A University Draws Rural and Native Students From the Vastness of Alaska’s Interior

A few dozen students from Alaska’s most rural regions are chattering in a classroom as an admissions officer tries to get their attention. Some talk to their friends; others have fallen asleep in the semi-darkened room on the campus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. One young man suddenly stands up and declares he has to be alone. He leaves the room.

The recruiter, Amy Wald, continues her presentation undaunted. She describes campus traditions that include massive bonfires, and stirs some interest when she mentions the university’s athletic programs. She asks if anyone has considered studying somewhere else through an exchange program. No hands.

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Hawaii, she offers, is a popular destination.

The 34 students have been brought here by Take Wing Alaska, a group dedicated to helping rural students through college. That’s a goal shared by the university’s department of Rural, Community, and Native Education, which is overseen by Evon Peter, vice chancellor. The department’s mission includes advising students from far-flung towns on the main Fairbanks campus and helping to serve rural students in the areas they live.

Indigenous people in Alaska govern themselves through regional and village corporations established by a 1971 Act of Congress. Because the state is so large, there are important differences between, say, the cultures of the Athabascan people, who live in Alaska’s interior, and those of the Inupiaq and St. Lawrence Island Yupik — hunting and gathering groups that live in the north, according to the Alaska Native Heritage Center. About 15 percent of Alaskans, according to the U.S. Census, identify as Alaska Natives or Native Americans. Some 21 percent of students at Fairbanks identify as one of those groups.

Native students at the flagship often face challenges that their peers from more populous areas don’t. For many, Fairbanks — a small town by most standards, with 33,000 residents — is the biggest place they have ever lived. They may not have had access in high school to academic resources such as Advanced Placement classes or math courses beyond Algebra II. They often can feel homesick, and their family obligations may require more time and energy than typical university coursework might allow.

“The experience of our Alaska Native people — how we relate to the land and relate to each other and experience the human existence, if you want to put it out on that spectrum — is radically different than what you experience in a Western-structure bureaucratic system,” Peter says.

Peter is Native himself, of Gwich’in and Koyukon affiliations, and served as tribal chief in the town of Arctic Village for three years.

Navigating structures like financial aid can be challenging for these students as well. How do you fill out the Fafsa if your parents don’t have a tax return? The university’s Rural Student Services department helps guide students through that process.

The university also has a special dormitory on the main campus just for Alaska Native students. It’s called the Eileen Panigeo MacLean House, and it accepts a maximum of 20 students, to offer a sense of a tight-knit community. Native students are given other small amenities, too, like large refrigerators to hold traditional foods like caribou or salmon.

Part of the challenge, though, is the sheer time and distance it takes to reach some of these students for recruitment purposes or to offer intensive courses on the ground.

“It could take up to two days and three airplane flights for me to get to some of the communities we serve within Alaska,” Peter says.

(Oh, and such a trip could cost more than $2,000.)

Online courses aren’t always reliable in places with limited internet bandwidth. Another challenge is the sheer diversity of communities the college serves. In some cases, English might not be the student’s first language. Peter says the university works with 13 different languages.

The department also hosts a summer intensive program for rural high-school students called the Rural Alaska Honors Institute, which serves as an introduction to college life. Students live in dorms while taking college-level courses. Robert Strunk, 16, is one such student.

He is studying to become an educator, and wants to work in his community of Quinhagak to help students like himself who may not have had the best instruction. Advanced math courses weren’t available in his village, but he was able to take a more advanced course through the university.

A short walk away from the building where the students are gathered is a hill that requires a bit of a hike to reach. Once there you can see the campus far and wide. The university plans to build a park and an indigenous studies-center on the site. It’s called Troth Yeddha’, and the story goes that it used to be a place where Alaska Natives would meet and share their knowledge with one another.

That Alaska Native students can still avail themselves of such learning on this hill is a narrative not lost on anyone.

Chris Quintana is a staff reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.