"The tribal colleges are unique in that most of them are located on or near reservations, and are chartered not only to provide higher-education basics, but also an education steeped in tribal languages and cultures," notes Ron His Horse Is Thunder, J.D., president of Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Reservation of North and South Dakota.
"Despite having only about half the funding available per student as mainstream colleges, and the same curriculum requirements, our graduation rate is about 75 percent, versus only 25 percent for Native students in non-Native institutions. We are providing our students with the foundation and the confidence to go on to major colleges. Our success grows, I feel, out of the love and dedication our faculty and staff have for their work, sentiments the students obviously pick up and thrive on."
The great-great-grandson of the college's famous namesake also chairs the President's Advisory Board on Tribal Colleges and Universities and sits on the regional college accreditation board, the Higher Learning Commission. His success, and the success of the tribal college system as a whole, was celebrated with a segment on NBC's Today Show on Sept. 21. -DG
It's a little before 9 a.m. on a crisp September morning at a small community college in rural Montana. Students fill the hallways, talking with friends, drinking coffee, discussing assignments. Latecomers drive into the parking lot, hoist book-filled backpacks and hurry off. In classrooms, faculty are turning on fluorescent lights, writing on whiteboards and adjusting overhead projectors. Today, like most days, there will be lectures, tests, student presentations and-maybe-a pop quiz or two.
It's a routine familiar to any community college in the nation. But at this college, it's higher education with a twist. Chief Dull Knife College is different from most institutions of higher learning in one important way: It's run by an Indian tribe. Located on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation and chartered by the tribal government, it is part of a small but rapidly growing movement to put higher education back into the hands of American Indians.
Today there are 34 tribally controlled colleges and universities located in 12 states across the West, northern Plains and Great Lakes region. One more is in Canada. This includes three schools not under direct control of a tribal government or governments—the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) in Albuquerque, and Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence Kansas. These three are federally charted and funded but like their sister tribal colleges they predominately serve an Indian student body, and are directed by Native administrators with direction from Native boards.
Although most institutions are small-Chief Dull Knife College serves as few as 200 students-collectively they enroll more than 24,000 students. According to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which represents the schools as a whole, tribal colleges now serve 18 percent of all American Indians enrolled in college.
Offering an Alternative Path
Tribal college leaders argue that their institutions play an important role by making a college education accessible to isolated reservation communities, especially for tribal members unable or unwilling to attend a mainstream institution. "Tribal colleges offer the first-time-ever college experience for many of our tribal members," says Chief Dull Knife College President Richard Little Bear. "They also provide a 'Plan B' for those who've gone to four-year colleges and found that they could not handle them."
Offering an alternative path to a college degree is vital, tribal educators say. While overt racism is less pronounced in mainstream higher education, Native college students still struggle against less-visible barriers to success. Many are academically underprepared, especially in the core subjects of English and math. Others continue to face subtle forms of discrimination. Non-Indian faculty may not understand, for example, why attending the funeral of a distant relation may be more important than completing a final exam. Faced with these hurdles, American Indians have one of the highest dropout rates of any racial or ethnic group in the country, according to data compiled by the American Council on Education.
Tribal colleges are generally small and poor, but they compensate by offering the kind of support missing from even the best-intentioned mainstream colleges. Counseling and remediation build missing academic skills. But more than anything else, it's the one-on-one attention from faculty and staff that makes a tribal college special, according to Regina Lopez WhiteDirt, a recent Chief Dull Knife College graduate. "It's the family-like environment that really gave me the support and confidence I needed," she says.
WhiteDirt, a member of the Ute Mountain Tribe, completed a two-year degree in business, then stayed on as an intern while completing an online bachelor's degree. Now she is back home, working for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and pursuing a master's degree. But it was Chief Dull Knife College that gave her the start she needed. "I established relationships from day one. Everyone was there as a support system. And they still are. President Little Bear still checks up on me constantly," she says.
Cultural Values and Far More
Culture also plays an important role in fostering a climate for learning. Many students say they grew up in an era when pride in their heritage was not encouraged. Few speak their tribe's language with fluency. By taking classes in the language and seeing culture used in a proud and positive way, they gain confidence as students, and as members of their tribe.
Today, the distinctive knowledge and values of tribal peoples are reflected in classes found nowhere else in America: totem pole carving, coyote stories, tipi making and Navajo astronomy, among hundreds of others. Language courses are also offered-and frequently required. Tribal colleges may be the only institutions where languages such as Crow, Salish, Northern Cheyenne and Ojibwe can be studied for academic credit at intermediate or advanced levels.
But to focus on these cultural courses, no matter how engaging, misses the larger role tribal colleges play in their communities. Tribal colleges are about a great deal more than "arts and crafts" or even the preservation of traditional culture in the narrow, objects-in-a-display-case sense. Instead, their goal is to train leaders for the 21st century. The focus of every tribal college is forward looking and increasingly high-tech. Internet access, online learning and government-funded research grants help bridge the technology and information divide. Students may spend the morning learning oral history from an elder, then spend the afternoon in a computer lab, writing business plans or analyzing water samples from reservation lakes and plotting data via GPS (global positioning system) technology.
The most popular degrees are not in Native American studies, but in the fields of business, healthcare and education. The typical tribal college student is a single mother in her thirties looking for the skills and credentials needed to find work and support her family. Most graduates want to find employment close to home, often as teacher's aids, entrepreneurs, nurses and dental assistants, among other professions.
As the movement matures, more colleges are adding four-year and even graduate degrees, allowing students to earn teaching credentials, human service degrees, bachelor of arts degrees and MBAs. Students may also transfer credits to and continue their education at mainstream institutions, where some pursue degrees in education administration, law and the sciences. Like WhiteDirt, a growing number are blending studies at a tribal college with distance learning-earning four-year or graduate degrees without leaving the reservation.
Whether the work is entry level or professional, however, tribal college leaders believe they are building a foundation of economic growth that will help tribes survive as self-supporting, sovereign nations. "Tribal colleges serve the needs of our nations," argues Janine Pease Pretty-On-Top, former president of Little Big Horn College in Montana, "just like Harvard serves the needs of its nation."
Still Struggling
It's an ambitious mandate for such small and underfunded institutions. Despite the comparison, most campuses do not look anything like the Ivy League. Instead, the typical campus is a hodgepodge of renovated buildings and doublewide trailers. Only a few-among them IAIA, SIPI, Salish Kootenai and Haskell-offer residential facilities; most serve commuter students. Older colleges are starting to build attractive and well-equipped campuses, but most tribal colleges make do with less. Little Big Horn College's library is housed in a former indoor basketball court, and for years the chemistry lab was in an unused sewage-treatment plant. The main campus of Bay Mills Community College in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is an old fish-processing plant. At Chief Dull Knife College, President Little Bear points out that his institution has neither a gym nor a multipurpose building. College basketball teams practice at local elementary and high schools, "which always presents an array of scheduling issues," he says.
While data on the impact of the tribal movement is incomplete, there is strong evidence that communities with their own college are advancing both socially and economically. "Tribal colleges have proven their ability to enroll students who were not served by higher education, to graduate students who had dropped out from other institutions, and to sponsor successful community development programs," according to a 1997 report on tribal colleges by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is that tribal colleges have even survived. When the first tribal colleges were founded only 36 years ago (excepting the previously launched Haskell and IAIA), they had little support, and few expected the movement to last more than a few years. Indians and non-Indians alike doubted that tribes could start and run "real" colleges. When a public forum was held to announce plans to create the first tribal college on the Navajo Nation in 1968, one invited CEO simply laughed and walked out. Mainstream colleges refused to support their Indian counterparts or accept the credits earned by tribal college students. Funding was piecemeal: a collection of temporary federal and private-sector grants.
To survive, the first colleges joined together and created the American Indian Higher Education Consortium in 1973. Collectively, they won passage of federal legislation that provides a small but stable base of funding. Since then, the colleges have also been added to the prestigious list of land-grant colleges and universities and have received significant grants from major foundations nationwide. In the past, tribes themselves have provided little or no funding to the colleges due to their poverty-stricken status, but some are now lending a hand with income derived from gambling operations. Tuition is lower at tribal colleges than at mainstream schools, but education is not free-contrary to the persistent myth that Indians get a free ride in higher education. Scholarships are available-the American Indian College Fund (see sidebar) helps about 6,000 students a year-but there is not enough money to go around and students struggle to pay the bills at school and at home (many are older students with families to support).
Proving that they are as good as their mainstream counterparts, all but the very youngest colleges are now fully accredited. However, the movement is still young and challenges remain. While survival is not in doubt, tribal colleges struggle financially. With less funding per student than any other group of colleges in the country, tribal colleges are also expected to serve some of the poorest and least academically prepared learners in the nation. The pathologies of tribal life-poverty, alcohol abuse, high dropout rates, dependency-are deeply entrenched, yet tribal colleges must answer to critics who expect these small institutions to instantly solve all the problems of Indian society.
For Regina WhiteDirt, however, it is obvious that tribal colleges are making a difference. She made a commitment to college after "getting caught up in the 24/7 shift work of my tribe's casino." Now she sees how her four children, ages six to 16, are already getting excited about college. Is she recommending a tribal college? "I tell everyone they are a great place to start."
Editor's Note: We would like to thanks Marjane Ambler, editor of Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, for the help she extended us with this special look at the tribal college system. Tribal College Journal (www.tribalcollegejournal.org) is a fine magazine that focuses on the many interesting stories associated with this largely unknown but increasingly valuable resource. We would also direct readers interested in these subjects to review previous issues of Native Peoples. We published a story on some aspect of the tribal college system in almost every issue from 2000 through 2002. Additional information and resources related to the tribal college system can be found at the web site of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, www.aihec.org. 
Paul Boyer is the author of two reports on tribal colleges released by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and was the founding editor of Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education. He holds a doctorate in education policy from The Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book is College Rankings Exposed: The Art of Getting a Quality Education in the 21st Century (Peterson's Press, 2003).
American Indian College Fund: Bringing In the Bucks
Founded in 1989 by tribal college presidents to raise private-sector funding for scholarships and developmental needs, the American Indian College Fund (AICF) also raises awareness of tribal colleges and their unique qualities. John Gritts, AICF's director of tribal college relations, notes, "Lots of people aren't aware of the significance and diversity of tribal colleges."
Serving the more than 26,000 students at the nation's 35 tribal colleges, AICF awards are based on academics and financial need and range from $50 to $5,000. Scholarship funding comes from corporations like General Mills and Nissan, sales of specially designed Pendleton blankets and other products, plus fundraising drives, special events, foundations and individual donations.
Another major AICF mission is to help students become confident in who they are, Gritts says. "We pride ourselves on what we do," he adds. And others see the pride that permeates the organization; in 2003, Reader's Digest named AICF the top U.S. educational nonprofit organization. But Gritts' biggest reward comes from his schools. "We love it because we get to work with the tribal colleges," he says.
Details
P.O. Box 172449, Denver, CO 80217-9797
800/776-3863; Fax: 303/426-1200
www.collegefund.org
-DK
American Indian Graduate Center Producing New Native Leaders
The American Indian Graduate Center (AIGC), founded in 1971, isn't your ordinary scholarship organization. "Our goal is to grow graduate students with the sense that they will come home and serve their communities," says AIGC Executive Director Norbert Hill (Oneida). "We can't level the playing field if kids go off to Chicago and get rich."
The only national nonprofit organization that aids Native graduate students obtain professional degrees, AIGC provides students with funding as well as preparation for grueling graduate programs. With so many first-generation Native college students entering universities, Hill keenly feels the need to ensure their success by helping them "learn the code" of college through enhanced learning opportunities. "I never saw a kid's head explode because we gave them too much information," Hill says.
However, AIGC also strives to entice graduates to engage in nation-building. "We want to reinvigorate communities through education," Hill says. "The new warriors are in the classroom."
Details
4520 Montgomery Blvd. NE, Suite 1B
Albuquerque, NM 87109
505/881-4584 or 800/628-1920; Fax: 505/884-0427
www.aigc.com
-DK
For a complete Tribal Colleges Directory call 888/262-8483 to request a copy of the November/December 2004 issue of Native Peoples magazine.
