In the Summer of 2016, These 4 Native Students Looked Toward College. Here’s Where They Are Now.

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

It’s the day before homecoming at the University of Montana, and Charnelle Bear Medicine is feeling nervous. The Native American Student Association, of which she’s secretary, has entered a float in the homecoming parade. But the group hasn’t lined up a drummer, and someone just said the posters with the flags of Montana’s tribes are too small to be seen by the crowd. Meanwhile, her 1-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn, keeps crawling out of the conference room where the association is meeting.

“I want it to be really good,” she frets, chasing after Kaitlyn in knee-high boots while her boyfriend, Gerald, paints a sign that reads “Montana Native strong.”

It’s been a tough couple of years for Bear Medicine, who grew up in Browning, a struggling but close-knit community on Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation. As a freshman, she grappled with her newfound freedom, staying up too late and partying too much. She got pregnant during her second semester in college, and had the baby last October, taking just two weeks off so she wouldn’t fail her classes and lose her scholarship.

Then, last Christmas Eve, her high-school boyfriend, Sean, Kaitlyn’s father, shook their daughter, causing seizures and bleeding in her brain. The baby spent Christmas, and the next 17 days, in the hospital, and was on a feeding tube until late April. Doctors told Bear Medicine to expect developmental delays and warned that the child might never eat normally.

But Bear Medicine has persisted. Even after many of her high-school classmates have dropped out and returned to the reservation, she remains in Missoula, determined to disprove the stereotypes and defy the odds.

Those odds are daunting. Less than a quarter of Native students who began a bachelor’s program in 2009 graduated on time; just over 40 percent finished in six years, federal data show. At the University of Montana, just 23 precent of Native Americans graduate in six years; that’s less than half the rate of white students.

Single parents like Bear Medicine face additional challenges. Just 8 percent of single mothers graduate with an associate or bachelor’s degree within six years, compared to 49 percent of female students who are not mothers, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

For the past three years, The Chronicle has been following four students from the Blackfeet reservation on their journey into and through college to show readers the students behind these statistics. Now in their early 20s, they are confronting many of the challenges that cause so many Native students to leave school — family obligations, poverty, and inadequate academic preparation. One dropped out of the University of Montana last year and is teaching at an elementary school on the reservation. Another is slowly making her way through community college while racking up titles in Native pageants. A third lost his mother and cousin, but has finally finished high school and is figuring out his next move.

Bear Medicine, who is taking a full course load and working as a receptionist in the Native American center, doesn’t think she’s doing anything extraordinary. As she sees it, she’s just getting by.

But Gerald, a Lakota Indian who Charnelle affectionately calls her “Sioux mate,” thinks she’s being too humble.

“Charnelle is a very rare person, to be able to do it all,” he said. “I think most people would fall apart.”

At Her Own Pace

The next day, Bear Medicine oversleeps and misses the parade. But her high-school classmate, ShawnTyana Bullshoe, is there, wearing the sash and beaded crown of Miss Kyi-yo, a local title, and dancing to the music of the drummers the student association found at the last minute.

Bullshoe, who lives in Browning with her parents and three teenaged siblings, should have been finished with her associate degree at Blackfeet Community College by now. But like many community-college students, she’s wasted some time on courses she didn’t need.

When Bullshoe discovered last year that her advisers had placed her in the wrong classes, she says, she was frustrated and considered switching to a four-year college. She decided to stick it out after she learned that some of her credits wouldn’t transfer.

The experience taught Bullshoe to take charge of her own academic planning. This fall she registered for 18 credits, aiming to finish her degree in elementary education by 2020. She plans to transfer to the University of Montana Western for a bachelor’s degree in special education before returning to the reservation to teach special education or Blackfeet language.

Lately, though, she’s been missing class to care for her siblings and her father, who has diabetes and is awaiting heart and liver transplants. Her mother works 12-hour days at the dialysis clinic and collapses when she gets home. So it’s up to Bullshoe to massage her dad’s swollen feet and legs, pick up the kids from sports practice, and feed everyone dinner. Last year she failed her first course.

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

She’s also working 15 hours a week as an intern for the Blackfeet Environmental Office, a tribal department, earning $10 an hour. The extra income helps the lights and water stay on, she said. “I’m having to take up the second parenting role.”

Her elementary-education adviser has been sympathetic, letting her earn credit in other ways.

Not all professors are so accommodating. Treyace Yellow Owl, a high-school classmate of Bullshoe’s who also attended the University of Montana, said non-Native professors often refused her requests for extensions or make-up tests when she went home for funerals. Some were skeptical when she told them yet another “grandpa” had died. The white professors didn’t understand that Blackfeet mourn deaths for four days, and consider elder members of their extended families to be grandparents, Yellow Owl said.

Mandy Smoker Broaddus, who oversaw the state of Montana’s Indian-education programs until last May, said she wishes more colleges would treat Native students’ commitment to community and family as a strength, rather than a distraction.

“These Indian kids are not trying to pull one over on the system; they’re trying to honor who they are and where they came from,” said Smoker Broaddus, who is now consulting for Education Northwest. “Instead of creating worry, fear, and stress for them, they should be creating some flexibility.”

Bullshoe’s own arrangement with her professor includes public speaking gigs. In October, she spoke to her educational field-placement class about her experiences with bullying and attempted suicide.

It’s a history Bullshoe has been sharing with grade schoolers since she was named Miss Blackfoot Canada in 2015, but she still gets choked up telling it — how she was taunted for her traditional ways, overdosed on her dad’s diabetes medication when she was 11, and nearly shot herself in eighth grade. Her message is simple: Don’t be ashamed of being different. It gets better.

Life isn’t easy in Browning, an isolated community with high rates of poverty and brutal winters. By the first week in October, it has already snowed twice. The prairie is a brittle yellow, the potholes are filled with a dirty slush, and icicles hang from the casinos and pawnshop. A swirling snow obscures the beauty of the nearby mountains.

These days, though, Bullshoe is feeling optimistic about her future. In April, she won her fourth consecutive pageant title, and this September, she was elected to the student Senate. Several days after the election, one of her goofy campaign signs still hung in a bathroom stall: Don’t let your vote go down the toilet — Vote ShawnTyana.

Bullshoe had a chance to escape Browning three years ago, when she was offered a scholarship to attend Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. (Dartmouth, which has a Native-student support program and house, has educated more Native students over the past 50 years than all other Ivies combined.) But Bullshoe turned the offer down, afraid of being on her own, and afraid of failing. She has no regrets.

Attending tribal college “allowed me to mature at my own pace,” she said with a smile that revealed red and gold bands on her braces. “Now I’m ready to leave the nest, to do things my own way.”

Playing Catch-Up

Studies show that Native students who start at a tribal college are four times more likely to receive their bachelor’s degree than are their peers who enroll in a mainstream college right after high school.

Yellow Owl, who dropped out of the University of Montana last year to escape an abusive relationship, wishes she’d made the same decision as Bullshoe. But she was bored in Browning, and “wanted to rebel against my mom,” a program coordinator at the tribal college, so she took off for Missoula.

Socially, the adjustment was easy; there were so many Browning friends at the university that it felt like home. The college offered Native American student groups, cultural activities — including “Soup Wednesdays” — and a beautiful new Native American Center where students could gather.

But she struggled in lectures, accustomed to small classes and attentive teachers who had known her since she was born. Next to her white classmates, who “were taught to sit at a desk and memorize,” she felt inadequate.

“Native kids are used to having one-on-ones,” she said. At Missoula, “one professor has 500 kids to worry about.”

“I was straight A’s in high school, and took AP, but I still struggled,” she said.

Amy Andreas, the librarian at Browning High School, believes the district isn’t doing enough to prepare students for the rigors or structures of college. “The bar isn’t set high enough,” she said.

Melissa Flamand, a top student in Yellow Owl’s class who went to Dartmouth, describes her experience there as “a game of constantly trying to catch up.”

Browning High School doesn’t track how many of its graduates drop out of college. But at the University of Montana, where several of Yellow Owl’s classmates enrolled, only a third of Native students persist beyond their second year, according to the most recent institutional data. That’s despite extensive student services that include mentoring, tutoring, and a corequisite remediation program that gets students up to speed on math and writing more quickly than traditional remediation.

Yellow Owl says she would have stuck it out if she hadn’t gotten involved with a controlling classmate from back home. She returned to Browning to find herself, and to reconnect with the family she’d avoided during the relationship, fearing their disapproval.

Then, over the summer, she got a call from an elementary-school principal she knew from rodeo circles, Toni Tatsey. The principal asked Yellow Owl, who is fluent in Blackfeet, to come teach the language and phonetics to first graders. After hesitating, worried she wasn’t ready, she accepted the job.

This October, she stood before a classroom of adorable and squirmy 6- and 7-year olds, teaching them the word for pumpkin — omahkatohkoisimaan — while they painted bright orange ones. It’s a tough phrase, so she has them repeat it as they work. When they pronounce it correctly, she beams. “You guys make me so proud,” she says.

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

A majority of the students here at Vina Chattin Elementary are low-income, and many have experienced trauma, such as child abuse or the addiction or suicide of a family member. Growing numbers were born with meth in their systems, teachers say, and have difficulty paying attention in class.

Tatsey, who spent 23 years teaching at Browning Middle School before becoming a principal in 2016, sees culture as critical to these kids’ survival. Over the past two years, the school has added immersion classes and a Blackfeet language program. Assemblies now open with a blessing, and teachers will “smudge” with their students, burning dried herbs to purify the spirit.

“When you have a leg in the Indian world and a leg in the white world, you need to find balance,” she said. “I’m trying to bring balance into these babies’ worlds.”

To do that, Tatsey is recruiting more local teachers, through a new two-plus-two program that lets students at the tribal college earn their bachelor’s in elementary education from Montana Western without leaving home. Students in the program attend face-to-face courses with local teachers, many of whom work in the Browning school district, and do their practice teaching in reservation schools.

Yellow Owl plans to finish her bachelor’s degree through the program.

Still, she says she is glad she got to experience living away from home, if only briefly.

“I got it out of my hair,” she says of her residential-college experience. “I don’t feel like a failure. It just wasn’t meant to be. I realized I can’t live without my family.”

Disconnected

While many Native students struggle to navigate the college transition, for some, just getting to college is hard enough.

Three years ago, William Righthand was a high-school senior struggling with homelessness and pouring his emotions into his art.

Then, with two and a half credits to go, he dropped out of Browning’s alternative high school to care for his mother, who was an alcoholic and had cirrhosis of the liver. She died in late 2016, followed two weeks later by a cousin’s suicide.

Righthand re-enrolled last year, then dropped out again, bouncing between Great Falls, two hours to the south, and Browning, where his father still lives in a run-down motel behind the pizza shop. He tried again last summer, and finally earned his diploma. He spent the summer working at the IGA grocery store in Browning.

Today Righthand is back in Great Falls, helping the wife of the cousin who committed suicide take care of her 9-year-old son. Righthand isn’t working, nor is he enrolled in college. That puts him among the nearly one-third of Native Americans between the ages of 20 and 24 whom the federal government deems “disconnected.” Native American youth are more likely to be disconnected than any other racial group; among whites of the same age, the rate is 13 percent.

Righthand, reached by phone, said he spends most of his time drawing. One day recently, when he was thinking about his mother’s death, he made a picture of a teepee on fire. “It’s just how I was feeling that day,” he said.

He considered joining the military, but his family was against it — too dangerous, they said. His dad wants him to go to trade school to become a carpenter or electrician. Righthand thinks carpentry would be a good fit — he excelled at woodworking in high school — but he’s also fascinated by psychology, and has been devouring lectures by Jordan B. Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto. And he still dreams of starting a T-shirt design business.

First, though, he has to figure out how to pay for school. He’s been told that his tribe back in Canada, the Siksika, will pay for his degree, but he hasn’t contacted them yet.

“I really want to go to school,” he said. “I feel so bored. I feel like I don’t have a life.”

De-Assimilating

Back in Missoula, Bear Medicine is touring an exhibit of Western art at the university’s Museum of Art and Culture with her writing class. The professor asks the students to choose a piece that speaks to them; for Bear Medicine, it’s a 19th-century engraving of Pawnee Indian being attacked by a grizzly.

“It reminds me that our people were warriors,” she explains.

In the print, the bear is lunging at the Indian, who has his arm raised in self-defense. Was this an unprovoked bear attack or a hunting expedition gone awry? The accompanying text doesn’t clarify the scene, so Bear Medicine calls her dad to get his perspective. He tells her that Blackfeet didn’t hunt grizzly, and only killed them in self-defense.

Bear Medicine didn’t spend much time with her dad growing up. Her parents were divorced, and she was raised by her mom, a strict Catholic who taught her the importance of education. But she’s making her own decisions now, and she’s moving toward a more “traditional” way of life — “de-assimilating,” as she puts it. She’s eager to learn more about Native traditions from her dad and paternal grandmother.

Rebecca Drobis for The Chronicle

Her biggest teacher, though, is Gerald. She started dating him last spring, after he approached her in their Blackfeet language course and handed her a hundred-dollar bill, saying, “This is for your baby.” Gerald, who was raised in California and Hawaii — an “urban Indian” — takes a dim view of the church, which he sees as “offering a band-aid to the wound that they themselves caused.”

“The only way to fix the problems is to remember who we are,” he said. As he sees it, the suffering of the reservation is a “direct consequence” of drunkenness, abusiveness, and other actions that break the laws of the creator.

Gerald says he’s willing to return to the reservation with Charnelle when they graduate, so she can fulfill her dream of working as a therapist to Native children who have been abused. But he doesn’t want to raise their kids in Browning or send them to public schools. They’ll go to Cuts Wood School, a private language-immersion school that Yellow Owl attended.

For now, Bear Medicine is focused on getting through the semester, and getting Kaitlyn to her medical appointments. Her daughter is doing far better than the doctors predicted, but she’s still having problems with swallowing, and sometimes chokes on her milk. Bear Medicine, whose grades slipped to C’s this term, plans to take off the spring semester to “just focus on making money and being a mom for a while.” She plans to stay in Missoula with Gerald, who is resuming his studies after a semester on academic probation, and return to school in the fall.

Bear Medicine’s goal, beyond helping others, is to be self-sufficient, “to live without government support.” She still needs food stamps, a housing voucher, and Kaitlyn’s Social Security benefit to make ends meet, but she recently gave up cash assistance because she thought she could get by without it.

“I want to prove to my people and to others that Native Americans can be successful,” she said.

“I could have given up everything and gone back home and fallen into a cycle, but I grew up with my mom telling me education matters,” she said. “I’m so thankful for that.”