I bought a program called PC-USA back when personal computers stood alone on your desk, not connected to anything, mostly so I could write a review of it. It consisted of maps of all 50 states, with facts about them.

When I installed PC-USA on our computer at home, my kids gravitated to it, and that was a good sign. We left them alone with it.

After a while, though, my wife and I noticed something odd. The kids had been dinking around with it for half an hour and they still hadn't looked up North Carolina.

Instead, they looked up Utah, and then sat there arguing with the software (which didn't answer, making the argument rather one-sided) about the things it did and didn't say about Utah.

Our third child had been born in North Carolina; the two oldest had been born in Utah before we moved away. But they were so young when we moved that neither of them remembered much about living there. Just a few family visits — that's all Utah was to them.

Except it was way, way more. It was, to put it plainly, our tribal home. Not our family home, but the homeland of our people.

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