Native Americans Long ‘Left Out’ From Broadband Push for Equity

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 ...