American Indian College Fund Interview

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Greta Thomas of Philanthropic Project, where we’re donating 100 percent of our profit towards the most effective cost areas like protecting the rainforest, protecting the climate by funding climate change technology, and the topic of today is tribal colleges and universities and ways for American Indian students to access higher education. And to

understand more about this when I’m invited, Horror Wedel and Cheryll traceable Cristóbal from American Indian College Fund. Dean is the director of Public Education and Cheryl Crossable is the president. I want to say welcome, Dina and Cheryl to this interview..

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Thank you.

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Thank you. We’re glad to be here.

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The first question goes to you now. Could you help us get a taste or a little sample on what’s the difference when we speak about tribal colleges and education? What’s the difference between our colleges?

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Well, colleges and universities are accredited higher education institutions that are located on or near Indian reservations that provide access to a higher education to people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to attend college due to distance from higher education.

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They’re affordable. But the biggest difference is that they are culturally appropriate. So they’re steeped in Native American identity, culture, spirituality, and the whole mission of the institution is surrounded around native identity.

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So I guess the only option actually for American Indians would be to attend one of those colleges. If you want to access higher colleges or at least go native, people can attend any college or university in the United States.

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But these institutions are different in that they were chartered by their tribal nations to serve tribal communities.

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So the whole purpose of a tribal college and university is really to provide a higher education for native people so that they can then serve their communities. Native people can attend any tribal college emissary, any university in the United States. She can speak really well to that as Cheryl as a former tribal college president and actually got her start in her community on the Rosebud Reservation at San Diego State University. So I would love to hear more about what Cheryl says about that.

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Yeah, feel free, Cheryl.

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Yeah, thank you, Dana. I. Tribal colleges and universities are really a revolutionary experience in American higher education. These institutions emerged out of intention and the community that native students would be able to access higher education. That really strengthened and honored their identity. And about the same time that tribal colleges emerged, you saw a rise in American colleges and universities of native studies programs.

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So there was this complimentary experience in American higher education where they tried to create a climate where native students would have a good higher education. Experience with tribal colleges are really the institutions that are placed based on the issues that you’re dealing with, like climate. They occur in place and tribal colleges and universities really create that climate environment for students so that’s one of my friends used to say that Northwest Indians go to school with Indians at tribal colleges. Indians don’t study Indians at tribal colleges. They go to school together and really transform their communities together.

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Makes sense right now, makes sense. Oh, it would mean.

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So let me ask you, what would be Cheryl, do you see a problem that American Indian College Fund is helping to solve or would you say that will be.

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Yes, so the American Indian College Fund, I believe we address two things. One is creating services that increase the likelihood that students will complete college at both tribal colleges and at what we call predominantly white institutions or mainstream institutions by giving students scholarship support because financial resources are often a barrier to attending college. And by also providing them with support services, because they don’t have a lot of experience with higher education, then we give them some resources to kind of overcome that lack of experience.

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And then the other problem, I guess, in quotes that we would be addressing is the need for increased capacity at these place based institutions.

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We support institutions with what we call mission focused programming. So institutions have two missions. One is to train people for jobs and opportunities in their communities, and then the other is to promote cultural revitalization. So the college fund works with providing resources to the tribal colleges and universities so they can do their mission work.

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So increase the likelihood that, um, students attend a higher education and to increase the amount of people who can get the place at these universities and colleges.

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Yes. Yes. And increase the likelihood that they’ll attend and remove financial barriers to their attendance and remove other kinds of barriers that exist. For example, they might not know how to navigate a classroom or how to interact with a faculty member or even maybe what career they think that they want to pursue.

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So the college fund to help students navigate that environment as well.

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And if I read on the website. That a high percentage of the population of the American Indians are quite young, so I guess that would be made that would be an important topic too. I think you said 42 percent of the population are 24 years or younger. Yeah.

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Yeah, to tell me a little bit about that when it comes to, um.

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I guess, um.

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I mean, not growing up being a native. If I’m not grown up in that environment, what is it that it’s hard for me to understand, like what is it that is hard for modern society to understand about education around Native Americans?

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Yes, I think it’s safe to say that indigenous peoples in the United States are very diverse. So the tribal colleges themselves are very diverse institutions. They travel colleges first began a little over 50 years ago.

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They were creating a place where people could be trained as teachers, health professionals, you know, people to work with, natural resource management, all the kinds of jobs that existed in our communities. And the age of the students at that time was slightly older and, you know, in the 30s. And what we’ve seen in the last maybe eight to 10 years is more and more young people taking advantage of college as soon as they come out of high school or within a year or two after coming out of high school. So we’ve seen a decrease in age. So I just want to make two comments about the young population. We create an environment that is about the hope that young people have, that they will have better lives and that they can create better lives for their families. So the challenges that native people in the United States face, our incredible economic disparities, health disparities, a lack of access to quality housing, lack of public transportation, they’re just an incredible set of social and economic barriers. But what we have is this incredible cultural richness and this really valuable world view. And so if tribal colleges, you know, they facilitate that restoration of the hope that we can overcome these disparities by providing students with a good education and providing them with things that they can do in their communities.

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And then the other thing I want to mention about having the young population, it’s important for people to realize that part of the reason why we have a young population that’s so large is because of the disparities that our people experience. So people, indigenous peoples in the United States, because of their lack of access to resources, health care, things like that, they don’t have a very low, you know, average age of death, for example, in the northern plains. Many people don’t live to the age of 60 or older. So that’s part of what’s created that young population. And that’s important for, I think, listeners to know that if that’s the other side of having a young population to work with is that they’re trying to address these disparities that have had this incredibly devastating impact on the quality of life in our communities. We see that right now, for example, with covid-19 and having a very disparate impact on indigenous communities.

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You said, um, Charlotte, um.

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Then the genius people would bring a lot of cultural kind of knowledge and value to. Into the rest of society.

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How?

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If I ask you now, what will be the current relationship that indigenous people have with the government of America or the rest of the society? What’s the current relationship?

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Well, as Sheryl knows, we’ve been working on a visibility campaign in concert with other native organizations, in fact, and there are other native organizations that have done surveys about the visibility of native people in the United States. And for many of our students, they say that they feel invisible. They’re not represented in the college curriculum. Oftentimes when they are represented in college curriculum, it’s not after modern times. It’s just people who are spoken about in a historical context. And in addition, we have issues in the country, as you may have read about, with what we call fetishization of native peoples through using images as mascots and that kind of thing. And so people don’t have a true understanding, I think, in mainstream society of who native peoples are in their histories. It’s definitely something that we’re working on at the American Indian College Fund as part of an equity initiative in which we are trying to create greater visibility of native people on mainstream campuses, in addition to, of course, what’s happening on our tribal college campuses so that people can understand the full context of who native people are, what their historical contributions are, and so that they can be seen and respected and take place and have a voice in American culture and in an American society.

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So I guess that would be going back to all of society like infrastructure, if you if one group would be invisible. It would not be taken into consideration when you’re building. So that’s just an example of how this will showcase in reality, as you’re saying, that this would be the experience of someone going to college.

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It’s dimler that you would feel like your background is and are not reflected in exactly how often you know, students say that they don’t see role models and the institutions, they don’t see native professors, they don’t see native people in the in the higher administration.

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Native people aren’t part of the boards of trustees or regents at institutions. And in addition, native nations aren’t consulted when, for example, about community issues impacting that institution. They are not consulted about the curriculum. There’s a wealth of information, history, ways that native people can participate in those spaces and they’re not included. We’re seeing that right now in the country. You’ve probably read about the Black Lives Matter

movement with African-American people. And the same is true of native people. You know, we’re asking that native people be part of institutions and be considered and brought into the fold and their voices be listened to and not just dictated to.

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Yeah, makes sense when you mention it in those categories, like it’s similar problems, like my life matters are facing. I guess women have been facing this for a long time and just all of society as well, and children, I guess, as well. Cheryl, you spoke a little bit about that. You have different programs, I guess. Tell us more about the American Indian College Fund.

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Help us understand what is that really and how does that fit into the picture of being that voice for our native natives?

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The American Indian College Fund focus since its founding over 30 years ago has been post-secondary success filling that gap that I mentioned earlier. And so some of the ways that the college fund has supported that has been to so we are bringing private sector dollars into the mix here. So the tribal colleges, they’re mostly rural reservation based institutions. So they don’t have access to donors. They don’t have access to people who can give them resources to support their work. So the college fund has helped the tribal colleges build buildings and support

their infrastructure on their campuses, build roads, parking lots, libraries, laboratories, classrooms, student housing, all those things that people kind of take for granted in a college setting. The tribal colleges didn’t have access to the college fund working with other partners to help them do that. We do programming.

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For example, we have a student ambassador program where we identify students who are interested in being part of our storytellers.

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So we teach them how to do this, talk to people like you or talk to the news media about their experiences. So we really support students and the kinds of capacity or work that they’re doing. We’re doing programming like supporting native arts and culture. So we recognize, along with some of our funders, that we run a risk in our communities of losing access to traditional art forms because people are concentrating so much on surviving. So the college fund has been able to support people in the communities keeping and restoring traditional arts or even doing at the college fund a lot of programming around sustainability.

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So right now we have an initiative that looks at the impact of grasslands in our communities.

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I think that’s a really valuable piece of what the college fund is doing is helping people figure out where we are situated in this place. What do we do to manage the resources in that place? And then I think the last thing I’ll mention at the college fund is that, you know, the visibility campaign is really important. And a foundational part of that is research. So the college fund has stepped up as an organization that is doing research about tribal colleges and universities and about native students, because historically there wasn’t very much research in that space. So a good example of that is that we know tribal colleges have an incredibly wonderful impact on people, on students and their graduates. And we did a study with African Nation of the United States, the Gallup Corps. Do they do research with populations in the United States? And they worked with us to do a research project with alumni of tribal colleges that proved with data what we already know at that tribal colleges are amazing institutions that have an incredibly positive impact on people’s lives. They helped us tell that story with data for all those people who need data and not just a good story. So I think the college fund is a leader in that space of helping tell the story with data.

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Tribal colleges and universities are, if I understand correctly, that there are quite many in the United States, there’s there’s a map on the website, college fund work, where you can see where those will be located.

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An American Indian College Fund would be a supporter for all of those, I guess, a support function, as you say, to improve the facilities and help the to the students to.

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How to talk about their heritage in the media or. That’s kind of what I’m understanding, that you’re supporting all of those different colleges.

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Yeah, we do, we support the thirty five colleges that are full members of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which is a membership association of the tribal colleges, and they. Founded the American Indian

College Fund, our primary focus is student success.

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For the primary investment that we asked people to make is in helping us help students individually and as a group be successful with whatever their post-secondary dream is, whether it’s to get a certificate so that they can be a data entry person or do construction or get a two year degree and use that two year degree to be a professional in a school or maybe transfer to a four year institution or get a four year degree or in many cases get a graduate degree and work in their communities.

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That’s our primary focus.

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And what we’re talking about, there is a lot about experiences, it seems that to increase the experience that individual students have, and I guess that’s quite hard to understand. You say that it’s wonderful that you’ve now proven in science that it’s a wonderful school education and it’s just hard to tell from the outside. You have to be in the experience to understand it. That’s a I guess this is a challenge just how to paint the picture of why that would be wonderful.

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But that’s what I’m taking with me, that now you’re thanks to the American Indian College Fund, you’re improving the experiences that the college students have. You’re improving. Kind of acknowledgement that the heritage becomes something valuable rather than neglected. And you’re improving. Know it’s easier to see, um.

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In real facts, though, the quality that schools are having, that some of the points that I’m taking with me.

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Yeah, that’s a good summary, but it’s good.

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Um, I would like to end this interview by asking you if I ask you or if you want to read or have a real answer.

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Two questions. The first one for you, that would be. Now, what kind of support do you see that you would like after hearing this interview, what kind of support do you need or what kind of what would you like people to do after hearing this and do?

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Well, I think that, of course, we always want people to learn more about us and go to college, fund Doug and learn about the work that we’re doing so that they can become financial supporters of our initiatives and our students primarily.

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You know, Cheryl mentioned that it’s so important for students to gain access to school and graduate and only thirteen point five percent of American Indians, twenty five or older in the United States today have a college education, a college degree compared to that’s less than half of the rest of the population. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Obviously, Cheryl mentioned the challenges in our communities, the financial challenges and that kind of thing. And so it’s really important for our students to get financial support so that they can go to college. We offer scholarships. We offer programs that train them in terms of internships and mentoring so that they can then graduate and go on and succeed in their careers. So that would be my big call to action, I think.

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College fund work. That’s the last question I.

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If you could empathize. One thing that you would like for more people to understand, what would that be?

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All that we still are here about really living in these incredibly rich place based cultures. Even our people who live in cities and, you know, other urban areas are closely tied to our land and our identity. So I think the big takeaway I would like for people to have is that we are not historical people. We are contemporary people who have historical and ancestral teachings that guide us and help us live good lives. But we’re here today and people should make sure that we’re represented everywhere in jobs and schools in the curriculum, that when there’s health opportunities that are the disparities that exist in our communities are addressed, that that is visible. Because the takeaway that I’d like for people.

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