Pauly Denetclaw
ICT
WASHINGTON — The group of five from Red Lake Nation College were on their way to the U.S. Capitol when New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker happened to walk by them. Dan King, president of the college, swooped in to briefly talk about National Tribal Colleges and Universities week. Then the group huddled together for a selfie.
Ribbon shirts and skirts, beaded medallions and moccasins could be seen all around the Capitol and Senate office building last week.
The annual week brings together administrators and students from 37 tribal colleges and universities to the nation’s capital to learn how to advocate on the hill. Students share their stories with members of Congress, White House staff and secretaries of the president’s cabinet.
As early as 2013, then Sen. Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota sponsored legislation that recognized the week to bring awareness to the importance of tribal colleges and universities. The event is sponsored by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and was previously known as Capitol Hill days.
Riccardo Maiingan, 21, is a freshman at Red Lake Nation College, located in Red Lake, Minnesota, studying social and behavioral sciences. He plans to transfer from the two-year institution to a four-year institution where he plans to double major in economics and political science.
“Tribal colleges have truly changed my life for the better and gave me a whole other view on education that I never had growing up,” said Maiingan, who is Red Lake Nation. “I didn’t have role models to look up to, or any celebrities or politicians who look like me. The only history I was taught about our people was the whitewashed history. Just being taught we were nothing but savage Indians and we are uncivilized. When the real history is we had civilizations. We had religion. We had beliefs. We had everything that the White people had when they came over.”
The first-generation college student is grateful to be attending a tribal college where he can connect with his peers as well as elders from this community. He has also connected with Devery Fairbanks, a faculty member of the college who has become a role model to Maiingan.
“Without our tribal college, I would have never met him and I wish I could give him the world because that’s what he’s done for me,” he said.
This is why Maiingan was advocating for tribal colleges and universities to be adequately funded.
Tribal colleges and universities need, at minimum, $3.2 billion to improve and provide basic infrastructure like dorm rooms, health care facilities, office space and classrooms. What makes the situation even more dire is that most tribal colleges and universities don’t receive state funding despite 20 percent of students being non-Native.
Currently, the 37 tribal colleges only receive $26 million annually despite being on the frontlines of preserving Indigenous languages and cultures, and providing an education that Indigenous students can’t get anywhere else.
TCUs provide language and culture classes, events and extracurricular activities for students. Faculty and staff are often from the communities they serve.
“Because we’re so underfunded that’s why it makes it harder on tribal colleges,” Hereditary Chief Dan King, president of Red Lake Nation College, said. “We have small classes, like a lot of one-on-one attention. We have counseling. We have support systems. We have mentoring, about 70 percent of our staff and faculty are either Red Laker or Natives. That’s huge because it means we can provide one-on-one mentoring and help for our students. We have emergency aid programs. We have food shelves, and we have all these extra things that help our students.
All of these services focused on Native students and their unique experiences make a difference, especially when about 80 percent of Red Lake Nation students are the first in their families to go to college.
“It works for our students and our retention rates, our graduation rates are much better than Native students have at mainstream systems because they’re kind of left out,” he said.
However, even tribal colleges and universities cannot escape the low graduation rate for American Indian and Alaska Native students like mainstream academic institutions.
For bachelor degrees:
- Only 25 percent of Native Americans over the age of 25 obtain a bachelor’s degree nationally.
- The national average is 42 percent, according to the Postsecondary Policy Institute.
However, 40 percent of alumni report that attending a tribal college or university prepared them well for life outside of college. Nationally, only 27 percent of alumni would agree.
Over 70 percent of TCU alumni are “primarily employed in areas related to American Indian communities or tribal lands, and many work directly with their tribe,” according to a Gallup poll.
“Another aspect of attending tribal colleges, I’ve had the opportunity to do internships that affect my community and culture, such as research for missing and murdered Indigenous women, which has given me the motivation to pursue a law degree,” King said.
Maiingan has a 4.0 GPA and was recently elected as president of his school’s senate. He was just one of dozens of students advocating on the hill.
Joelle Drouillard, 20 and Red Lake Nation, previously attended the University of Minnesota Morris where she felt like she didn’t belong and eventually left the institution.
“I had gone there for two semesters and I just couldn’t do it,” Drouillard said. “I transferred to (Red Lake Nation College) in the spring of the next year and immediately I felt more connected to my culture and actually felt like I had support from people.”
At one point, her grandfather was diagnosed with cancer and passed away. Drouillard told her teachers what was happening and they were very understanding, telling her to come back when she was ready.
“If I was in Morris at that point, I don’t think they would have helped,” she said.
Drouillard is in her last semester at the college and will be graduating with an associates degree in pre-engineering. She plans on transferring to a four-year institution to get her degree in engineering and hopes to contribute to protecting the earth, something she wouldn’t have been passionate about if not for reconnecting with her culture at her tribal college.
“I feel like we’re just taught to hate our culture so early on, because I went to a Catholic school growing up. So, I didn’t want to do anything with Native American culture for so long and that just changed in college,” she said.
Kyleisha Garrigan, 18, is in her first semester in college but she graduated high school with 27 college credits. She is the chairwoman of the Red Lake Nation Youth Council and secretary of her college’s senate.
“It’s the best decision that I’ve ever made. I really recommend people to start at a tribal college,” Garrigan said.
The only tribal college in the pacific northwest is Northwest Indian College, that serves three states, Oregon, Idaho and Washington. The college is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year.
“Our students said it best, it’s the focus on the cultural identity and cultural education,” Justin Guillory, president of Northwest Indian College, said. “It focused on family. It’s multi-generational.”
The impact of this can’t be understated on the success of Native students who often aren’t taught anything about Native American history as well as their nation’s own language and culture in school. Federal Indian boarding schools were publicly funded with a mission to assimilate Indigenous people, an act that would lead to huge reductions in Indigenous language speakers and access to cultural carriers.
Tribal colleges and universities act as a bridge, providing students with language and culture classes and events.
“The motivation for our students to complete their education, it’s a ‘we’ based pursuit, it’s not a ‘me’ based endeavor. ‘I am pursuing my degree to help my family, to rebuild my tribal community, as tribal nation building.’ That comes from the culture, that comes from the values and the teachings,” Guillory said, who is Nez Perce. “That promotes Native students’ success.”
Alexé Ortiz is a student at the Nez Perce location of the college. She has experienced this firsthand.
“I’m grateful for attending a TCU because it’s taught me my values, and it hasn’t at all obstructed my values or my core beliefs,” Ortiz said.
This was echoed by a student from Oglala Lakota College, some 1,000 miles away in South Dakota. Charles Bush, 32, is in his last semester and will be graduating with a bachelor’s degree in natural science with an emphasis in conservation biology.
“TCUs are just really important because they offer you a sense of keeping your identity, knowing who you are and just being able to have a voice,” Bush, Oglala Lakota, said. “One message is just to keep investing in TCUs as they’re so vital.”
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