Fighting Long Odds

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

Charnelle Bear Medicine isn’t really a football fan. She doesn’t know the fight song, doesn’t understand the rules, and only just learned that they have homecoming in college, too. Where she grew up, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwest Montana, basketball was king.

Still, Ms. Bear Medicine likes seeing the “crazy fans” and a high-school friend who plays clarinet in the University of Montana band. And she’s a little awed by the pageantry of Division I sports — the helicopter flyover, the booming cannon, the lighting of the “M” on the slope of nearby Mount Sentinel.

So on a sunny day in October, she’s put on a Grizzly tank top, stuck a paw tattoo on her cheek, and come to the football stadium with her high-school boyfriend, Sean Lewis, to watch Montana take on Southern Utah in the homecoming game. Mr. Lewis, who moved to the city to live with his brother in September, after his family got evicted from their home, doesn’t have a tattoo, so Ms. Bear Medicine plants a lipstick kiss on his cheek. They hold hands for most of the game. They even clap holding hands.

From the Reservation to College

This is an occasional series of pieces on the transition to college for students at Browning High School on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana.

The next section over, Treyace Yellow Owl is standing in a group of Native American students from Browning, Mont., that includes two of her cousins and some seniors who graduated from high school with her older sister. They’re dressed like all the other students, in jeans and maroon-and-silver Grizzly attire. But they stick out, a pocket of brown in a sea of white faces.

Like Ms. Bear Medicine, Ms. Yellow Owl is “more of a basketball girl,” but she likes to come watch the running back, who is Native. “I’m really proud that there’s an Indian on the team,” she says.

Six months ago, the two women were seniors at Browning High School, where nearly all their classmates were Blackfeet. They were eager to escape the watchful eyes of their moms and aunties; ready to trade the tedium of rural life for the excitement of the city.

Now, they’re freshmen at a large public college, learning to navigate a campus that is just four hours from home but feels like a different world. Here, just 3 percent of students are Native, and the culture centers on individual success, rewarding those who distinguish themselves academically or otherwise. It’s a sharp contrast to the tight-knit reservation, where a commitment to the community is the top priority.

Statistically speaking, Ms. Bear Medicine and Ms. Yellow Owl are already success stories. In 2014, only a quarter of American Indian and Alaska Native students between the ages of 18 and 24 were enrolled in a degree-granting postsecondary institution — the lowest rate of any racial subgroup.

If the pair make it through college in four years, it will be an even bigger feat. Less than a quarter of Native students who began a bachelor’s program in 2008 graduated on time; just over 40 percent finished in six years.

This is the story of how Ms. Bear Medicine, Ms. Yellow Owl, and two other students from the Blackfeet Reservation are trying to beat those odds. Three are succeeding; one is not. Yet all of them show in their own way the steep climb Native students face to turn the promise of education into a reality.

In her “Communicative Sciences and Disorders” lecture, where she’s the only Native American, Ms. Yellow Owl is all business. She listens intently, raises her hand often, and takes detailed notes in multicolored ink — alternating pens for main topics, subtopics, and definitions.

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

But in her Blackfoot language class, where a quarter of the 20 or so students are from Browning and her cousin, Jesse DesRosier, is the teaching assistant, Ms. Yellow Owl relaxes. She watches videos on the cracked screen of her phone, checks out Snapchat pics of her friends with animal faces, inserts a bellybutton ring. The Browning kids sit together in the back row, teasing each other as the professor pins up pictures of weather.

“Iksstoyi — it’s cold,” the professor intones, pointing to a picture of snow. “Iksstoyi,” the students repeat. She explains that in Blackfoot, people don’t ask, “How old are you?,” they ask how many winters you have survived.

“Then I must be a year younger, since I spent a year in Arizona,” jokes Zachary Wagner, a high-school classmate of Ms. Yellow Owl’s.

The class is too basic for Ms. Yellow Owl, who attended a Blackfoot immersion school through eighth grade; she took it because it’s the only one being offered and because it’s a “double dipper,” counting toward her general-education requirements as well as her speech-pathology major.

Between classes, Ms. Yellow Owl heads to the Native American Center, a striking building at the heart of the campus that opened in 2010. She says the staff there helped her drop a class and fixed a problem with her financial aid more quickly than the student-aid office could.

“When you need something, it’s easier to go through Natives,” Ms. Yellow Owl explains. “It’s just natural to come here — I feel safe.”

Royelle Bundy, director of American Indian student services, says the center aims to provide a “home away from home” for Native students, recreating the extended family and support system they grew up with. In addition to serving as a gathering space, it offers a mentoring program, weekly beading sessions, and help navigating an unfamiliar — and often alienating — culture and bureaucracy.

“Mainstream culture is ‘sink or swim’ — it’s ‘fly birdie,’” says Michelle Guzman, academic adviser for Native American studies. “For some of our students, it’s a culture shock.”

For Native students, the mainstream emphasis on competition and individual accomplishment is often at odds with the reason they pursued postsecondary education in the first place — to serve their communities, says Bryan Brayboy, a professor of indigenous education and justice at Arizona State University.

“The academic aggression necessary to succeed is anathema to many indigenous ways of being,” he writes in his book, Postsecondary Education for American Indian and Alaska Natives.

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

The transition to a predominantly white institution like the University of Montana can be especially jarring for Native students who grew up on reservations surrounded by American Indians, as Ms. Yellow Owl and Ms. Bear Medicine did.

Mr. DesRosier, Ms. Yellow Owl’s cousin and a senior who served in the Marines before starting college, describes the experience as “going from being just an Indian to being the Indian” in the classroom.

You’re no longer just another student, but a presumed spokesman for all Native people, expected “to represent your whole community, your whole culture, and all nations,” he explains.

“We’re supposed to be the voice of our nations, instead of ourselves,” he says.

Last year his brother’s girlfriend, Turquoise Devereaux, interviewed Native students about their experiences at the university for a social-work class. Ms. Devereaux, who is now the program coordinator for American Indian student services, found that students felt stereotyped and tokenized by their professors and peers. They told her that their efforts to challenge those stereotypes were distracting from their academic performance and taking an emotional toll.

“As students, we often have to teach more than we’re learning,” says Mr. DesRosier.

But Ms. Yellow Owl, who lives in an off-campus apartment with Mr. DesRosier and his brother, M.J., says the adjustment to college has been easier than she’d expected.

“I really thought I would experience a culture shock, but I didn’t,” she says. “There are so many Browning people here that it feels like home.”

For Ms. Bear Medicine, who was raised with lots of rules, the hardest part of college has been managing her newfound freedom. In high school, her teachers and her strict Catholic mother made sure she kept up with her assignments. But here, in Missoula, “there’s nobody to tell me what to do,” and it scares her a little.

She’s trying to balance school and socializing, but like many college students, she stays up too late, watching Netflix and hanging out with her dormmate and her boyfriend, who is attending high school nearby. On Facebook, friends post pictures of her sleeping in class.

Now it’s midterms week, and Ms. Bear Medicine is worried. She says she was awake from 2 to 4 a.m., unable to sleep.

“I get really bad test anxiety,” she says. “I overthink it, and I start telling myself I’m going to fail.”

In her study-skills course, provided as part of the federal TRIO program for disadvantaged students, she takes out a brand-new No. 2 pencil and exhales. She finishes the exam in 15 minutes, and declares it easy.

After the test, the students fill out a weekly schedule with slots for class, studying, and socializing. Ms. Bear Medicine gives herself four hours of study time on Monday and Wednesday, and more on Tuesday and Thursday, when she has fewer classes. Across Saturday and Sunday, she writes “party/extracurricular” in big letters. A little later, she adds an hour for church.

Her other midterms are harder. She ends up with a C-minus in psychology and in journalism, and a B-plus in her study-skills class. She misses her goal of all B’s, and resolves to “work harder for the finals.”

Still, she decides to drop poetry, her favorite course, because it’s interfering with her writing class, where she’s working on a midterm paper on fetal alcohol syndrome. In comments on that paper, her professor praises her for “comparing the issue across multiple cultures,” while urging her to “go deeper on your analysis” and not rely too heavily on quotes.

“Make sure your own voice doesn’t get lost in here,” he writes.

For many Native students, a public university like Montana is out of reach, whether for academic or financial reasons. Half of all Native students are enrolled in community colleges. But the odds of success are even longer there than for those at more selective institutions — less than a quarter of Native students complete an associate degree in three years.

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

Back in Browning, ShawnTyana Bullshoe, a high-school classmate of the Ms. Bear Medicine and Ms. Yellow Owl, has chosen to go to Blackfeet Community College, which infuses its curriculum with tribal culture and language, in part to retain students.

On a Thursday in October, Ms. Bullshoe is chopping green onions in a round room with air vents in the floor and geometric patterns on the walls. It’s a space designed for drying meat and for smudging — burning dried herbs to purify a person or a place — and it’s where Ms. Bullshoe and the other 11 members of the Piikani culture club gather for their weekly meeting (the Piikani are the branch of the Blackfeet living in Northwest Montana).

Today, for “Soup Thursday,” it’s also a place for preparing soup. Each week, the tribal college serves up free soup and sandwiches to roughly 300 local residents, rotating the responsibility among the eight “societies” that students, faculty, and staff are assigned to based on their discipline or preference. This week it’s the Beaver Society’s turn.

In 2015, two-thirds of the students who graduated from Browning High School enrolled in college. Half of them went to Blackfeet Community College, and 11 percent went to Salish Kootenai College, another tribal college. High-school administrators are still tracking the class of 2016, but the numbers are likely to be similar.

Ms. Bullshoe, who is living at home with her parents, three younger siblings, and 13 dogs (including nine puppies), was supposed to have a Blackfeet-history class this morning, with her aunt, Marilyn Bullshoe. But her mom needed the car to go to her job at the nursing home, so she was stuck until a cousin came to pick her up.

While Ms. Bullshoe chops, another student makes grilled cheese on a panini press and the Piikani culture club’s president, Dannette Spotted Horse, puts her 2-year-old daughter down for a nap on a pair of couch cushions covered with a Denver Broncos blanket. Ms. Spotted Horse lies down to encourage her daughter to sleep, but it doesn’t work. The toddler, Genesis, pops up, and pretending to be a puppy, laps fruit punch from a paper cup.

Marilyn Bullshoe, ShawnTyana’s aunt, comes into the room and says a prayer for Ms. Spotted Horse, who is stressed about the “negativity” that outsiders are directing at club leaders. The aunt passes her hands over Ms. Spotted Horse’s head and torso to calm her, telling her that “you can’t take on other people’s problems.” Later, she says, she will burn sage for her. The younger Ms. Bullshoe says she has some sage, and asks if her aunt wants the male or female plant.

This weekend Ms. Bullshoe plans to head to a powwow in Canada. Since she was crowned Miss Blackfeet, in July, replacing Ms. Yellow Owl, she’s traveled almost every weekend. Sometimes the tribe will give her money to help with gas and food; if it’s not enough to cover her expenses, she’ll raise funds herself. Right now, she’s selling banana bread for $3 a small loaf, $7 a large.

Ms. Bullshoe is also trying to get more involved in the community, she says, through suicide- and drug-prevention groups. She’s been visiting local schools, talking about how she overcame being bullied as a child, and telling them about her brother, who tried to commit suicide last year, while he was still in middle school. She’s urging them to resist the lure of drugs and alcohol, and to draw strength from their cultural identity.

“Growing up on a small reservation, we see a lot of drug and alcohol abuse,” she says. “I’m teaching them that it’s OK to say no — and that starting at BCC is not such a bad thing.”

Even so, she doesn’t plan on sticking around Browning forever. Next fall she’s going to compete for the crown of Calgary Stampede Indian Princess. If she wins, she’ll get to travel the world as a representative of the First Nations; if she loses, she may transfer to the University of Washington. Her ultimate goal is to become Miss Indian World.

“Grandma says I’m on a winning streak,” she says of her Miss Blackfeet title, her fourth pageant win in four years, “but I don’t know how long it will last.”

As a group, American Indians and Alaska Natives make up less than 1 percent of the college-going population, roughly 150,000 students. That small sample size means that they’re often excluded from statistics on student outcomes, and overlooked in conversations about the nation’s racial achievement gap. Researchers refer to this as the “asterisk problem.”

The data that does exist isn’t encouraging. While college enrollment rates have increased for all races over the past 25 years, they’ve grown the least for Native students. In 2014, American Indians and Alaska Natives trailed Black and Hispanic students in college enrollment by 10 percentage points.

Those Native students who do enroll are concentrated in community colleges, and underrepresented in the top public universities. In 2014, 18 percent of the nation’s college students were enrolled in top research universities, but just 8 percent of Native students were, according to the Education Trust.

Those disparities matter because research shows that students who attend more selective institutions are more likely to graduate. The fact that Native Americans and other minorities are overrepresented in two-year colleges and regional publics only deepens the divide in college attainment.

And large numbers of Native students aren’t even making it through high school. According to the latest federal statistics, more than 11 percent of Native students between the ages of 16 and 24 are not enrolled in college and do not have a high-school diploma — a “status dropout rate” of 11 percent, nearly double the national average.

William Righthand is one of them. Last spring the 20-year-old was living in a run-down motel with his parents and taking online classes through Project Choices, one of Browning’s two alternative-education programs. He dreamed of escaping Browning, of becoming an artist, or starting his own T-shirt design company. He had just two and a half credits left to graduate.

But six months later, Mr. Righthand is missing. He hasn’t shown up for classes all fall, and he is rumored to be in living in Great Falls, two hours south of Browning. Charlie Speicher, a counselor at Project Choices, said he last saw Mr. Righthand in June, when he ran into him on the street.

“He looked like he was homeless, like he was struggling to find food, to find shelter, and to stay clean,” he said.

Even Mr. Righthand’s father, who is still living in the motel, doesn’t know where he’s living, or with whom. “I don’t know where he’s at,” he says, through a closed door.

Mr. Speicher thinks he might be found on Hill 57, a sandstone-capped plateau in Great Falls where there had historically been a Native encampment. But there isn’t much of anything on the hill now, apart from two houses with long gravel driveways and signs warning that trespassers will be shot.

A mail carrier delivering letters at the base of the hill isn’t aware of anyone else living up there; neither are the bartender or the patrons at the Halftime Sports Grill, in the hill’s shadow. They say the hill is privately owned now.

There’s a McDonald’s in town where Mr. Righthand’s cousin used to work, but he isn’t there anymore, and none of the employees recognize his name.

When Ms. Yellow Owl finds out that Mr. Righthand, her high-school classmate, has vanished, she’s sad but not surprised.

“The sad thing about Native kids is things like that happen, and it’s the norm,” she says. “He was the statistic where that was going to happen.”

In Missoula, Ms. Bear Medicine is struggling a little too, and running the risk of losing financial aid.

By the end of the semester, she has dropped psychology, in addition to poetry. She says she knew she was failing the class and didn’t want to jeopardize her state merit scholarship, which requires a 2.5 GPA. She finishes with a B-plus in writing, an A-minus in TRIO study skills, and a passing grade in journalism. Determined to do better next semester, she drops her journalism double major to focus on psychology.

In a Facebook message, she writes that she “didn’t think college was going to be so hard.” She says she has struggled to find “the balance between having a social life and school life.”

“Sometimes my social life took over, and sometimes my school life took over. Both just resulted in either me feeling overwhelmed with my schoolwork or feeling left out when your friends go out,” she says. “I definitely learned some lessons, and I’m still trying to find that balance.”

Ms. Bear Medicine says she misses her 6-year-old niece, Angel, who called her crying the other day, and her mom, who texts often. But neither she nor Mr. Lewis, her boyfriend, miss Browning, a town they describe as dirty, dangerous, and boring — “kind of a shithole,” as Mr. Lewis puts it.

In Browning, “almost every day you’re expecting a fight,” says Mr. Lewis, who joined a gang when he was 8 and still has a facial twitch from the beating he took when he left when he left it, at age 10.

Missoula, Mr. Lewis says, is cleaner, safer, and “there’s stuff to do.”

He adds: “Here, I’m more chill, though I’m still on guard.”

But Ms. Bear Medicine says she doesn’t hate Browning, despite its faults. She says she still plans to return to the reservation after graduation. Ms. Yellow Owl, who wants to be a bilingual speech pathologist, still intends to go home after college, too.

In the end, that commitment to their communities may be what helps them get through the challenges that lie ahead, in their next three and a half years of college. Mr. Brayboy’s research shows that Native students who are devoted to serving their home communities are more likely to graduate than are those who are focused on individual achievement.

“You’re less lonely when you’re on a mission,” says Mr. Brayboy, the Arizona State researcher.

For Ms. Bear Medicine, that mission is to work as a therapist to Native children who have been abused.

Like her boyfriend, she didn’t have the easiest upbringing. Raped at age 4 by a family friend, later molested by a female cousin, she struggled for years with insecurity and social anxiety.

But here, in college, she seems to have found some degree of peace.

One Sunday, she and Mr. Lewis visit a corn maze on the edge of Missoula to give her a break from her studies. There, they toss tufts of hay at each other in the maze and linger at a petting zoo, feeding and caressing the farm animals. Ms. Bear Medicine says the smell of hay makes her miss riding horses.

“I could stay here all day,” she says.

Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.