It took Gabriela Perales three months to get internet service installed in her northeast Nebraska home. The connection was unreliable—dropping for days at a time—and weeks would pass before someone showed up to fix it. So in March she canceled it.
Perales belongs to the Winnebago Tribe, a community of about 5,000 stretched across almost 200 square miles in the Great Plains, and her experience isn’t an outlier. As a group, Native Americans are the country’s poorest— with more than twice the poverty rate of Whites—and the digital gap is also stark. Conservative estimates show more than 18% of ...