American Indians Are Aggressively Recruited to Study at Dartmouth : Education: A special program helps them adjust to life at the Ivy League school. Graduates have amassed an impressive post-college record.

Bill Yellowtail, a 17-year-old Crow from rural Montana, came to Dartmouth College in 1965, excited to be one of the first three Indians to attend the prestigious school in more than 20 years.

Two years later he dropped out. He felt overwhelmed and isolated. And he was disappointed with his performance at the demanding Ivy League school.

The scenario was nearly repeated 10 years later, when Bruce Duthu felt torn between the need to keep up with better-prepared white students and the desire to return to the safety of the Houma community in Dulac, La.

Duthu stayed for two reasons: “No. 1: I was getting a really good education. No. 2: there weren’t many schools out there that had such a supportive program.”

Since its founding in 1970, Dartmouth’s Native American Program has helped Duthu and scores of Indian, Eskimo and Hawaiian students cope with the demands of being in a foreign and often frightening place. The program got a lot of help in the beginning from people such as Yellowtail, who returned to Dartmouth and completed his degree in 1971.

The school’s aggressive recruitment and retention efforts have drawn more American Indians to Dartmouth than to all the other Ivy League schools combined.

This year, 3% of the students are American Indians. That is three times the group’s representation in the U.S. population. The school claims a graduation rate of 75% to 80%--far above the national average of 10% at non-tribal, post-secondary schools.

Those graduates have amassed an impressive post-college record. Lori Cupp (class of ‘79) was the first Navajo woman to become a surgeon. Louise Erdrich, a Chippewa (class of ‘76), is a well-known author. Her works include “Love Medicine,” “The Beet Queen” and “Crown of Columbus,” written with her husband, Dartmouth Indian studies professor Michael Dorris.

Yellowtail, a Democrat, soon will begin his eighth year as a Montana state senator. Duthu returned from law school and practice in Louisiana to head Dartmouth’s program for three years, then became an assistant professor at Vermont Law School. Arvo Mikkanen (class of ‘83), a Kiowa-Comanche from Norman, Okla., is a law professor at Oklahoma City University and tribal judge.

“I’m deeply impressed with the college and its lasting commitment,” said Yellowtail, 43, a rancher still living near remote Wyola, Mont. He recently left the program’s advisory committee after eight years.

Like many old Eastern colleges, including Harvard in Massachusetts and William and Mary in Virginia, Dartmouth was founded “for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian tribes. . .and also of English youth and any others.”

Like the rest, Dartmouth soon forgot the promise in its charter. It graduated just 19 Indians in its first 200 years. Until the 1970s, all that was left of the first objective was its team name, the Indians.

Then, in 1970, in his inaugural address as Dartmouth president, John Kemeny pledged to rededicate the college to its original mission.

“The time was right. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the entire nation was becoming aware of minority concerns, including Native American concerns and educational needs,” Yellowtail recalled.

“Dr. Kemeny was a broad-minded and forward-thinking leader. . . . It was natural for him to seize on the opportunities for Dartmouth to renew its commitment.”

Kemeny’s efforts were supported by students such as Yellowtail and Duane Bird Bear. “The college could be doing more positive things than having Indian mascots and kids beating drums at football games,” Bird Bear said.

It began with recruitment and counseling of Indian students who had been admitted. Most of them came from reservations in the West or other rural, impoverished areas.

The difficulty today is in attracting Indian applicants. Many, though intelligent enough, attended substandard schools and therefore lack adequate preparation, and Dartmouth has no remedial programs.

“Dartmouth starts here--a lot of our students start here,” said Colleen Larimore, the program’s current head, placing one hand level with her eyes and the other at her throat. “They’ve got to run to catch up.”

Bird Bear, 43, a Mandan-Hidatsa, hesitated to apply to Dartmouth. His schooling on the Ft. Bristol reservation in North Dakota had been well below par.

He left his school as a junior and spent three years in prep school before he won admission to Dartmouth. His two Indian classmates also were prep school graduates.

“There are a number of bright and talented Native American students going to schools in the West, maybe on reservations, that probably have the basic skills and intelligence to go to a place like Dartmouth, but they need the encouragement,” Bird Bear said.

Confidence remains a problem. Shawn Attakai, a Navajo freshman from Chinle, Ariz., applied only because a counselor at his Flagstaff high school urged him to do so.

“I seriously thought I wouldn’t get in,” he said. “On my application, I just hand-wrote it, and on the others I typed really neatly. I was surprised I got in.”

The program faltered at first, mainly because it was too ambitious, Yellowtail said.

“There was a disastrous attrition rate in the first few years,” he said. “The college recruited some students who did not stand a very good chance of surviving under the best of circumstances. Dartmouth is just not for everyone, and it’s certainly not for every Native American, by any means.”

More recently, the program’s sophistication--and its graduation rate--have improved, Larimore said. She credited aggressive recruiting.

Cupp, for example, finished high school in Crown Point, N.M., at age 16 and was graduated from Dartmouth at 20. Yet she, too, lacked confidence and basic education and found the college “a little bit intimidating.”

“I think it was coming out of a reservation, a reservation high school, because (other students) came from prep schools,” she said in Gallup, N.M., where she works for the Indian Health Service.

Program counselors now help Indian students tailor their college careers to fit their own skills and needs.

“Some people, regular advisers, would try to say, ‘You have to do this work in this quarter. You have to take chemistry, biology and physics in this quarter,’ and that’s not true,” Cupp said.

“What Indian counselors would do is say, ‘Wait a minute. Obviously, this is going to be too fast-paced. This is too big a chunk you’re taking at one time. Stretch it out.”’

Cultural differences can also present large obstacles.

“I can remember sitting in a sociology class during my days as a student here and the professor asking, ‘What values can you say Native Americans hold as a generic group that Anglo-Americans hold as well?’ ” Larimore said. “People were throwing out answers left and right, and he was saying, ‘Wrong, wrong.’ There wasn’t one we could come up with.”

The competitive attitude that got many mainstream students admitted to Dartmouth is one example, Cupp said.

“There’s an overt drive in the outside world to compete heavily at the expense of just about anything,” she said. Among Indians, “if you had those ideas of trying to get ahead of somebody, you were considered selfish and a bad person and people didn’t want to associate with you.”

Another handicap is custom of learning by quietly watching one’s elders, rather than taking an active role in class, Cupp said. “A lot of Indian students weren’t even aware that was holding them back,” she said.

The program compensates by offering its own group-oriented tutoring as an alternative to the college’s, in which students must vie for attention.

It also holds weekly discussions to try to ease the Indian students’ lost sense of community.

“The native community, the extended family, is so very important, and there is so much constantly available family support for a young person that one finds oneself terribly alone when you leave this situation,” Yellowtail said.

Lisa Clark, 34, a Passamaquoddy from Lowell, Mass., and a biochemistry graduate student, said the discussions sometimes turn to “highly personal things, like alcoholism in the family,” a prevalent problem among Indians. “Last night, we had a rollicking discussion on being full-blood versus mixed-blood.”

At other times, the topic may be ignorance and insensitivity.

“When I told people I was part of the Native American program, this guy across the hall said, ‘Well, I thought all Native Americans wore buffalo,”’ said Randy Quinones, a sophomore from Waipahu, Hawaii. “He said it seriously. My jaw dropped.”