Nurturing native Americans on campus

It was a humorous start to a serious task - helping professors understand their native students. Some would complain, he says, that Indians are "uncontrollable" and do crazy things like jump out of windows into snowbanks. Mr. Peshlakai invited them to his sheep ranch, where they saw his grandchildren grab their bikes and disappear into a vast landscape. "The whole desert is their playground," he says.

Peshlakai still has an edge of anger, something many native students can relate to. "I saw my people denied life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," he says. Like many in his generation, he was sent to a boarding school where he was whipped if he was caught speaking Navajo.

He tells the students, "You have to have a college degree today," but he's trying to make sure that they can survive in the dominant culture without losing their heritage. "A lot of the native American students write papers and let me critique them. I tell them sometimes, 'This is not true.' And they say, 'I got it out of a book.' Well, it's not true."

Last fall, two more resident elders joined him - Bob Lomadafkie, a Hopi, and Marina Vasquez, a Mayan from Mexico. "As an elder, our position is nonthreatening, because we have no influence on their grades," Mr. Lomadafkie says. "We encourage them to seek out tutoring, or if they need financial help or psychological help, we can guide them to [the right resources]."

The hope is that Indian students won't drop out when they hit a rough patch if they can turn to these mentors. The 1,300 native students make up about 10 percent of NAU's student body. But only 29 percent of first-time native American freshmen graduate within six years, according to the institutional planning office. While that's significantly higher than the national average, it's much lower than the 46 percent rate for the overall group of first-time freshmen at NAU.

There's also a physical structure on campus that embodies the support network: a Navajo hogan, where talks are given and students can have traditional ceremonies that might otherwise require a long trip home. Located outside the building that houses the indigenous studies department, the octagonal wooden structure was built by students and a local nonprofit group in 2002. Peshlakai brought soil from his land to create the hard-packed floor. In the snow nearby, branches of traditional medicinal plants peek out, waiting to bloom again in spring.

These efforts are still too new to track their effect on student retention, Professor Trujillo says, but there's anecdotal evidence that makes her optimistic.

Take Temashio Anderson, a recent graduate who grew up on the Navajo and Pomo Indian reservations. "The resident elders are very important," he says. "Sometimes you do need somebody to talk to - that understands, that's been through these different problems before.... They always welcome you with open arms - kind of like your grandpa or grandma."

As a teenager, he says, he was full of anger and got into trouble with gangs and drugs. "I stopped one day and thought about what I'd been doing.... Everybody has some kind of vision of who they want to be ... and I envisioned myself as maybe someone who's helpful to the community, a mentor to the children, [someone] involved in his culture."

Now Mr. Anderson has bachelor's degrees in both environmental science and applied indigenous studies, and he hopes to continue studying uranium contamination on the Navajo reservation. He always consults with native leaders and residents to shape his projects, even though it can slow things down. That stands in contrast to a history of exploitative research, he says. Anderson is part of a new tradition that "really stresses that research needs to be done for the [native] people, and it needs to ultimately benefit the people."

166,000
The number of American Indians and Alaskan native students in higher education in 2002, more than twice as many as in 1976.

11.5%
Percentage of the native American population age 25 and older who had at least a bachelor's degree in 2000 (compared with 24.4 percent for the overall population).

60%
Percentage of enrolled native Americans who are female.

56%
Percentage of native American full-time undergraduates who received financial aid (similar to average for all groups).

0.5%
Percentage of native American full-time faculty members at degree-granting institutions in 2001 (native Americans are about 1.5 percent of the US population).

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