‘I Wanted to Find My Community’
When Kyra Johnson enrolled last year at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, she was nervously excited about experiencing life outside the Navajo reservation in Crownpoint, N.M., where she’d spent her childhood.
“I grew up, my entire life, in the Navajo Nation, surrounded by Native people,” Johnson said. She attended a Bureau of Indian Education high school an hour from her reservation, living in a dorm and going home on weekends.
The transition to college life was harder than she expected. Looking around in a lecture class in chemistry, she felt like she was the only Native person in the room. “There were times when our instructor would introduce a topic and then say, ‘Talk to your neighbors about this.’ They honestly would look at me and give me that little glare,” she said. “Then they’d turn to someone else.”
Just under 4 percent of the university’s undergraduates identify as Native American, many of them with mixed racial identities. That’s more than Johnson would find at most colleges, but still a far cry from the environment she was accustomed to.
She had always made a point of sitting in the front row of her classes to make sure she stayed engaged in the lesson. In chemistry, she “started sitting in the corners.” The feeling of isolation carried over outside the class. “I just stayed in my dorm room,” Johnson said. “I didn’t go out much.”
That changed this fall, at the beginning of her sophomore year, when she came across a table at a student-activities fair promoting the Native SOAR (Student Outreach, Access, and Resiliency) program. The program provides culturally responsive academic and social support to Native students, who mentor younger students and are in turn mentored by graduate students, professionals, and community members.
Since the fall of 2022, 138 students, more than two-thirds of whom identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, have served as mentors to middle-school and high-school students in southern Arizona. Since the pandemic, the program has expanded its mentoring to virtually serve students from outside Arizona. A $1.2-million state grant in 2022 allowed the program to offer tablets to students in rural areas and expand its networking reach.
Native SOAR is offered as a one-semester class for general-education credit. It’s open to all students, but in a typical semester, about three-quarters identify as Indigenous or Native American. In addition to mentoring, Native SOAR staff members hold workshops for K-12 educators to help them better serve Indigenous students.
“Everyone was so nice and welcoming,” said Johnson of the Native SOAR class, which she joined. “It was a time when I was looking for other Natives, because everything seemed so unfamiliar,” she said. “I wanted to find my community.” She was homesick for the sights and smells of her reservation, the colorful mesas where she and her friends would hike, the farmers markets where people wore traditional Navajo outfits as they shopped for jewelry or food like pozole, fry bread, or Neeshjizhii, a corn stew with mutton and vegetables. In a text message, she said she even missed the “rez dogs” that roamed her neighborhood.
It was sobering to learn in her Native SOAR class how few Native students were making it into colleges and graduating, and how deep the educational inequities were at every stage of the pipeline. American Indian/Alaska Native students have the lowest rate of high-school completion of any demographic group in the United States, a recent study by the Campaign for College Opportunity found. In 2021, only 28 percent of Native young adults were enrolled in college or graduate school, the lowest level among the groups examined.
Johnson was relieved to hear that other students, some of whom had experienced racial slurs, shared her insecurities when they arrived. She has since made close friends, studying and playing basketball with her new classmates. They’ve bonded on field trips, including one to a museum that celebrates the culture of the local Pascua Yaqui tribe, which has a significant presence in the Tucson area.
Now a sophomore in the pre-nursing program, Johnson hopes to become a travel nurse, moving around the Navajo Nation and bringing badly needed health care to reservations like the one where she spent her childhood.
Native SOAR is among a number of University of Arizona efforts aimed at better serving Native students and faculty. It grew out of another service-learning course, Project SOAR. Native SOAR had a similar model but was focused in 2015 to serve the needs of Native students.
The program is led by Felisia Tagaban Gaskin, a doctoral student in the university’s Center for the Study of Higher Education who is Navajo (Diné) and Tlingit (Lingít), as well as Filipina.
In 2017-18, Tagaban Gaskin worked as an education program adviser for about 200 Native students in kindergarten through eighth grades who were enrolled in Tucson’s Sunnyside Unified School District. Visiting students from this predominantly low-income district at their homes, as well as in the classroom, she did her best to excite them about learning and boost their self-confidence.
Around the same time, she was pursuing a master’s degree and working part time for Native SOAR, then a small program whose funding was about to expire and was struggling to stay afloat. After taking a course at the University of Arizona in critical race theory and studying the writings of Indigenous scholars, she concluded that there were better ways to incentivize and measure student success.
“I didn’t see myself at that time as part of the problem, but eventually recognized that a lot of the ways we focus on attendance rates and GPAs have harmful effects on their long-term goals and their success in school,” she said of the students she worked with.
During the first two quarters in the public-school system, she held celebrations honoring students who’d made the honor roll or had strong attendance records. The rest of the academic year, those celebrations honored students for being active in their communities through Native youth councils, rodeo, and pageant royalty. With the shift, “we were validating the things those students were doing, even if it didn’t necessarily contribute to a traditional pathway to school,” she said.
In the fall of 2022, when Tagaban Gaskin returned to Native SOAR as director, the program had 10 students. It’s now up to 41 students. For the mentoring component, students are divided into four groups, working both in person at local high schools and virtually with more-remote students.
It’s proven a soft landing spot for students like Amani LaRae Jones-Embry, a sophomore at Arizona who grew up on a reservation in Cibecue, Ariz., and was one of 27 students in her graduating class.
“It was a crazy adjustment, going from a super-small community,” said Jones-Embry, whose mother is White Mountain Apache and whose father is Black. “My education was nothing like what other students had been getting,” she said. In addition, “we were in the middle of nowhere. The nearest grocery store was about 50 minutes away.”
She’d started school early and was 16 years old when she enrolled in college. “Being a 16-, 17-year-old girl far away from home, it’s a lot to go through.”
Her mixed identity made it challenging at times to figure out where she fit in. “I don’t have Native American features, so people don’t recognize me as Native,” she said. “Growing up, I felt like I wasn’t Native enough or Native at all.” On the reservation, “I was the Black girl.”
At Arizona, she quickly bonded with her roommate, who was Black. So, too, were most of the friends they hung out with. But when they talked about the music and food they liked, she often had trouble relating, making her wonder, here, if she was “Black enough.”
She signed up for the Native SOAR course as a way to fill a gen-ed requirement. “I thought it’d be the whole spiel about Native American genocide and colonialism, and I’m like whatever.”
Instead, it introduced her to new friends and connected her to a culture she’d been missing. She recalled meeting someone who didn’t immediately recognize her as Native American. “I told him I grew up on the res, and I said something in our language. The look on his face was like — wow, you really are Native!”
Jones-Embry said her motivation and grades have improved since she started the program. “When I’m surrounded by people who remind me of home or with programs designed for people where I’m from, it motivates me to do 200 percent. It’s like a little ignition.” Being a mentor, she said, “puts me in a position to hold myself to a higher standard. I’m not just doing it for me anymore. I have to be a role model.”
A psychology major, she dreams of combining everything she loves into a “super-cool career” that would draw on psychology, art, and philosophy. The goal would be to create a “TED Talk style of media that will inform and inspire Native and Black youth.”
Most kids growing up on a reservation don’t have the advantages she had with parents who were both educators stressing the importance of college, she said. “A lot of the youth don’t see college as a real possibility and never even look into college financial aid,” she said.
“A lot of our youth have to deal with very dark, traumatic experiences growing up,” Jones-Embry said. “Some of their parents may not have even graduated from high school. Alcoholism and addiction are big problems, and suicide rates are high. A lot of kids are dealing with things their parents haven’t healed from and their parents’ parents might not have healed from.”
One of her mentees, an 11- or- 12-year-old girl, told Jones-Embry something that made her think she can inspire hope. “She said ‘You make life seem less sad than other people do,’” said Jones-Embry. As a mentor, “I feel like in a way I’m helping my younger self.”
Occasionally, students who are mentored in high school end up enrolling at Arizona and becoming Native SOAR mentors themselves. That was the case for Dauvon Eve, an Arizona freshman who grew up in Tucson but spent summers and vacations at the Navajo reservation in Red Rock, N.M., where his mother is from and where his extended family now lives.
“I’m directly in the middle of the city in the central area of Tucson — me and my mom,” he said. “It was a big deal for me to be able to spend time with Navajos from the reservation.” His girlfriend, Heylene Gamez (Tohono O’odham) is another mentee turned Arizona student and mentor.
Eve, whose father is from Bermuda, said Native SOAR has strengthened his connections with his Native ancestry and opened his eyes to the challenges other students face. “The passing rate in high school is way less than the average student,” Eve said. “Teachers are always harping on them and putting them down when it comes to discipline. They develop a mind-set that college is not meant for me.”
In high school, Eve was in a Native pride program where some mentors from Native SOAR would come to speak with them on Tuesdays. “The first semester was team building and interpersonal stuff; the second semester more focused on college, with one-on-one help with logistics like scholarships,” he said. “Seeing what they were able to do was really inspiring.”
Eve is in the ROTC and plans to join the Air Force after he graduates. He contrasts his experience with that of his cousin, who lives on the reservation. His cousin grew up horseback riding and taking care of livestock, is now a ranch hand, and probably never gave much thought to college.
One of the people largely responsible for recruiting students to become mentees and, eventually, University of Arizona students, is Kayleigh Paddock, who graduated last year from the University of Arizona and is now an outreach specialist with Native SOAR.
Paddock, who’s also applying to medical schools, hopes to become a primary-care physician based on a reservation, and to continue being a mentor.
She grew up on a Navajo reservation in the “super-small town” of Tuba City, Ariz. The first time she took the Native SOAR course was in her sophomore year, in 2021. It was the middle of the pandemic, and she had just transferred to the University of Arizona. “Like everyone, I was stuck in my apartment, which made my transition difficult because I couldn’t make connections,” she said.
Paddock enjoyed the course so much that she signed on as a mentor for the next two years and took the course again, in person, as a senior in the spring of 2023.
“I can empathize with the students,” she said. “I understand some of the unique challenges of growing up on a reservation,” including no Wi-Fi and little access to technology.
During the pandemic, “Native SOAR was forced to get creative and change the way we delivered our program,” she said. Going online allowed the program to serve students outside of Arizona.
“We had a mentee who would drive with his mother to the top of a hill just to get the best possible signal,” she said. “I could identify with that, having to rush to a McDonalds to finish an assignment when I went home during the pandemic.”
“When I was applying to colleges, I didn’t really know what the ACT was, and I didn’t study for it,” Paddock said. “I was so lost throughout the college-application process.” Now, she said, “I want to offer the resources I didn’t have. I want to be a resource for my hometown, a support system and someone who represents us Native people.”
