Shannon Lenz-Wall is a web designer based in Montana who made it out to San Jose for the NetSquared conference. She runs a web design service called Hawkline and volunteers with Hopa Mountain, a nonprofit organization that does capacity building with Native American communities throughout the Northern Rockies and Great Plains.

Shannon talked to me at the conference about web use and Native American youth.

Rural customers throughout the western US face near zero connectivity, Shannon told me, because most vendors do not consider it financially desirable to build the infrastructure that's needed. These communities have almost no DSL or cable internet, but are reliant on 28.8K dial up connections at best.

This means that Ajax pages, for example, are effectively unusable. Google Maps is a great service, Shannon says, but pages there too often crash or time out because of the large amount of data being transmitted. Even the NetSquared site is difficult to use on such a connection, she told me.

Some schools on Native American reservations have T1 lines, but most children there have little or not access to the web at home. Shannon would like to see an initiative to provide internet connectivity through electrical lines, as has been done in Cincinnati. Electricity itself had to be government subsidized in order for rural areas to have access to it.

Service providers also need to educate themselves about cultural issues when working with Native American communities. Shannon told me a story to illustrate this about a Microsoft created, Native American run computer lab in downtown Billings, Montana. The project aimed to provide certification in the use of software for area tribal members. Unfortunately, the lab now sits nearly empty. Shannon believes this has happened for two reasons. First, the lab was located in downtown Billings and many of the area Native Americans do not feel comfortable going there. Second, area cultures are generally not very competitive by nature. Family members sent to the Microsoft lab were presumed to be headed for certification; those who failed faced community humiliation and did not go back.

Had the lab been mobile and usable by children on the reservations, Shannon believes the program would have been much more successful.

She emphasized to me that one group of people cannot tell another group how to bootstrap themselves out of poverty - and Native Americans get told all the time. Outsiders generally don't understand Reservation communities' isolation, widespread poverty, devastating environmental pollution or cultural pride.

Shannon told me throughout our conversation that this systematic exclusion for access to the web is doing serious harm to the future of rural Native American children.

Shannon Lenz-Wall is a web designer based in Montana. To learn more about her work, visit Hawkline.com.