TRIBAL GATHERING

Hauling heavy bags of concrete and long pieces of metal up dangerous rocky mountain ridges is a labor of love for Michael Peralta, a member of the Rincon Indian Reservation.

From his headquarters about an hour outside of San Diego, Peralta is working to connect 18 different remote Native American reservations — spread out in a 150-mile area full of rocks, trees, mountains and deep valleys — to the Tribal Digital Village Network, an 802.11b Wi-Fi network funded by a $5 million grant from Hewlett-Packard but owned by all 18 tribes.

“There is a big gap and division between the tribes, even though we're all related to each other,” Peralta said. “We can start a news bulletin and calendars so people know when there's a powwow, a funeral or a youth gathering going on.”

Many of the 7600 people on the reservations don't have basic telephone service, let alone dial-up Internet access. But several tribal learning centers are already connected to the 802.11b network through the initial efforts of UC San Diego, whose High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network team was awarded a $2.3 million, three-year research grant in 2000 from the National Science Foundation to evaluate wide-area wireless networks for research and education.

UC San Diego is now transferring the project to TDVNet. Peralta and Linton recently finished connecting the northern clusters of reservations in San Diego County, which stretches from the California/Mexico border into Riverside County — an area requiring 4.5 hours of driving time to visit. They have six reservations still to go.

It won't be easy. Because many of the reservations sit deep inside valleys — the La Jolla Reservation, for instance, spans deep valleys of 2000 feet to open mountain ridges of 5100 feet — obtaining a proper line of site is often a tricky task. Although the HPWREN team last year created a self-contained mountain relay powered by solar arrays and batteries for La Jolla because there weren't any line-of-site views, Peralta said at least one reservation still won't be connected because it sits too low and requires too many hops.

This was supposed to be a part-time job for Peralta, but he usually ends up working more than 40 hours a week constructing and troubleshooting the network. “I get calls in the middle of the night to fix stuff,” he said. “It's great.”

Over time, Peralta has taught himself the ins and outs of 802.11b construction, tinkering with radios and figuring out how they worked in his spare hours. He's also helping children learn in the Rincon learning center, where students now have high-speed Internet access to an array of educational Web sites. More importantly, 802.11b technology is making it possible for tribes to preserve their culture. They are beginning to use equipment that allows them to videotape members speaking their language and documenting tribal songs and stories.

“We sometimes have to take a step back to see what we've accomplished,” said Peralta. “I really thank all of the people involved in this project for having the faith to trust us. They gave us the opportunity, and we've done a great thing with it.”