Volume XII Fall 2000 Issue #1

Celebrating our students
We're in the business of changing lives

By Marjane Ambler

When Rick Williams (Oglala Lakota) started work as the executive director for the American Indian College Fund several years ago, he said that he was working for institutions that created hope on reservations. At the time, these words rang true for me and for many of my colleagues working for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. We come to work each day knowing that we contribute to a movement that changes lives. Rick's words came back to me again last spring as we visited some of the woodland tribal colleges in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

"I see it here everyday," Michael Price told us at Leech Lake Tribal College. "People come in here who are picking up and starting over. They have a glimmer in their eyes that they never had before in their lives," said Price (Anishinabe), the chair of the Math and Science Department at the college in Cass Lake, Minn.

"An associate degree doesn't matter much elsewhere, but here it is a right to live. Students come here and start believing, 'Maybe I have a reason to live.'" Some of the short stories and poems in this issue give a glimpse of the horrors that some students experience before they arrive at the tribal college - incest, alcoholism, racism, abuse, problems that have robbed them of hope and a reason to live. At the tribal colleges, they have learned to tap these experiences (as well as positive experiences) and transform their anger, grief, pride, and joy into poetry and sculptures. One of Michael Price's students told him that science gave him similar solace, providing order in the midst of chaos, as well as career options.

Price came to Leech Lake from an American Indian non-profit organization that works primarily with mainstream institutions and private corporations. He said the universities and corporations seemed more interested in working with Indian students with 3.8 GPA's, who would succeed anyway. That job failed to satisfy his yearning to empower reservation communities.

Price enjoys working at the grassroots level where the students include the single mom and the middle-aged former alcoholic. Although he knew Leech Lake Tribal College was a struggling college with limited resources, he wanted to help empower people. "We see women who have been beat up because their men resented them wanting to empower themselves, but they come anyway," he said.

During our travels we met dozens of tribal college faculty and administrators-both Indian and non-Indian-who seemed to share Michael's fire. Several had turned down salaries 50-100 percent higher for half the workload. While they were reluctant to publicize their personal stories, we convinced them that their story is their college's story.

Dana Gretz was on her back in a hospital bed for nine weeks before her twin daughters were born last year. Rather than feeling sorry for herself, however, Dana had a computer rigged so that she could operate it upside down, above her head, and continue working for Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Community College. She wrote the college's academic assessment plan and a successful faculty development grant, which required keeping in touch with each faculty member several times a week through email and phone calls. "With 8 to 17 contractions an hour, those two deadlines probably helped me keep my sanity," she said. Dana, a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, directs research and assessment at the college in Hayward, Wis., and her husband, Dan, is the academic dean.

Bruce Carlson, housing director at Fond du Lac Tribal & Community College, works with tribal elders to develop innovate strategies to make Indian students feel at home in the college dorms. He is devoted to his students and to community elders on the Minnesota reservation; he drove to Albuquerque and back -- over 2500 miles -- in a weekend to get enough blankets for a ceremony honoring all the elders on the reservation. "Look at me," he said, pointing to his white skin and blonde hair. "I wanted the elders to know my level of commitment so they would trust me," he said. A "D" student in high school, his experiences at Fond du Lac ignited his interest in learning and especially in sociology. He wrote a bachelor's thesis on white supremist groups and graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin in Superior. Now he is paying the tribal college back for changing his life.

Twenty-five years ago, Betty Laverdure challenged her friend and colleague, Dr. Ann Brummel, to switch her career to American Indian education instead of teaching French to middle class young ladies in Kansas. Brummel and Laverdure were in West Africa at the time for three months, and they had discussed the similarities between how colonization had been practiced in Africa and in the United States. Laverdure worked at Turtle Mountain Community College. As a result of Laverdure's challenge, Brummel got her masters in international relations and her doctorate in education. She has devoted the last 17 years to Indian education, helping to start the Tiospa Zina High school on the Sisseton Wahpeton Reservation in South Dakota and working at Turtle Mountain Tribal College and Turtle Mountain high school. In 1998, she became the development director for AIHEC's youngest member, White Earth Tribal and Community College in Minnesota. While a small college, White Earth boasts three doctorates on its staff: the president, Dr. Helen Klassen (White Earth Chippewa); academic dean Dr. Betsy McDougall (Turtle Mountain Chippewa); and Brummel.

A respite from despair

The faculty's backgrounds vary as much as the students. No doubt some work at tribal colleges because of convenience; it's the only place available locally, and they put in their eight hours and go home. We know that some faculty burn out with the long hours and low pay, but we didn't meet any of those. We met young, impassioned teachers dedicated to changing the world, one student at a time, and older teachers who found meaning for their own lives. One told us that he arrived at the tribal college after a bankruptcy, the death of a spouse, and financial despair. The college-and especially his experiences with the students-redeemed his life.

Others had experienced a more common despair, the existential despair referred to by Michael Price. They had worked at large corporations or agencies where no one seemed to notice if they showed up for work, where the paycheck at the end of the month was the only gratification.

From what we have seen at tribal colleges over the years, this is rarely a problem. At the tribal colleges, everyone is needed, not only to fulfill his or her own duties but also to help fix someone's computer or loan a student $10 for gasoline to get to school. As Agnes Fleming says at Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College, "There is never a job description - if someone needs to do something, someone jumps in." Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College President Debra Parrish knows all about jumping in when something needs to be done. She sewed her college's name in 8" letters on to a 10-foot banner to use at recruiting booths, sewed the curtains for the college's newly acquired Post Office building, and learned how to operate the distance learning electronic classroom. A tribal member herself, she wrote the grant for the college's child abuse prevention program, and when parents and children meet with community elders two nights a week to sew pow wow outfits for that program, she is there, sometimes with her own foster child.

The tribal college attraction

People arrive at the doors of the tribal colleges for many reasons. They live in the community. They grew up on the reservation, worked in the city, and returned because of a sick relative. Roger Pilon, the librarian at Bay Mills, works three hours away from his home because the college allows him to be a Renaissance man, indulging his loves for carpentry, gardening, and history. He is carving the sign and constructing the shelves for the new college library and heritage center, building a Three Sisters garden and the nature trail around the library, and managing the college's folk art collection. He holds two master's degrees in history.

Nick Ferro wanted to move to the Bay Mills Indian Community because his wife's sister (Iroquois) lived in the area. Bay Mills Community College President Dr. Martha McLeod knew they could not afford to pay him what he had earned as the development director at a hospital. Responding to his desire to relocate, however, McLeod used funds from a Kellogg grant to offer him considerably less than his previous salary. Within a year and a half, he had brought in nearly half a million dollars in grants and donations for the college.

What explains the commitment of these and the hundreds of other tribal college faculty and staff? Greg Chester, librarian and instructor at Leech Lake, revels in the students' growing skills. "It's amazing to see how their writing changes over the semester-clear, concise, sometimes beautiful. Why were they not taught how to do this in the previous 12 years?"

They see the new glimmer in the students' eyes fueled by hope. As the students learn history, science, and gain a cultural foundation, they see the ember grow into the flame of pride. Living in the community, they watch the families' joy when lost sons and daughters find themselves. They know they are changing lives.

Marjane Ambler has been the editor of Tribal College Journal since 1995.