American Indians Expand College Hopes

Sometimes white people can seem really ignorant, says Alistaire MacRae, a 17-year-old Navajo high school student, noting the time he and his family vacationed at Yellowstone National Park and were soon surrounded by tourists snapping pictures of them, as though they were a herd of elk.

By SAM DILLON

Still, Mr. MacRae wants a college education and knows that some good universities are predominantly white, far from his homelands in the Arizona desert, and hard to get into. So his parents paid $50 for Alistaire to join 50 other American Indian students this summer, meeting with representatives of Harvard, Stanford and 19 other schools for a crash course on how to apply to elite colleges.

"This has really opened up my mind," said Kyle Hegdal, an Eskimo who is a high school senior from Fairbanks, Alaska, midway through the course on the Carleton College campus here. Mr. Hegdal said he had not previously contemplated applying to any Ivy League school. "But now I’m thinking East Coast, maybe M.I.T. or Cornell," he said.

American Indians and Alaska Natives, who make up about 1 percent of the nation’s population, are underrepresented at many highly selective colleges, contributing well below 1 percent of undergraduates.

Even those who enroll often drop out. On average, fewer than one in five Indians who enroll in college earn a bachelor’s degree, said Norbert Hill, executive director of the American Indian Graduate Center of Albuquerque.

The gathering here on Carleton College’s leafy campus was part of a cottage industry that has developed – short courses, counseling efforts and consultancies – aimed at helping Indian students navigate the obstacle course that is college application. For their part, elite colleges, most of them far from any reservation, need ways to get acquainted with those students and to understand their difficulties, which include the cultural issues Indian students face at largely white universities.

"It’s like navigating with a foot in two canoes," said Mr. Hill, who left an Oneida reservation to attend the University of Wisconsin in 1964. Among the reasons Indian college students drop out at higher rates than other ethnic groups, experts said, is the poor quality of their reservation and rural schools and the culture shock that many experience as they move from reservation to university life.

"You rarely would get a white student walking up to an African-American student and saying, ‘Wow, I’ve never met a black person before.’ But that’s not uncommon for Natives," said Danielle Terrance, an Akwesasne Mohawk who is a student development specialist at Cornell University’s American Indian Program. "You’re always having to explain who you are."

During the five-day course here, known as College Horizons, students polished college entrance essays, heard an assistant director in Yale’s admissions office describe the touches that can make a dull application sparkle, worked with an associate dean from Princeton on a financial aid application and heard Tallerita Tunney, a Navajo woman who took the course five years ago, describe life at Macalester College in St. Paul, where she graduated in May.

"It’s cold in Minnesota, but you learn how to dress warmly and I love it," Ms. Tunney said.

The American Indian students, all high school juniors or seniors, included Gary Richards, an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge, S.D., who wears a rhinestone earring and a braid reaching his waist and aspires to attend law school, and Ashton Thompson, a senior from Philadelphia, Miss., who wrote a college entrance essay about studying her Choctaw language, which is in decline.

Twenty-five students packed into a classroom to hear Carmen Lopez, a Navajo woman from Black Mesa, Ariz., who directs the Harvard University Native American Program.

"What’s your interest in Harvard?" Ms. Lopez asked. One student wondered if Harvard had a dental school. Mr. Hegdal wanted to know about business courses.

"Doesn’t Harvard have the most books of anywhere?" asked John Badami III, an Osage from Cazenovia, N.Y., who attends a private school in Connecticut.

"Yes, 15 million volumes!" Ms. Lopez said.

In an interview, she said that Harvard College currently has about 55 Native Americans out of a total enrollment of 6,500, and she would like to help increase that. But her goal was to help students find a college that is a good fit.

"Sometimes I just say, ‘You should go check out Cal State,’ " she said.

Whitney Laughlin, who founded College Horizons in 1998, sat across from Brittney Babb, a Lower Brule Sioux who is a junior from Vermillion, S.D., reading Ms. Babb’s file, and asking questions. Did Brittney want a campus with lots of other American Indians? Was she liberal or conservative? What about a women’s college? East Coast, West Coast or heartland?

Ms. Babb had already expressed interest in Dartmouth, Georgetown and Harvard, and Dr. Laughlin urged her also to consider Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Carleton, Macalester and Washington University in St. Louis.

"Here’s what you have going for you," Dr. Laughlin said. "You’re low income, you’re Native American, you have an outstanding grade-point average and you have a solid record in athletics. You’re doing a great job, Brittney."

Poverty had shaped the aspirations of students like Gabrielle Moore, a Chickasaw-Cherokee from Tulsa, Okla., who said she hoped to break into advertising.

"What about creative writing?" Dr. Laughlin asked.

"I’d love to, but I don’t want to be living in a Dumpster behind McDonald’s," Ms. Moore replied. "I’ve lived without money and don’t want to do it again."

In contrast, Casey Vaughn, a senior from the Mississippi band of the Choctaw, said that revenues from her tribe’s two casinos would pay her expenses at the college of her choosing. Such tribe-financed scholarships are not available to most students, however, because only about 30 of the 500 tribes in the United States run lucrative gaming operations.

Payments to youths by some tribes with casinos help dissuade them from attending college, some American Indian leaders who participated in the course here said.

But Willie Hordacker, a lawyer for the Shakopee Sioux, which operates the Mystic Lake Casino south of Minneapolis, rejected that view. He said in an interview that the tribe’s 190 adult members receive a per capita payment, but said he could not confirm or contradict reports that the payments are $70,000 a month. The tribe, he said, has at least 10 current members enrolled in college or vocational schools. "So the per capita payments have clearly not been a disincentive to those students," Mr. Hordacker said.

For Mr. MacRae, a big bear of a fellow with longish black hair, the course did not change his college aspirations. Before arriving at Carleton, he wanted to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., a preference maintained even after attending presentations by representatives from Macalester, Dartmouth, Yale, Cornell and Harvard.

"All those schools sounded challenging and I respect them for that," he said. But a visit to the institute in Santa Fe left him impressed by the sheer number of Indian artists there and eager to study writing there.

His father, Sterling MacRae, a successful sculptor, said in a telephone interview that he would support his son, regardless of his choice.

"Our songs and prayers are with him to try his wings," Mr. MacRae said.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company