Tribes Embrace Colleges as Best Hope for Building Self-Reliance, Prosperity

Across this rugged Indian reservation, where poverty and isolation grind so many hopes away, the struggle to solve one of the most stubborn problems in American education is at last showing results.

The signs are small but unmistakable: Lorri Not Afraid, a rancher’s wife, is striving to earn an accounting degree and to open her own business. Jane Holds The Enemy, once ashamed of not knowing how to help her children with their homework, is studying computer science and math. Donna Dreamer, who returned to the classroom after 15 years, has an internship this summer in a local government office.

They and several hundred other Crow tribe members are students at Little Big Horn College, a makeshift campus of a few old trailers and a gray cinder-block building just off a highway near where Gen. George Armstrong Custer made his doomed last stand.

Little Big Horn is one of about 30 tribal colleges expanding across the West: remote, rustic outposts of higher education that many Indian leaders call their next, perhaps last, chance to revive long-lost traditions of self-reliance and prosperity.

Here and on other reservations, the severe lack of education has long been a root cause of the economic crisis afflicting tribes. For many Indians, completing high school is a feat. Their dropout rate in some places exceeds 50%. And Indian students who do graduate seldom reach college. It is too expensive, too far or too foreign to their cultures. Nationwide, the rate at which Indians attend college and graduate is rising, but it remains lower than that of any other minority group.

Most families here are so poor that finding work takes priority over school, particularly college. But jobs are scarce. Even casino gambling, an economic boost to other Indian tribes, is ailing here.

This is the dismal culture that tribal colleges are trying to shatter. Their enrollment has doubled to 25,000 students this decade, and most are bracing for more because new welfare policies across the nation are forcing many Indians to learn a trade and get a job. Most of the colleges are two-year institutions that emphasize technical or business degrees and also offer courses in liberal arts and tribal heritage.

“We have to change the way people think,” said Janine Pease Pretty On Top, the founder and president of Little Big Horn College. “A lot of them have been content with only a marginal existence. They don’t realize that life can be lived better.”

It is an enormous task, and many of the colleges are battling great odds to succeed. Their budgets are tight, teachers come and go, and students have other serious worries besides classes. Most live in poverty--the average household income on the Crow reservation is $11,000--and most are women in their 20s with several children.

Just reaching the Little Big Horn campus is difficult, especially during Montana’s harsh winters. The Crow reservation, which has 7,000 residents, is bigger than Rhode Island. For some students, gas is the largest expense.

“It’s hard, but being here is something I know I have to do,” said Lorri Not Afraid, 32. “I don’t want to be stuck in a dead-end job all my life, and I don’t want to move somewhere else just to get better. I want to help myself and my community.”

Little Big Horn’s enrollment has increased to 350 students; there once were 32. But graduating classes are small. Some students quit; others spend years juggling college with jobs or demands at home before earning a degree. Of those who do graduate, about half proceed to a four-year university.

The college is obtaining more private grants to upgrade its technology--the campus is wired to the Internet--and to help break its dependence on government assistance. Without federal aid, most tribal colleges would be forced to close or to raise tuition much higher than the current average of $1,600 a year, a price already too steep for some reservation residents.

This spring, tribal colleges received a strong vote of confidence from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, a prestigious education group that spent two years visiting tribal campuses. Carnegie officials are urging the federal government to devote more money to Indian students.

“Considering the enormously difficult conditions tribal colleges endure, with resources most collegiate institutions would find unacceptably restrictive, their impact is remarkable,” the Carnegie report said.

At Little Big Horn, the science and computer labs were once gym locker rooms. They were renovated by carpentry students, who also built desks. The library, also housed in the former gym, has an array of books on Indian history and many periodicals, but its tattered fiction collection barely fills three tiny shelves.

Still, students keep coming. Half of the college’s 18 teachers are Indian. Some converse with students in the Crow language, but classes almost always are conducted in English. Nearly all the students here and at other tribal colleges are Indians, and most attend class full-time.

“These students are so hungry for any kind of education,” said Mari Eggers, a science teacher. “There’s absolutely no expectation for them to succeed. The expectation, really, is for them not to be here.”

Donna Dreamer, who has five children, had not been in a classroom since she left high school more than a decade ago. She returned after a search for work proved futile.

Now she is studying business administration, with most of her tuition covered by federal Pell grants, and is working as an intern in a vocational office of the Crow tribal government. She and her children do homework together around the kitchen table.

Some of her friends talk of making the same leap to college, she said, but few do. “They think they are too old or don’t belong,” Dreamer said. “It’s hard to change that because hardly anyone even knows what college is really like. . . . But I want to do what my parents could not.”

Little Big Horn College, which opened in 1981 with only a few students, two ragged trailers and a garage insulated with blankets, is accredited, as nearly all tribal colleges are. It has a $3-million budget, well-equipped teaching labs and 90 computers. It operates independently of the local tribal government and the state education department.

The local economy, however, is bleak. On most of the reservations tribal colleges serve, unemployment often exceeds 60%. In a recent survey of graduates over four years, Little Big Horn found 51% had jobs and 24% were at other colleges. The other 25% were neither employed nor enrolled in school.

“We need to expand the reservation economy, not just match people to the same old few jobs,” said Pease Pretty On Top, the college president, whose parents were teachers. “It’s hard because not many tribal members have ever participated in the work force, even as clerks. But we’re starting to push back that frontier.”

The college recently signed a deal with the National Park Service, which manages the Little Big Horn Battlefield national monument, a mile from campus. Now the college has exclusive rights to design and lead bus tours of the historic site. Scott Russell, a guide this summer, was trained in the tribal college’s new institute for microbusiness and recently graduated.