<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">My friend Lisa just returned from a big trip up the West coast with her Mexican-Mormon long-distance boyfriend. She's always good for a story and conversation, so it was a treat to run into her the other day in front of the piano teacher's house, where both our daughters take lessons.</span>

Of the stories she told me as we sat on the stoop catching up, my favorite was about how she and Ricardo ended up at a gas station on an American Indian reservation, checking their email.

Lisa said they were on their way through the Redwood National Forest on Highway 101, one of those beautiful yet endless and winding two-lane highways along the West coast. Suddenly traffic, which didn't seem to exist before that moment, stopped. Completely.

After a while, people started turning off engines and getting out of their cars with coolers and camp chairs, ready to wait out the unknown delay. Eventually they learned, by word of mouth, that a big accident had taken place about five miles up the road. I love this image of news traveling along a winding road of stuck strangers without cell phone service—it's the ultimate version of the classic game "telephone".

Although there was nowhere to go (at least nowhere that could be called progress in the desired direction), Lisa and Ricardo managed to get off on a road leading to a <span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Yurok</span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;"> American Indian tribal-owned </span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">gas station, across the street from the tribe's administration offices and community center</span><span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">. They bought something cold to drink and decided they might as well dig out their laptops and get some writing done. </span>

<span style="font-family: trebuchet ms;">Suddenly, one of them realized they had a wireless connection. A miracle! They spent the remainder of their delay catching up on emails. When the highway was cleared of the accident, they packed up their computers and continued on their way through the forest.</span>

Think of being surrounded by trees that are hundreds of years old, in a place where Native Americans have lived for more than 4,000 years. Now think of sitting in that place, sending emails. Surreal.

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This whole idea of Lisa finding a wireless connection on an American Indian reservation is not only surreal, it's poetic. Lisa is part Native American herself (one-quarter Cherokee and one-quarter Canadian Indian), and her two vocational passions are technology and minority groups. When you put those loves together, in someone like Lisa, you get a person who is perfectly positioned to discover and implement ways to utilize computers to give minority kids more opportunities and more of a voice.
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Lisa moved to town from Philadelphia late last summer, and we met either through Ellen (who met Lisa and her daughter Lana at the park) or at Leal Elementary, where Saskia and Lana were in the same first grade class. (It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly how you know someone in this town.) Lisa is as sweet and generous as can be, which is the frosting on her smart and interesting cake. She got her PhD at Northwestern University from the School of Education and Social Policy, and writes things like "The case for considering cultural entailments and genres of attachment in the design of educational technologies." Take that to your nearest American Indian reservation and send an email about it.
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