Programs designed to help Native students at Western universities have shown promise. But low enrollment and budget cuts mean the future of some, like those at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is uncertain. | Illustration by Morgan Krieg

For Evon Peter, Fairbanks — population 31,000 — was the big city. The Gwich’in tribal member grew up without electricity or running water in Vashrąįį K’ǫǫ, known as Arctic Village in English, a remote community of 150 in northern Alaska. “I made my way from there to the city, and then ultimately up here to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to study,” Peter said.

Peter was part of the first generation in his family to speak primarily English; his grandfather and other tribal elders spoke Gwich’in. So when he arrived at UAF in 1993, he experienced culture shock on many levels. “I grew up in a very different cultural context and worldview, and then came to this rigid Western institution with all this paperwork and expectations that were so radically different than the culture I grew up in,” he said. “That’s the experience for a lot of our Alaska Native students.”

Peter is now the vice chancellor for rural community and Native education at UAF. In that capacity, he oversees the College of Rural and Community Development, which offers academic programs and support services to students from rural areas — the vast majority of whom are the Alaska Native students who make up more than 20 percent of UAF’s student body. That fact, plus Alaska’s unique geography, makes added support essential for students transitioning to the university from remote villages, many of which are only accessible by plane.

Peter’s college undertakes numerous measures to help its Alaska Native students. The school’s 50-year-old Rural Student Services department has advisers and cultural programming dedicated to Native students. Sandra Kowalski, director of Indigenous programs and an Iñupiaq tribal member, said the department’s freezer is stocked with traditional foods such as fish, caribou, and moose. Yet another program, the Rural Alaska Honors Institute, brings promising high school students to campus for a summer, during which they earn college credit. An independent analysis found that Alaska Native students who participate in RAHI earn a degree at nearly twice the rate of those who did not enroll in the program.

“If it was not for the support of Rural Student Services, I would not have graduated from college,” Peter said.

The future of these programs, however, is uncertain due to recent financial turmoil across the University of Alaska system. After a fraught summer, Governor Mike Dunleavy slashed the state’s higher-education budget in August to the tune of $70 million over two years. The cuts have called into question the very future of the University of Alaska, which is comprised of UAF, University of Alaska Anchorage, and University of Alaska Southeast. Each of the three universities manages a number of branch campuses that provide higher education access to rural communities where many Alaska Native students live. A plan to consolidate the campuses seemed to spell the end for these smaller programs, but that was put on hold in early October after stakeholders, including the agency that accredits all three universities in the system, expressed concern. Later that month, to prepare for the budget cuts, expedited reviews were announced for several programs, including many that serve rural and Native students, due to “high cost and low enrollment.”

Peter said UAF has made Alaska Native and Indigenous programs a strategic goal, so he does not believe any of his programs will be eliminated after this review. But the budget cuts will likely impact staffing and Rural Student Services’ ability to deliver high-quality programming. “We still are uncertain what the additional reductions are that we’re going to have to take at each of the universities,” he said.

UAF’s longstanding support of Native students is rare among colleges and universities in the United States. Few higher education institutions outside of the 37 tribal colleges and universities offer culturally responsive programming for Native students.

One result is that Native students, or prospective students, can be treated as though they don’t belong on campus. When two young men from the Mohawk Nation visited Colorado State University, their “dream school,” in 2018, they registered for a campus tour. They initially got lost when they arrived on campus, and joined the tour group late. A parent on the tour called the campus police, who removed the brothers for questioning. Following the incident, the American Indian College Fund challenged mainstream colleges and universities to create a plan to increase visibility and promote college access and success for Native American students. A subsequent report posited that the “invisibility” of Indigenous people to many in the U.S. leads to “a college access and completion crisis among Native American students. When a student is invisible, his or her academic and social needs are not met.”

And though some steps have been taken at the federal level to help Native students, there has been no formal federal recognition of the assimilationist boarding schools many Native children were forced to attend until the late 1960s. The National Congress of American Indians called for such recognition in a 2016 resolution.

But some universities in the West have proactively embraced their Native students. Indigenous centers have popped up at flagship universities around the region, including at the universities of Colorado, Washington, and Montana. At Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Lorenzo Max serves as a traditional knowledge scholar in the Elder Cultural Advisors program. A Navajo tribal member, Max attended a government boarding school as a child. His experience there underpins the knowledge he wants to pass on to the Native students he works with at NAU.

“I see my role as trying to, in some ways, undo the damages that we encountered,” Max told Bitterroot.

The boarding schools, Max said, internalized many negative lessons for the Native children who attended them. “You’re told that your medicine people are witch doctors. When you go home, you’re ashamed to talk in your own language or participate in traditional ceremonies,” he said. “For that reason, a lot of our pupils were broken, and some of them never fully recovered.”

Max co-teaches a class on Navajo philosophy with Manley Begay, an enrolled Navajo and professor in the department of Applied Indigenous Studies. He also mentors students at the Native American Cultural Center, which NAU opened in 2011. As an elder working at the university, Max tries to share Native values with students. “I want them to be proud of who they are,” he said.

“Elders in Native American communities play a very important role in terms of maintaining and furthering our culture and language. They’re storytellers, philosophers, herbalists, astronomers, historians, and medicine people,” Chad Hamill, vice president of Native American initiatives at NAU and an enrolled Spokane tribal member, said. “Their primary function is to be there as counselors for Native American students to provide cultural guidance to those students.”

Indigenous knowledge doesn’t always fit comfortably within academia, but Hamill said that students eagerly seek it out. “A lot of our Native students, and certainly our non-Native students, are very inspired by and hungry for this kind of pedagogy that puts them in touch with important aspects of traditional knowledge and culture.”

Max usually teaches from songs, not books. His lessons touch on concepts such as hózhǫ́, the Diné word for happiness, beauty, love, compassion, and harmony. “Hózhǫ́ is so powerful that it’s in every song that we have,” he said. “It’s also the foundation of who we are, our language, our knowledge, our culture. … It’s in everything in nature. That’s Navajo Philosophy 101, our human core.”

As a medicine man, Max wants students to understand that learning Indigenous customs and concepts is what keeps them alive. “My father, my grandfather, my uncles, all the medicine people that were in my lineage, they’re all gone. I’m the last one,” he said. “And if the students don’t relearn it, one day it’ll be like the wind just swept through … as if it was never there at all.”

When education systems do not focus on the unique needs of Indigineous students, there are clear consequences. Native Americans are less likely to enroll in college, and those who do are less likely to graduate. According to the American Indian College Fund, only 14 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives age 25 and older have earned a bachelor’s degree, compared to more than 30 percent for the overall U.S. population. Native students are more likely to be older, to work full-time, and to support families than traditional undergraduates.

A focus on tribal knowledge and systems can help. Native students who start at a tribal college, for instance, before transferring to a university are more likely to stay enrolled and graduate than their peers who begin at a four-year institution. A research brief from the Center for Minority Serving Institutes notes that tribal-run colleges “recognize the need for culturally relevant material. By incorporating Native American values, tribal languages, and tribal history, their curriculum is culturally sensitive and provides Native American students with courses that meet their needs, contrasting with the curriculum of mainstream four-year institutions.”

Because Native students make up less than 1 percent of the total college-going population in the United States, they are often lumped together with other students of color.

“Colleges and universities tend to think of African American and Chicano students when they recruit for diversity,” said Rob Williams Jr., a law professor and co-chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona, and a member of the Lumbee Tribe. “It’s hard for administrators to justify disproportionate investments for Native American students. When more Native students attend a university, there tends to be more support.”

Another difficulty in establishing such programs lies in the fact that Native American students are not a homogeneous group. Northern Arizona University, for instance, enrolls around 1,500 Native American students from 115 tribal nations. But NAU stands out from many of its peers in its quest to become the nation’s leading university serving Native Americans, a goal that is “written into our strategic plan,” Hamill said.

The institution works closely with tribal communities to see where NAU can put resources. For instance, the university participates in the Diné Institute for Navajo Nation Educators, a professional development program for public school teachers that pairs NAU faculty with K-12 teachers on the Navajo Nation to prepare culturally relevant, responsive curriculum long before a student enters college.

When Williams joined the University of Arizona faculty in 1987, very few Native students had graduated from the law school. “For the first 100 years, less than six Native Americans had graduated with law degrees,” he said. Thanks in part to Williams creating the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program, that number has swelled to more than 200.

“We have the largest number of Native law students of any of the top 50 law schools, and we have the largest percentage of Native students at any law school in the country,” Williams said.

The program offers dozens of courses related to federal Indian law, economic and community development, nation building, Indigenous governance, and international human rights. There are several law programs that offer courses in federal Indian law, but few that offer as many as UA.

“It’s just mind-boggling that I can go to this program for three years and take basically every class that applies to Indian country,” said Summer Blaze Aubrey, a third-year law student who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a descendent of the Blackfeet Nation.

Close to 90 percent of the students in the program are Indigenous. Aubrey said she feels validated being surrounded by other Native students, especially after taking classes outside of the program. She remembers talking with a white classmate in the library during her first semester of law school while she was trying to get through hundreds of pages of reading.

“He asked me if I had ever read a book before,” she said. “And right then, it dawned on me how important that network is that I have here at this school.”

Earlier this year, the University of Arizona launched its Native American Advancement and Tribal Engagement Initiative, which creates a senior leadership position that reports directly to UA President Robert C. Robbins. Williams will spearhead the initiative.

Like Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona, the University of Alaska Fairbanks targets the skills and knowledge that Native students want to bring back to their communities. One example is the Rural Human Services certificate program offered at the main Fairbanks campus and a satellite in Bethel, which serves as a regional hub for 56 Yup’ik communities.

Students in the two-year program are flown in from surrounding villages for one week each month. Once on campus, they take courses on addiction counseling, mental health, and case management. Each cohort is made up of 25 Indigenous adult students, and the certificate is a precursor to an associate degree or a bachelor’s in social work. “Most all of them are already doing some kind of work in their community that’s related to human or social services,” assistant professor Diane McEachern said.

The curriculum draws extensively from Indigenous knowledge about behavioral health. McEachern, for instance, invites two Yup’ik elders into each of her classes. “My students say that to walk into a university classroom and actually see elders there gives them a visceral sense of relief,” she said. “Elders are cultural anchors. They share their wisdom, provide support, and contribute to a sense of safety in the classroom.”

McEachern explained that the curriculum exposes students to non-Western ways of providing social services. “We bring the most current ideas and approaches from leading Indigenous scholars in the field of social work,” she said. One result is that students often get emotional during class sessions because the issues they are discussing, such as addiction and suicide, have likely touched their own lives. “They get a chance to intellectually grow, but they also get a chance to personally heal.”

The experience teaching in RHS has led McEachern to reflect on her role as a white educator. “I’ll be honest — in the very beginning, if there was a lot of emotion in the classroom, I was very uncomfortable. And then, when I’d look around the room, I realized I was the only one who was unsettled. Everyone else was fine,” she said.

Graduates of the bachelor of social work program are just now starting to fill critical leadership roles in organizations in their communities. Carmen Pitka, a Yup’ik tribal member, began the RHS program in 2008 and completed her bachelor’s degree in 2017. As the program director at Bethel’s Child Advocacy Center, Pitka sees her role as empowering families to decide what’s best for them.

“A lot of the models that we bring into this area are pretty much all Western. They are systems that [aren’t developed by Native communities],” Pitka said. “A big piece of what’s missing out here is our own people helping one another.”

Other students express similar sentiments. “There’s historical trauma where people came in culturally encapsulated and tried to make their ways work here,” said social work student Leanna Isaac, who is Yup’ik. “But here we have our own solutions, and [the RHS program] helps bring our own solutions out and give us the empowerment and encouragement to find our voice.”

These unique, in-person programs are at risk under the pending cuts to the University of Alaska system. Some have suggested moving programs online. But Evon Peter, the Native programs vice chancellor, pointed out online education is not possible in many communities. “The rural campuses in Alaska serve a critical need to provide that opportunity for post-secondary education to people in those regions. It’s hard for me to imagine us not having those campuses in place.”

These programs, after all, are far more than just credits to achieve from a distance — they have lasting impact on communities that are overlooked by most in higher education.

“My concern is that we have developed and designed these programs, and they’ve grown out of a responsiveness to community needs of students,” Peter said. “We have the experience in being able to operate and deliver them well.”