Ignacio: One of America's Most
Remote Places Comes Online
Ignacio, Colorado
Ignacio, Colorado, is about as far from America's communications hubs as you can get in the continental United States. But it, too, is joining the information revolution.
Located about 25 miles from Durango, Colorado, in the remote southwest corner of the state, Ignacio is a seven-hour drive and two mountain ranges away from Denver. In 1995, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, whose headquarters is a mile north of the town limit, joined forces with the Ignacio Public Schools, Fort Lewis College, and TIIAP to create an information infrastructure that would link the tribe, the schools, and residents of the town to the Internet.
It was not easy, but Ignacio is well on its way. Ignacio's public schools, the tribal administration building, and the Southern Ute Education Center now all have their own networks and Internet connections. More than 130 people have received Internet training. In an area that had almost no Internet connections before the project began, there now are about 100 regular Internet users (not counting students) and a similar number of less frequent users. Dial-up and e-mail messages climbed from 1,453 in June 1996 when it became available to over 9,000 in October. And the community now has its own web page, providing information on everything from Ignacio town government to Southern Ute culture.
Networking Brings Economic Opportunity to Tribe
Members of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, who had been skeptical about the project, have now given networking their seal of approval by allocating $294,000 to establish their own information network to manage the tribe's gas-production and casino businesses. Tribal council members, many of whom only had typerwriters in their offices a few years ago, now use laptop computers. And to encourage the spread of computer technology among members of the tribe, the council pays half the cost, up to $1,200, for tribe members who buy computers for their personal use. In the last two years, the tribe has spent the entire $35,000 provided for such purchases, and there is a waiting list of tribal members who want to take advantage of the program.
"We're entering into the computer age," says Leonard Burch, a member of the tribal council. Technology, he adds, "has been a lot of help to us and the people we work with."
Among the most enthusiastic technology users in Ignacio is Rick Jefferson, Assistant Director of Education for the Southern Ute Indians. He works at the tribe's education center, which provides educational enrichment programs for Southern Ute children, helps older kids with their homework, and offers tutoring for students who are having trouble in school. The center also sponsors adult education, early childhood, and school-to-career programs.
To do its job well, Jefferson says, the tribal center has to keep close track what Southern Ute children are doing in school. Currently, such information is exchanged by hand along what Jefferson and other tribal members call the "moccasin network" that is, by people walking between different buildings carrying paper. Linking the school's and the education center's networks will make the job a lot easier and more efficient, Jefferson argues.
Tribe, Schools, and Businesses Invest in the Information Age
"We need to get into the twenty-first century or we'll be left behind again," Jefferson says of the tribe and its computer networking efforts.
Like many computer networking projects, the Southern Ute information infrastructure has helped pull together disparate elements of the Ignacio community. The school system, where 48 per cent of the students are Anglo and 22 per cent are Hispanic, has developed a closer working relationship with the tribe. Some teachers take their classes to the tribal center to use the computer labs, for instance. Sarah Noon, a kindergarten teacher, searches the Internet for lesson plans. Last year, she taught her students about rainforests by showing them information she downloaded including Internet sites that carried pictures and sounds from actual rainforests.
Project sponsors say that one of the key lessons learned from the Southern Ute project is the importance of enlisting support for networking from the highest levels of tribal government. At the outset, the project lagged because Tribal Council members were concerned that Internet connections would enable hackers to obtain confidential tribal information. Once those concerns were eased, the leaders agreed to support the project.
Despite the solid start, the Ignacio project has a long way to go. Noon says that only a few teachers have embraced the Internet, as yet. And while the Ignacio web page provides a lot of information about the community and its region, participants say it is difficult to enlist volunteers to update the material. Still, students now regularly drop into the tribal education center to use the Internet. E-mail continues to grow in popularity. And enthusiasts like Jefferson already are looking to new and more exciting applications of communications technology.
The tribal educator enthusiastically describes recent discussions about the creation of a fiber optic connection from Denver that would run through the Southern Ute reservation down to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Phoenix, Arizona. If that happens, Jefferson notes, "we could have teleconferencing, two-way video, telemedicine...all kinds of things that aren't possible now."
Craig Young
Project Director
(970) 247-7166
young-c@fortlewis.edu
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
Office of Telecommunications and Information Applications
Last Modified: 18 Dec 97