Jackson started with a tribal scholarship but fell below the 2.0 minimum grade point average to maintain it. The math was just too hard for her. But she sought help from the American Indian Programs center, got tutoring and decided to stick it out and try to get a two-year certification in microcomputers. Her new boyfriend has offered to help her financially until she can qualify for the scholarship again.
She just passed her two computer classes and another math class. And she is finding herself actually liking school.
Leah Fasten
Clinton Pattea, president of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, hopes to boost grim high school graduation rates in his own community and motivate teenagers to attend college.
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"This place has been good for us," Jackson says. "It feels good to be learning. I've started to look forward to going to class. And my kids are doing good. I feel like at least I have a chance."
Had she dropped out, she says, she would have been forced to move back home to her family house, a mud structure surrounded by trailers where she grew up with 11 brothers and sisters.
"It's crowded and there's a lot of drinking," she says. "I don't want my kids exposed to that."
The Native American convocation at the ASU student union two weeks ago was a blend of old and new traditions. Christmas songs were piped in before a traditional drum group began singing and beating. Of nearly 70 students getting their undergraduate and graduate degrees, about a dozen showed up for the formal ceremonies. Some wore traditional Indian attire, others modern dresses. One, an Oglala Lakota whose family drove from South Dakota to see her graduate from college, wore a feather in her mortarboard.
For cultures rich in tradition and ceremony, this was a chance for the graduates to have their own moment in the spotlight, to celebrate and speak of their individual accomplishments rather than just walking across a stage to grab a diploma. At a podium adorned by an Indian blanket and basket, each graduate had a chance to speak.
Nearly every one cried.
Their impromptu speeches were not the rhetorical stuff of other college graduation ceremonies -- full of giddy celebration, fond memories and vague dreams for the future.
They were somber, powerful testimonies about the long path to that microphone.
Some spoke of the trials and death marches imposed on their ancestors. They spoke of their own struggles, paling in comparison, but ringing of the same courage and determination to survive and achieve.
Speakers recalled long years working toward their degrees, five, six, even nine years. Tears streamed down faces as they spoke of loneliness and sleepless nights, of missing their families, of not being able to return to their homelands for months at a time. They told of frustration, anxiety and failures. They spoke of invaluable help they received from faculty members and staff at the American Indian Institute.
Marcus Bakurza, a Navajo-Hopi who earned a bachelor of science in communication, said he was keenly aware each day that the odds were stacked against him, that 70 percent of the Indian students at ASU would not make it to graduation.
"Coming off the reservation, or near a reservation, sometimes we're lost . . . ," he said. "Sometimes you ask, 'What am I doing here?' Each morning you wake up with the statistics against you."
Bakurza urged his fellow graduates to be part of another statistic, a growing number of Indians in the country with a college degree.
Today, what hope exists in the effort by the tribes to educate their own results from extraordinary intervention to create an Indian environment on largely Anglo college campuses in Arizona. Because there is no official tracking system in place, what happens when that support system is removed after graduation remains to be seen.
Dennison says she took the opportunity not long ago to give some adjustment advice to a recent ASU graduate.
He had called, she says, eager to tell her the good news. He had landed a fabulous off-reservation job in his narrow field of study, he was driving an impressive new truck and he was making a hefty salary -- an amount he boasted about without being asked. Dennison, of course, congratulated him, but per her on-campus role, offered some advice:
"I told him he should invest his money, look into buying a condo or something," she says.
Wassaja's dream, that Indians escape the "bondage" of the reservation, still shimmers upon the horizon. In the interim, tribal leaders are encouraging graduates to return to their people on Indian lands.
While most Indian college students say they want to return to the reservation and help their people once they have completed their education, college administrators say that is not as easy as it sounds.
Al Henderson, tribal coordinator at NAU, says going home can be particularly tough for tribes like the Navajo, Hopi and Apache where a member's place in the community is fixed to the land and the labor necessary to make the dirt fruitful from grazing or farming. There, students who leave the reservation may be looked upon as deserters who left their responsibilities behind, creating more work for those who remained.
And even if they do have the blessing of their families, college graduates are not always welcomed or revered back home. Henderson and Phil Huebner at the ASU East campus say it is all too common that students have been shunned, perceived as having a "holier than thou" attitude even though they don't. Dennison says some are met with jealousy or fear that they will steal jobs from those already employed.
