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Tribal Colleges Spread, Marking Slow Progress

By Andrew Metz | Staff Correspondent

November 11, 2003

Ron His Horse is Thunder, President of Sitting Bull College at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Fort Yates, North Dakota. (Newsday / Alejandra Villa)

Fort Yates, N.D. - When Sitting Bull College officials wanted to build student housing, they didn't have a roster of wealthy alumni to bankroll the project.

They made it classwork.

So in a snow-covered construction site on the Missouri River one day last week, the students of Building Trades 142 were wearing canvas coveralls and utility belts, hammering and laying floor braces for the first residences in the Indian college's history.

"Guys! Where's my nails at?" shouted Dave Luger, the instructor, inspecting the sub-floor of a home for a future student on the desolate prairie land of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

"Look, that's way too wide," Luger said, pointing to the spacing of nail heads before dispatching his class back to earning college credit at a school that's as much about academic achievement, as revitalizing Indian communities.

"If I can help build a home for someone, I feel good about it," said student Art Taken Alive, 36, who as part of his associate's degree has helped build other homes here in one of the poorest, most remote places in the country. "I was homeless for a while, I know."

From the fringes of American academia, tribal colleges like this one are remaking the landscape of Indian life, nurturing a new generation with education and infusing reservations from Michigan to Washington State with optimism and ambition.

In the 35 years since the first college was chartered on the Navajo reservation in Arizona, the institutions have proliferated into a network of over 50 schools, offering everything from certificates in bison management to master's degrees in education.

Isolated and underfunded, they are recording successes, even as American Indians continue to rank at the bottom of college graduation rates and are more likely to drop out of school than other ethnic groups.

More than 30,000 students attend the schools, up from 2,100 in the early 1980s. In the last three years, bachelor's degrees from tribal colleges have increased threefold. And Native American enrollment in all higher education, on and off reservations, has increased 41 percent since 1993.

"The tribal colleges have changed the history of Indian education in America," said Rick Williams, president of the American Indian College Fund, which is holding its annual money-raising gala in Manhattan tonight. "Think of our tribal colleges as community centers. They usually have the only libraries on the reservation."

The schools first began emerging in the late '60s and early '70s out of broad government reforms in Indian education and a growing climate of native self-determination. After a century of harsh assimilationist policies, educators and tribal leaders responded with homegrown schools meant to regenerate their culture, stem the tradition of failure in mainstream institutions and cultivate new Indian leaders.

"Culture and language are the core of it. All the government policies in the past tried to do away with it. We are trying to undo that," said Gerald Gipp, executive director of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, the main umbrella organization for 35 of the schools.

While the tribal college movement has been accompanied by the growth of native studies throughout higher education, the reservation schools often the only affordable or accessible option for Indians are the proving grounds for change.

"Ironically, the reservations have become the bastions of hope for our cultures," said Gipp, a Sioux from Standing Rock. "That is where our cultures and our languages have continued to thrive and our colleges are trying to build on that."

At all the schools, courses in native ways are required or strongly encouraged, and many offer studies uniquely relevant to reservation life, such as the bison management program at Sitting Bull or casino administration on reservations with gaming. Nursing and education are also popular throughout the system, supplying local schools and hospitals with a workforce innately attuned to their needs.

"I want to go back and help my people," said JoBeth Brown Otter, 26, who is in Sitting Bull's education program. Every weekday, she leaves her two kids with a babysitter and drives 45 minutes here from her home on the South Dakota side of the reservation. "There are a lot of sacrifices you have to make in life if you want to get a college degree, but in the end it is going to be worth it."

The education program has a 100 percent job placement rate after graduation and a teacher here can expect to make over $20,000 a year, a good wage on Standing Rock, where unemployment often surges over 65 percent and officials estimate the average annual income is about $7,000.

The school, founded in 1973, has been behind a nascent tourism movement to promote its part of the Lewis and Clark trail and, of course, its legendary namesake, Chief Sitting Bull. The renowned Indian leader was killed and buried here. The college started a tribal transportation service, bought its own buffalo herd for research and education and began a construction firm, providing students with live training and job opportunities after graduation. The company has built around 30 homes across the 2.3-million-acre reservation.

"We have twin goals. One is education, the other is economic development," said the college president Ron His Horse Is Thunder, a great, great, great-grandson of Sitting Bull. "You are now seeing ... more and more educated people on the reservations. We are on the cusp of an explosion."

His school has its biggest population ever this year, 379 students, and he hopes to at least double that when a new, $40 million campus, which includes the dorms being built, is funded. Like most of the colleges, cash is always in short supply. The tribal schools collect about $3,900 per student from the federal government, shy of the $6,000 authorized by Congress and less than half the typical U.S. spending on mainstream universities and colleges.

Still, with leaky roofs and cramped rooms, students continue to come.

"We both came here for our sons," said Candace Gipp, 23, sitting with her sister-in-law, Corrine Kopp, in a lounge area at Sitting Bull. Gipp is studying to be a licensed nurse practitioner in a new program; Kopp is an environmental science student, planning on becoming a veterinarian someday.

The sisters-in-law coached each other through pregnancy three years ago, high school graduation and are now side-by-side determined to get college degrees.

"This college gives a lot of people hope," said Kopp, 19. "Sitting Bull College is a whole different world for me. I leave home and I focus on the future."