Volume 14 Winter 2002 Issue #2

Thirty Years Strong

"History will be told by those who have the courage to evolve, and the heart to remember." -former IAIA student Anongonse Migwans Beam

by Marjane Ambler

U.S. Rep. Wayne Aspinall (D-CO) was one of the most powerful men in Congress as chairman of the House Interior Committee in the 1960s and 1970s. Never considered a friend to American Indian causes, Aspinall was cajoled by Ruth Roessel (Navajo) to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for Navajo Community College in Tsaile, AZ, the nation's first tribal college and thus the first to seek federal funding.

At the groundbreaking, Aspinall and several others held onto the gish, the traditional digging stick. During the lengthy ceremony, Bob Roessel grew increasingly alarmed. The day was hot; the Congressman was elderly; and Aspinall was stooped over, his hands below the others on the gish. At the end, he released the stick and slowly stood up, calling Bob Roessel to his side. "I have been to mosques; I have been to synagogues; I've been to churches all over the world. But I felt God when I felt that stick. You will get your college," he said. True to his word, Aspinall shouted down congressional and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) opponents, and the Navajo Community College Act of 1971 became law.

Rep. Wayne Aspinall (in suit) said he felt God when he held the digging stick used to break ground for Navajo Community College. Left to right: Tony Tsosie of Tsaile community, Medicine Man Charlie Benally, Aspinall, and then Navajo Tribal Chairman Peter MacDonald.

Throughout the next year, AIHEC will be celebrating its 30th anniversary. The consortium was chartered in 1973 by six tribal colleges (D-Q University, Navajo Community College, Oglala Sioux Community College, Sinte Gleska College, Standing Rock Community College, and Turtle Mountain Community College). They created it primarily to stabilize their financial base, advocate for them politically, and to provide technical assistance. In 1978, AIHEC succeeded in convincing Congress to pass the Tribally Controlled Community College Act to provide core, institutional support. Now 33 colleges strong, the organization continues to provide these services and more.

Much of the more detailed history of the tribal college movement has been told in books and other articles (which are listed in the resource guide). So for this anniversary issue, we took a different approach. We asked various people who have been involved with the tribal college movement to look back at the past 30 years. We also asked them to look forward, to share their predictions for the next 30 years-- and to take a hard look at what remains to be accomplished to fulfill yesterday's visions.

Thirty years. Louis LaRose, a founder of Nebraska Indian Community College, remembers being at a long AIHEC board meeting in Denver and hearing that Elvis Presley had died. David Gipp, AIHEC's first executive director, remembers being at a Title III meeting in Dallas with Lionel Bordeaux and others where they watched the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Thirty years is a long time for colleges that were ridiculed at their birth and predicted to fail.

Thirty years. Many of the readers of this magazine, students at the colleges, and even current AIHEC staff members were not born when AIHEC came into being. Thus it is important for all of us to go back to the beginning and remember why tribal colleges were needed and what makes them important.

In this issue, Paul Boyer explains that the majority of American Indian students living on reservations were denied access to higher education, whether intentionally or not, before their tribes created local institutions. Grace McNeley (Navajo) takes us back to the 1960s and the beginning of the Native American studies programs and reminds us why those generic, pan-Indian programs could not substitute for an education designed for one's own tribe. McNeley provides intimate insights into the ceremonies held in the dark of the night for their college.

As she points out, each tribe holds the seeds of its own educational philosophy. The timeline in this issue shows when each tribe sowed these seeds and planted new tribal colleges on reservation lands, first in the Southwest, then in the Dakotas and California, then in Montana and Nebraska, and later in the Northwest and in the woodlands states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. The foldout map in this issue demonstrates the spread of this movement from 6 colleges in 1973 to 33 today.

However, the map does not indicate the fledgling colleges that are now developing across North America. AIHEC President Dr. James Shanley predicts that we will have 10-20 more colleges in the next 10 years. Nor does it reflect the number of tribes served. Students from more than 250 tribes attend tribal colleges, representing 18% of all the American Indians now studying in institutions of higher learning across the country.

Thirty years. Anniversaries and birthdays are valuable for making us look at our lives with the perspective of long-term rather than immediate gains and losses. In the tribal college movement, we often become pre-occupied with funding shortfalls and with annual threats to the viability of some of our member institutions. We lose track of how far the tribal colleges and universities have come in a relatively short time.

When I began writing about the tribal colleges in 1990, it was difficult to find even the most basic information. AIHEC's Denver office had closed in 1983 when the organization lost its grant funding. It wasn't until October 1994 that the consortium established a permanent office by purchasing an office building on the Potomac River near Washington, DC. During most of the interim, there was only a part-time executive director, and the tribal college presidents themselves pounded the pavement to advocate for increased federal support. They tell horrifying stories about the way they were treated. One member of Congress said, "You Indians are good with your hands. Why don't you forget about colleges and get into the chicken business?" according to Sinte Gleska University President Lionel Bordeaux, AIHEC's second president. For many years, the tribes' "guardian," the Bureau of Indian Affairs actually testified against the tribal colleges.

The colleges' prestige and credibility have changed as the result of several major legislative and executive victories listed by Dr. Gerald Gipp in the introduction to this issue. The past several months indicate just how far they have come: Several tribal college presidents met with President George Bush in July as he signed a new executive order, and two members of the president's cabinet traveled to tribal colleges, Interior Secretary Gale Norton to United Tribes Technical College in June and U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson to Oglala Lakota College in August.

They also now have an international reputation amongst indigenous peoples, some of whom see the tribal colleges as a model for what they want to do. First Nations in Canada have formed their own consortium, overtly modeled after AIHEC. In August of this year, the tribal colleges and universities joined with educators around the world to form the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium.

In the 1970s and 1980s, there was no time for explaining the tribal colleges to the general public or fundraising outside of the beltway. As young institutions serving low-income people, the colleges could not then, nor can they now, rely upon thousands of alumni with deep pockets to support them. Thus the college presidents in AIHEC established the American Indian College Fund in 1989 as a separate, nonprofit organization, primarily to help raise money for scholarships.

Gradually the College Fund developed a public relations campaign, which put the tribal colleges on billboards, bus stop benches, television spots, and magazines across the country. The College Fund used a motto that appealed to many non-Indians: "Help save a culture that may one day save your own." Advertising space has been donated by publications such as National Geographic, New Yorker, New York Times, and Time Magazine. AIHEC is focusing more upon public relations, and through combined efforts, articles about tribal colleges and universities have appeared in USA Today, Boston Globe, Albuquerque Journal, Sacramento Bee, Denver Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

The American public and foundations have responded. Since 1989, more than 120,000 individuals have made contributions to the College Fund. In 2001, the American Indian College Fund distributed nearly $4.1 million to the member colleges for student scholarships plus $130,000 for cultural preservation projects. Beginning in 1995, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's $22 million Native American Higher Education Initiative helped AIHEC, the College Fund, and the colleges to build infrastructure and to increase their visibility in the foundation world.

Several decades ago, most tribal colleges began with facilities abandoned by others - trailers, Quonset huts, store fronts, a high school, a retirement home, a fish plant, and a water treatment plant. It is difficult to instill pride and a sense of self-worth in students who are shivering in hand-me-down classrooms.

Now 28 of the colleges have a Cultural Learning Center. For many, it represents the first building actually designed to suit their academic purposes and cultural values. Most of the colleges are designing and moving into new campuses. The colleges no longer have to rely upon cast-off equipment either. As Carrie Billy describes in her article, they are connecting with the future through state of the art computer technology.

As much as things have changed over the past 30 years, some things never change. The colleges still struggle to get the institutional support authorized by Congress in 1978. In fiscal year 2002, they received only $3,900 per student, compared with the $6,000 authorized by Congress, far below the amount used by other colleges. The institutes funded under vocational education (United Tribes Technical Institute and Crownpoint Institute of Technology) face yearly threats from the federal administration to their core institutional support, which threaten to shut their doors. The College Fund is a long way from raising all the money it needs for its capital construction campaign and for scholarships. Several colleges still rent abandoned buildings on Main Street. With the chronic lack of resources and the constant need to meet mainstream expectations, the colleges continue to struggle to meet their original vision and make systemic changes on the reservations.

Thirty years. While many things have changed, the essence of tribal colleges and universities has remained constant and true. The colleges continue to change lives and send waves of graduates out to change the world. When we requested suggestions of families whose lives had been dramatically improved over two or more generations, we received a deluge of responses, more than we could ever publish. Rosemary Mills Jimboy's story about Haskell Indian Nations University is in this issue, and more will follow during this anniversary year. Dr. Joe McDonald also graduated from Haskell, after which he became the founding president of Salish Kootenai College. Now 69 years old, McDonald continues to grow. After witnessing the importance of song to Maori culture during a trip last March to New Zealand, he treated the AIHEC board to a traditional Salish song as his prayer opening the spring meeting. Spirituality continues to be a foundation of AIHEC.

The gish, the traditional digging stick used to break ground for the tribal college movement, still lives in the office of the Diné College president. After hearing the story about Aspinall and the powerful stick several times over the years, we unexpectedly saw it a couple of years ago when Dr. Tommy Lewis invited AIHEC presidents and staff members to a special ceremony in the San Francisco Peaks above Flagstaff. The Navajo medicine man sang several songs and used corn pollen to bless the stick. At his invitation, we each took the pollen, lifted it heavenward, washed our feet and our hair with it, and put it on our cheeks. I imagine everyone felt as I felt and still feel today, full of love and hope and fortified for the challenges ahead.

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