To Raise Numbers of Underrepresented Scholars, Mentorship and Time Are Key

Lauren Grabelle

Michael Munson, an instructor in the Native American studies department at Salish Kootenai College, in Northwest Montana, really wanted to finish the doctoral degree she’d started in 2011. But her heavy teaching load, typical of faculty at the nation’s 35 accredited tribal colleges, left little time for research and writing.

So in 2016, Munson applied for, and won, a fellowship from the American Indian College Fund that allowed her to buy out a portion of her 45-credit contract. She spent the next year teaching half-time, finishing her dissertation and earning her Ed.D. in the winter of 2017.

Munson, who is now the director of her college’s Salish Language Educator Development Program, says it would have been “nearly impossible” for her to finish her dissertation without the funding that let her cut her teaching load in half. “I would have been inundated,” she said.

The fellowship that helped Munson complete her degree is part of an effort by the College Fund, supported by $6.75 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to increase the share of Native faculty at tribal colleges who have at least a master’s degree and to disseminate their research more broadly.

Native Americans make up 44 percent of the faculty at tribal colleges, but account for only a quarter of those with doctoral degrees, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. Among Native faculty at tribal colleges, 8 percent hold doctorates, and 48 percent have master’s degrees.

The shortage of Native faculty with graduate degrees at tribal colleges is often attributed to the low pay and often remote location of the colleges. But an even bigger challenge is the supply: Native Americans made up just over 1 percent of the U.S. population in 2017, but accounted for only 0.2 percent of the doctorates awarded that year.

That has consequences. It means that fewer researchers and fewer students attending tribal colleges are studying issues affecting Native communities. It also means that American Indians who aspire to be scholars have fewer role models who look like them. That can make it harder for Native students “to imagine the possibilities,” says Bryan Brayboy, a professor of indigenous education and justice at Arizona State University.

“If you don’t see yourself in it, you’re less likely to do it,” he says.

Recognizing those consequences, the American Indian College Fund began awarding fellowships to Ph.D. candidates back in 2004 and added a program for master’s candidates in 2013. Both are designed to free faculty members from some of their teaching and administrative duties so that they can finish their degrees.

But the support is more than just financial. Fellows attend a summer research conference, where they can present their findings and get reactions from other indigenous scholars, and a fall writing workshop, where they get advice from experts like Brayboy. When they finish their dissertation, they can submit an article to the College Fund’s Tribal College and University Research Journal and apply for a grant to present at a professional conference.

Brandi Simons

Monte Randall, a doctoral fellow in 2017-18, says it was this network of support that motivated him to finish his degree.

“Sitting at the table with scholars whose work I’ve read and cited was a big boost,” said Randall, the dean of academic affairs at the College of the Muscogee Nation. “Knowing that I’m here. That I’m part of something bigger. That was validating.”

So far, 36 tribal college faculty have earned their doctoral degrees and 18 have earned their master’s degrees with support from the program. While those numbers aren’t huge, they aren’t insignificant either. Native Americans earned just 112 doctorates in 2017, nine fewer than the 121 they earned a decade earlier.

While the College Fund’s program targets Native Americans, in particular, its success contains lessons for other minority-serving institutions, and for helping increase the number of scholars from any underrepresented group.

Attractive to Native Students, Not Faculty

Tribal colleges operate more than 75 campuses in 16 states and serve students from more than 250 federally recognized Indian tribes, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. Their low cost and proximity to tribal lands makes them the best — and often only — option for Native students who can’t afford — or don’t want — to leave home for college.

Native students who attend tribal colleges report having stronger connections with staff and instructors than Native students at nontribal colleges, and studies show that 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.

Yet the rural locations and low cost that make tribal colleges attractive to many Native students also make it hard for the colleges to compete for the limited number of Native faculty with doctoral degrees. Predominantly white institutions pay more, offer tenure, and tend to have better labs and facilities, says Carrie Billy, president of the consortium. They don’t expect faculty to teach as many courses, either.

And there are only so many candidates to fight over.

So why are Native Americans so underrepresented in master’s and doctoral programs? Experts point to poverty, poor academic preparation, and a lack of faculty role models. Cultural norms play a role, too: Native students, raised to value family over self, often feel guilty about leaving their close-knit communities for far-off research institutions.

Brandi Simons

Those Native students who start programs often struggle to finish them, taking longer, on average, than any other racial or ethnic group to earn a doctorate. Family obligations, financial challenges, and time constraints conspire to keep higher degrees out of reach.

The College Fund is trying to remove at least some of these hurdles. Its goals for the fellowships and research grants, says Natalie Youngbull, the former faculty development program officer at the College Fund, are for tribal colleges to “grow their own” faculty with Ph.D.s, and for American Indians to assert ownership over research into their communities.

Youngbull, who is now an assistant professor in the University of Oklahoma’s College of Education, says she’s attended conferences “where there were people speaking for tribal colleges with no background in these spaces.” By publishing the works of Native researchers and providing grants for them to present their works to mainstream audiences, the group aims to ensure that “nobody else can speak on their behalf.”

Billy agrees. “We as Native people have to be doing research based on our values, that’s advancing our communities, and sustaining our people, our language, and our land,” she says.

Fellows typically use their grants for time off or travel. Randall, who said he struggles financially, was able to afford a month off in the summer and several Fridays off during the school year. He spent the time at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., meeting with professors and discussing his research. The questions they asked helped prepare him to defend his dissertation, he said.

“Working at a tribal college, we don’t get paid well, and that puts a lot of stress on me,” he said. The fellowship “removed that [financial] barrier, so I could really focus on going to school.”

Others, like Munson, use the money to pay other people to teach their courses. And some, like Munson’s colleague Co Carew, who got her doctorate in expressive therapy at far-away Lesley University, use it for flights and hotels.

Fellows are required to remain at their tribal college for at least two years after finishing their degree, a stipulation designed to prevent poaching by mainstream institutions — at least temporarily.

An Overlooked Community

Programs aimed at raising the number of Native Americans with graduate degrees are rare. Even the federal government, which funds graduate and professional education at HBCUs and Hispanic-Serving Institutions, doesn’t set aside money for graduate education at tribal colleges.

Sean Buffington, vice president of the Henry Luce Foundation, which supports the College Fund’s journal, research conference, and writing workshop, says that’s partly a reflection of that fact that foundations have overlooked tribal communities in general.

Some of that neglect is due to logistical and economic factors, Buffington says. Tribal reservations are scattered throughout the country, often in places that are hard to reach from the East Coast home of many foundations. And Native communities tend to be small, making it difficult for foundations to achieve the scale that their stakeholders demand.

But there are “less pragmatic” reasons, too — reasons related to “racism and the invisibility of Indian communities that imperialism and racism helped produce,” Buffington says.

“The imperial project, amnesia, and racism have put roadblocks in the way of foundations doing this work,” he says.

One notable exception, apart from Luce and Mellon, is the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which has been investing in STEM graduate education for Native students since 2003. Its Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership provides grants and scholarships to seven campuses and their students.

Purdue and other universities in the partnership have used the grants to build programs and cultural centers aimed at creating a sense of belonging for their Native students. Students have used their scholarships to travel home for ceremonies or family visits.

Kevin Gibson, the principal investigator on the grants and a professor of botany at Purdue University, says the program enables the universities to achieve the “critical mass” of Native students that is essential to their success.

“If you don’t have that, students can feel a sense of isolation, or tokenism,” he says, “all those things that impact performance.”

Gibson says the universities retain 90 percent of their Native students. So far, 200 scholarship recipients have earned their graduate degrees.

Brayboy suggests that universities go a step further, investing in promising Native students who never learned how to “do school” and didn’t distinguish themselves as undergrads.

“I wasn’t a good undergraduate student. Someone taught me how to do grad school — how to do research, read, and write,” he says. “Sometimes we cream the very best students who come to us with those skills already, and we don’t cultivate people who come to us rough.”

“Just as students don’t see the possibility in themselves, institutions don’t see the possibilities in a kid coming out of college with a 2.5,” he says.

Aislinn HeavyRunner-Rioux, who surveyed Native graduate students for her 2017 doctoral dissertation at the University of Montana, says graduate programs need to do more to support American Indian culture, too.

Her research found that some of the most successful students were those who maintained strong ties to their communities and culture during graduate school, attending ceremonies and speaking their Native language. Those students told her that even though they doubted their own abilities, they were determined to persist for the sake of their communities.

“They didn’t ever look at the degree as for themselves — it was for their communities,” she says.

Yet the same students said they were mostly on their own when it came to cultural practice. If their college had a Native students club or program, it was typically developed without student input, she says.

HeavyRunner-Rioux, who is now a vice president of research for a firm in Spokane, Wash., says that institutions need to give Native students a say in programs that are created for them.

Billy believes that tribal colleges will someday have the capacity to produce large numbers of Native graduate students themselves, much as HBCUs and HSIs do with black and Hispanic students. She points out that the first tribal college, Dine College, was created only in 1968, barely 50 years ago.

There are currently five tribal colleges with master’s programs, Billy says. Her organization is asking Congress to create a program to increase and strengthen graduate programs at tribal colleges, similar to the one for black and Hispanic colleges.

“Fifty years ago, there were very few Native teachers, and then tribal colleges began addressing that need,” she says. “It’s going to change, but it takes time.”

Kelly Field covers student success, equity, and federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.