The Invisible Minority
At Harvard, Erica A. Scott ’06 is far from her extended family. She grew up in Rehoboth, Mass., but most of Scott’s relatives live in Kansas, not far from where the Lenape Nation of American Indians was relocated many years ago. Despite the distance, Scott has strong connections to her family and her tribal culture. She doesn’t live on a reservation, and she doesn’t live in a metropolitan area with a high Native population, but regardless, coming to Harvard has posed a new set of challenges for her.
Scott says that American Indians tend to have “different value systems” than most Harvard students. Many Indian students, she says, have a hard time reconciling their community-focused outlook with mainstream Harvard culture.
But Scott has found a niche as president of Native Americans at Harvard College (NAHC). The undergraduate group brings together about a dozen of Harvard College’s 56 Native students. They represent a variety of backgrounds and interests: Elijah M. Hutchinson ’06 is from Brooklyn, NY, the grandson of Taino and Seminole tribal members; Sophia A. Taula ’04, part of both the Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes in the Pacific northwest, spent a year living on the Umatilla Reservation; and John T. Sieg ’07, part Oklahoma Cherokee, is a member of ROTC and the Green Party.
American Indian students at Harvard are a diverse group. And among the University’s minority groups, they are also the least visible, the smallest and—according to NAHC—the least recognized on campus.
“You could probably count the number of [American] Indian professors [at Harvard] on one hand,” says Visiting Professor C. Matthew Snipp, a Native professor visiting from Stanford University. While other minority populations grow, the College’s American Indian population continues to hover at under one percent. Harvard offers only two courses in American Indian studies exclusively for undergraduates, and one—Sociology 178: American Indians in Contemporary Society—is taught by Snipp, who will leave at the end of the year.
But the University’s American Indian community argues that Harvard has a unique obligation.
Over its history, Harvard has often pledged to support the country’s least employed, most underpaid, arguably most exploited minority. That kind of message would seem to go along with Harvard’s greater project. In February, University President Lawrence H. Summers vouched to “send the strongest possible message that Harvard is open to talented students from all economic backgrounds.” But Harvard has hardly ever followed through with its motions of support to the American Indian community.
This fall, the University used a $3 million gift from the Oneida tribe to establish the Harvard Law School Oneida Indian Nation Professorship, a move intended to promote American Indian-focused scholarship at the Law School. But one professorship may not be enough to recruit more American Indian students to Harvard, or create a larger courseload in American Indian studies across the University. What’s more, unlike other comparable colleges, Harvard has little specialized recruitment of American Indian students and limited resources for pursuits in American Indian studies.
If the University fails to back its professorship up with programs like these, it won’t be the first time Harvard paid lip service without taking concrete action.
From Neglect to Activism
Harvard College’s Native American history mirrors that of our nation’s American Indian history—mostly embarrassing, though not without its redemptive moments.
Shortly after the College’s 1636 founding, Harvard was crippled by financial trouble. Henry Dunster, who became president of the University in 1640, hoped to make Harvard into the American version of England’s prestigious Cambridge and Oxford Universities. But Dunster was in a bind: the college faced a severe housing crunch, and he lacked the money to build new residences.
After failed attempts at courting donors, Dunster enlisted the help of the ambitiously titled Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. The Society suggested a method for procuring funds: all Dunster had to do was take American Indian students into Harvard and deep-pocketed donors would step forward. The more these students knew English, the Society’s thinking went, the more they’d be able to read the gospel.
Dunster went a step further, rewriting the College’s charter to include a dedication to the “education of the English and Indian youth” in 1650.
The Charter has been in place now for 354 years.
With the funds Dunster secured, Harvard constructed its “Indian College” in 1655, where Native American and non-Native students were to be housed. Before the building fell into uninhabitable disrepair in 1693, it had housed a grand total of four Native students, only one of whom made it to graduation. The rest of the space was rented to non-Native students.
After almost 270 years of neglect, Harvard students and faculty members in the Graduate School of Education moved in 1970 to resuscitate the centuries-old commitment. Together they formed what later became the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP), today an Interfaculty Initiative under the auspices of the Provost’s Office. HUNAP is based at the Kennedy School of Government, but it aims to serve the entire University.
“We’re trying to have the University consider its duty and commitment to Indian people and education,” says Carmen D. Lopez, HUNAP’s interim executive director.
The program has had an unstable past since its founding as a part of the Graduate School of Education (GSE). A financial crisis in 1995 nearly forced HUNAP to shut down. The bulk of the program’s federal funding had dried up, and although the University applauded HUNAP’s mission, and even offered it partial emergency funds, it did not make the program part of its permanent budget.
But after reorganizing and generating its own capital campaign, the program was able to reemerge with a more research-oriented focus under the direction of its faculty advisory board chair, Ford Foundation Professor of International Economy Joseph Kalt.
Kalt, who has helped steer the program to expand American Indian studies throughout the University, is the only professor at Harvard to focus his research exclusively on American Indians.
Recruiting Change
According to Lopez, the weak American Indian studies offerings make it hard to recruit American Indian students to Harvard.
Lopez says the question that potential applicants ask themselves is: “Where are all the Native American professors, and where are all the classes?”
“If you’re a [prospective] student who’s interested in American Indian classes, it’d be difficult to find them [at Harvard],” says Kyle E. Scherer ’05, who is part Native American and is also a Special Concentrator in American Public Policy and American Indian Politics.
But Scherer isn’t dissatisfied. A frequent enrollee in graduate courses in Native studies, including Professor Kalt’s cross-faculty course Native Americans in the 21st Century: Nation Building I & II, fall and spring courses partially funded by HUNAP, Scherer says he has found “fantastic” support from faculty.
Scott is more skeptical. She believes that while there is particular support from HUNAP and its affiliated faculty, Native issues are “grossly underrepresented” in history and social science courses.
She says that grant-giving entities like the Harvard Foundation and the Undergraduate Council have been excellent in terms of financial support, but she sees the paltry American Indian studies curriculum at Harvard as the ultimate deterrent for potential applicants. “Friends of mine who wanted to apply to Harvard found that it had nothing to offer them,” she says. And without a department and without aggressive recruitment of American Indian students and professors, the University might be losing out to other schools.
HUNAP, with its limited resources, has initiated a campaign to distribute information on American Indian recruitment to all of the University’s admissions offices. Part of its mission is to “recruit, retain and graduate” Indian students, says Lopez. But the program’s influence on the University’s admissions offices is limited.
Despite American Indians’ unique legal, historical and social obstacles, all of which put particular burden on American Indian applicants, the College recruits potential American Indian applicants through its generalized Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, without addressing the specialized problems of American Indian recruitment. Roger Banks, the director of Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program, writes in an email that Native American recruitment is a “hotly contested field in college admissions, but Harvard College works aggressively to identify, admit, and matriculate Native American students” with the assistance of HUNAP.
But when compared to other universities’ recruitment practices, Harvard may not be doing enough.
Dartmouth College holds an annual Native American recruitment program in the fall, luring potential applicants to meet Dartmouth’s strong Native community by offering free airfare and lodging in Hanover, NH. Dartmouth also travels to reservations and areas with high Native populations to find prospective students.
Dartmouth may be far different from Harvard in terms of recruitment, but it has a strikingly similar history. In 1769, Dartmouth founder Reverend Eleazar Wheelock was able to raise substantial funds for the College from the Royal Governor of New Hampshire after penning a charter that devoted Dartmouth to “the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in the Land and also of English Youth and any others.” For the next two centuries, Dartmouth, like Harvard, failed to fulfill its promises. However, in his 1970 inauguration, Dartmouth President John G. Kemeny pledged to address the “historical lack of opportunities for Native Americans in higher education” and the University began its active recruitment. Since then, Dartmouth has graduated more than 500 American Indian students, more than all other Ivy League schools combined, according to its website.
Around the same time of Kemeny’s inauguration, Harvard Law student James Youngblood Henderson, was preparing a memorandum charging that Harvard “unjustly enriched the University, at the expense of the American Indian,” according to a senior history thesis by Ethel B. Branch ’01. He subsequently brought his case to the Massachusetts Attorney General, who later ruled that the case should not be brought to court. Branch interviewed Henderson, who argued that the case was dropped because of fears about Harvard’s negotiating power, according to the thesis.
Dartmouth currently has 117 American Indian students enrolled at its college—twice as many as Harvard, at a school two-thirds the size. Additionally, Dartmouth has an active degree-granting Native American Studies department and a Native American House with an adjacent Indian studies library.
Stanford, Cornell, and the University of Michigan also specifically recruit American Indian students and foster American Indian studies programs on their campuses.
Not just lip service
At Harvard, next year’s incoming freshman class will have, for the first time ever, more women than men. The admitted Class of 2008 set records for percentages of Asian American, African American, and Latino students. But the American Indian percentage of admitted applicants remains at a static level of under one percent. Banks hopes that “the new Financial Aid Initiative will provide even greater leverage in our recruitment efforts,” but until these new practices are made concrete, the number of American Indian applicants is unlikely to rise.
Still, HUNAP’s director Lopez remains optimistic. She sees promise in small moves forward, like research symposiums, fellowships and scholarships sponsored by HUNAP.
American Indian students at Harvard have also found solace in their community with each other. NAHC, the Native American student group, not only fosters camaraderie, but it is also an activist force. NAHC and HUNAP have hosted an annual powwow for the last nine years. In the past two years, Scott and NAHC have taken an active role in organizing the event, a Pan-Indian ceremonial dance festival.
This year’s powwow was held in the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center (QRAC) last Saturday. The event was, without a doubt, a triumph: multiple dance groups from across the country participated, and craft vendors came to peddle jewelry, carvings, books and music albums.
The powwow, an effort to increase Native visibility but also foster community development, has garnered increased support from campus initiatives each year. This year, it received sponsorship from the Undergraduate Council, the Harvard Foundation, the Harvard School of Public Health Dean’s Office, the GSE and other sources from across campus. But without exclusive recruitment and without a stronger Native studies presence, the University will only be making token gestures and continue to fail to uphold its end of a 300-year-old promise.