'For The Sake Of The Nation': Tribal Colleges Revitalize Language, Culture
By Nora Mabie and Cindy Graf, Lee Enterprises
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK — A layer of smoke obscured the otherwise iconic mountain vistas that tourists had flocked to see on a hot July day last year.
Along the shores of Two Medicine Lake, tucked behind rows of campsites filled with tents and Sprinter vans, a few dozen Blackfeet community members gathered in front of the view, novel to visitors but one their ancestors have known for generations.
A mix of elders and young people were there to gain and share knowledge about medicinal properties of plants native to the area, long used by the Blackfeet Tribe for healing. There’s yarrow for toothaches, juniper for kidneys. Mountain ash improves heart health. A tincture of sage, mint and rosehip treats coughs.
“We had our own medicine chest before (Indian Health Service) came,” said Darnell Davis Rides At The Door, a Blackfeet keeper of tradition and herbalist. She stood behind a long tapestry-covered table lined with Mason jars filled with herbs she’d handpicked. As someone tasked with revitalizing traditions like ways of healing, Rides At The Door knows all too well that many of these cultural practices must be stewarded if they are to survive.
Hundreds of years of harmful U.S. policy, which first intended to eliminate tribes and later to assimilate them, resulted in generational trauma and widespread loss of language and culture. The Blackfeet Community College (BCC) event at Glacier National Park is one of many examples of how tribal colleges in Montana play a pivotal role in ensuring those cultural traditions aren’t forgotten and revitalizing cultural identity for generations to come.
Montana is the only state in the country in which each Indian reservation is home to or near a tribal college. These schools — which were founded on shoestring budgets often offering classes in church basements, trailers or school gymnasiums — now serve a crucial role in community success, something experts say is a miracle. These schools offer more than just an affordable education. It’s at tribal colleges that students learn about who they are and where they come from — knowledge that is not just essential to the empowerment of individuals but to the prosperity of sovereign nations.
Why tribal colleges?
Carol Juneau, who was instrumental in the founding of BCC, said the tribal college movement began during a wave of national activism rooted in both Native and non-Native communities.
In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty. Around the same time, student groups protested the Vietnam War. And in 1965, the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination at the polls, was signed into law.
Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, the American Indian Movement — which condemned racism and advocated for tribal sovereignty — was founded in 1968. The Indian Civil Rights Act, which provides protections similar to those in the U.S. Constitution, passed that same year. And in the 1970s, the official U.S. policy toward Native American tribes shifted from termination — meant to eliminate tribes — to self-determination, meant to empower tribal governments.
“We wanted to determine our own destiny,” Juneau reflected. “We wanted to determine our own education systems. We wanted to run our own education systems, and I think tribal colleges became a vehicle to do that. … Having education is vital to building communities and strengthening families.”
Established in 1968, Navajo Community College — now called Diné College — was the first tribal college in the country. Six years later, the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council chartered Blackfeet Community College. By 1984, all seven reservations in Montana boasted a tribal college.
Janine Pease helped found Little Big Horn College on the Crow Reservation in 1980 and served as its president from 1982 until 2000. She said tribal colleges in the state began, in part, because the Montana University System did not sufficiently serve Indigenous students.
The Montana University System (MUS) consists of 16 public campuses. Though scattered across the state, most are far from the nearest reservation, where the majority of Native Americans in Montana reside.
For students living on reservations, attending university often meant leaving one’s community, support system, family, language and culture. It also meant being part of a student body with few Native peers and learning from mostly white instructors.
“We had, in those days, lots of starts and very few finishes,” Pease said of Native students enrolling within the Montana University System. “People would get there maybe — which was moving heaven and Earth — but once they got there, it was very difficult for them to stay for lots of reasons.”
Ramey Growing Thunder, who is Dakota and a Diné descendant, remembers the culture shock she felt while attending Dawson Community College in Glendive, about 120 miles south of the Fort Peck Reservation where she grew up. Growing Thunder says she was one of three Native American students, and most of her professors were white. She eventually transferred to Fort Peck Community College, a tribal college on the reservation, where she learned about language and culture from an elder in her community.
“That really made me feel like I belonged,” she said. “The professors were Native, and a lot of the courses talked about our history here in Fort Peck.”
Growing Thunder went on to earn a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies at the University of Montana.
Native Americans account for nearly 7% of the state’s total population. While American Indian enrollment across the entire 16-campus MUS system hovers around 6%, so largely on par, it varies greatly from campus to campus. Community colleges boast higher percentages of Native students, for example, and four-year options closer to reservations like Montana State University Northern in Havre also have a larger Native student body.
For the current academic year, about 7% of students at the UM are Native as compared with under 5% at MSU Bozeman.
Native students who do enroll at a four-year MUS program are less likely to graduate than their non-Native peers, largely due to many of the barriers Growing Thunder identified. Data from the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education shows that Native students who began in the fall 2020 semester had a 28% four-year graduation rate as compared with a 39% graduation rate for non-Native students. Looking at the six-year graduation rate for the latest class that has crossed that mark, the gap almost doubles to 34% and 56%, respectively.
Tribal colleges close this gap in higher education.
‘Miracle story’: The development of tribal colleges in Montana
Karla Bird, tribal outreach specialist at the University of Montana, called the development of each tribal college a “miracle story.”
“I think they’re miracle places,” she added. “Because they’ve survived and grown despite not having equitable resources.”
When Pease became executive director of Little Big Horn College in 1982, the school consisted of three or four offices, a giant room in the back of the Head Start building, a trailer and a tin shed. It was funded with only $53,000 from federal legislation. At the time, LBHC offered classes in general math, writing, Crow language and history. Pease remembers the classes “would fill as soon as we could announce them.”
“People were anxious and thirsty for education they never had the chance (to access),” she said.
A hard-fought eight years later, LHBC received its accreditation as a two-year community college. The campus served 300 students.
By the time Pease left in 2000, LBHC was operating out of an old tribal gymnasium. A library was installed on the gym floor and rows of classrooms replaced the bleachers. The whole thing, Pease noted, “was heresy,” given the prominence of basketball in Indian Country. As LBHC earned grants, it began to expand, adding more science classrooms and faculty offices.
Pease will tell anyone listening that the origin of tribal colleges in Montana cannot be separated from Native people’s desire to create strong communities replete with the culture of which they’d been robbed. The mission of tribal colleges, Pease said, became one of “nation-building.”
“It’s not just education for the sake of it or for the sake of individuals, but for the sake of the nation,” she said. “So the nation would go forward. And that’s distinctive.”
Success for tribal colleges, Pease articulated, isn’t necessarily having the highest number of graduates work in a certain field. Instead, it means educating and empowering a community of people so their tribe — and its unique culture, history, language and traditions — can prosper and succeed.
‘We have to know who we are’
Central to the tribal college mission is weaving Indigenous culture and history into curricula. Often, these lessons are specific to the land and people around the campus. Today, students learn the Blackfoot language at Blackfeet Community College. They learn about the treaties that influenced the Fort Belknap Indian Community at Aaniiih Nakoda College. They participate in beading workshops at Little Big Horn College.
When asked about the importance of infusing culture and language into curricula, Carol Juneau gasped.
“My gosh,” she said. “We have to know who we are! We have to know where we came from. We have to know what our rights are. We have to know who our family was. We have to know our ceremonies and be proud of who we are. Having that tie to who you are as a people is vital.”
Studies show that connecting with tribal languages and culture promotes healing, affirms identity, improves health outcomes and strengthens community within Indigenous populations. A Pew Research Center study revealed that more than 90% of people believe language is core to developing a sense of belonging.
Yet, on the Fort Peck Reservation — home to roughly 9.000 people — relatively few people participate in the traditional ways, said Alexx Eagleman-James, a language instructor at Fort Peck Community College. As a consequence of harmful federal policy and historical trauma that has transcended generations, Eagleman-James said it’s not uncommon for people to feel shame for not knowing their language, traditions or culture.
Elijah Hopkins, vice president for student services at FPCC, attributes many of the present social ills to this disconnection from culture. The median household income on the reservation is $45,026 — almost $26,000 less than the statewide number — and the most recent Community Health Assessment found reservation residents “face a substantial disparity in life expectancy.”
The severance from culture, Hopkins said, “is literally why we feel the need to numb ourselves, or to be destructive. And that is my driving force.”
As elders age and pass away, that relationship to culture and language is at greater risk of being lost.
“I can’t even count on one hand how many first language speakers we have here,” Eagleman-James said, adding that the coronavirus pandemic devastated the tribal community.
Eagleman-James grew up outside of the Fort Peck Reservation, but her grandfather who raised her spoke Dakota as his first language. Each summer, they would hit the powwow trail and travel to sacred sites to participate in ceremonies. Even as a young girl, Eagleman-James could see how speaking Dakota transformed her grandfather into someone happier and more whole.
That’s why she committed to learning the language. Participating in a past Fort Peck Community College program where she was paired with a first language speaker, she studied and prepared to become a Dakota language instructor herself.
“Our whole identity” starts with language, she explained, and it’s so much more than just a word-for-word translation found in a textbook — Dakota language reflects the values of its people.
Take "love" as an example. There’s no single word for "love" in the Dakota language. Rather, it’s a series of values — humility and compassion; to cherish things; wisdom. Love is having a deep understanding of all these things at once, Hopkins says. “It’s a behavior and a way of life.”
Like at every tribal college in Montana, FPCC is one of the only places where Dakota people can learn about their culture through language. There are only a handful of first language speakers still alive, so ensuring knowledge is transmitted to younger generations is essential to the future of the tribes.
Hopkins and Eagleman-James spearhead those efforts at the college, but both say these programs need more support — like compensating elders for their time, creating immersive spaces for learners and investing in cultural activities that show young people language is an entry point for understanding themselves.
While he believes in the power of language revitalization, Hopkins said insufficient funding makes for difficult work.
“(It) requires dealing with multiple systems, state, private, nonprofit — it’s hard to get the funding,” he said. “You get burned out on grant reporting.”
‘I love it here’
On a Tuesday afternoon in October, four Aaniiih Nakoda College cultural ecology students walked through a field on the Fort Belknap Reservation, stepping over sagebrush and dodging holes. They were looking for the site of a past fire.
Cultural ecology is ANC’s first bachelor’s program. Professor Dan Kinsey said the goal of the program is to prepare students to become “caretakers of our homelands.” Students participating in the program learn about how the Aaniiih and Nakoda people once used fire in service of conservation. They study federal Indian law to understand how various treaties and legal decisions shaped their land today. Students helped facilitate the reintroduction of the endangered black-footed ferrets. They study mapping and learn about sacred sites on the reservation.
“We want these people to have the knowledge, skills and abilities to fill jobs in the local community related to resource management,” Kinsey said of his cultural ecology students. “We want these guys to be the managers.”
Graduates have gone on to work at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and within tribal governments.
When the students arrived at an old fire site where a welder started a blaze in 2012, cultural ecology instructor Zachary Lenning showed them how to square off an area of rangeland and collect grass samples. They’ll analyze later how the fire affected growth in the area.
Wearing a floral headband tied around his forehead, Joesiah Longfox knelt on the ground as he cut pieces of grass and stuffed them into a Ziploc bag.
Growing up on the reservation, Longfox said he never thought he’d become a scientist. He assumed he’d end up a janitor or inherit his dad’s ranch. Tired of working at the front desk of the recreation center and eager to be outside, he enrolled in ANC’s cultural ecology program. Now he dreams of one day working for the tribes’ buffalo management program.
Longfox had taken a few classes at ANC in 2019 but quit when he ran out of money. This program — and being a scientist — is why he came back to school, and why he’s stayed.
“I love it here,” he said.
This story was created with the support of the Higher Education Media Fellowship at the Institute for Citizens & Scholars. The Fellowship supports new reporting into issues related to postsecondary career and technical education.