,000 per student per year from the federal government. That’s about half what states give per student to their publicly funded colleges and universities. The tribal colleges receive no state money.