This is not the first time students have rallied behind a push to expand Native American studies at this university.
But with a renewed energy, greater organization and a better sense of what it may take to see the discipline expand, students, faculty and administrators engaged in the movement say this time, they expect results.
Earlier this month, an informal coalition of university students, faculty and staff members, calling themselves the Native American Studies Working Group, met for the first time to brainstorm how to progress toward creating more Native American studies courses, hiring more Native American faculty and staff and forming a Native American studies minor. And the outcome, some said, seems more promising than ever before.
Student activists circulated a petition for Native American studies that garnered over 360 signatures in a week before a small group of student leaders met with Provost Nariman Farvardin last Tuesday to discuss these goals.
Following the meeting, Farvardin noted achieving these goals would take time and careful study; minors don’t materialize overnight. The U.S. Latina/o studies minor, which was instated in 2008 after student protests and petitions came to a head that year, took several years of talks and planning to come to fruition.
Still, Farvardin recognized that Native American history and cultures are subjects the university should address.
“I am quite supportive of developing a more robust set of courses in Native American studies as this topic constitutes an important part of the history and culture of our country,” he wrote in an e-mail earlier this week. “We will have to gauge the interest of our students in taking these courses, and the interest and expertise of the faculty in teaching them. I will discuss this matter with the deans of the colleges that are likely to be engaged in offering these courses in the near future.”
For the past year, the American Indian Student Union and their allies have worked to raise awareness of the need for Native American studies at the university by meeting with faculty, deans and department heads. They also made their presence known to students through several petitions and multiple Native American-centered events, including the annual Native American Indian Powwow and American Indian Solidarity Week, which was first launched during last year’s Native American Heritage Month — honored each November.
Students said the first meeting of the Native American Studies Working Group is the most concrete indication so far that Native American studies is making headway.
“A lot of people have cared about this for a long time,” said senior classics and history major Natalia Cuadra-Saez, who has been a long-time Native American studies advocate. “We just never got together in one room to do something about it.”
For Cuadra-Saez, her fight for Native American studies at the university began when she returned from an alternative spring break trip to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota her sophomore year to discover administrators planned to cut two Native American-centered courses — the only two offered.
Native American advocates succeeded in having the courses reinstated in 2009, and in April, Cuadra-Saez took it one step further by sponsoring a Student Government Association bill demanding the university create more Native American courses and hire of more faculty to teach them.
Student leaders said the waitlists for Native American courses and the number of petition signatures demonstrate a strong student interest in the topics, which they said is often glossed over in other American history courses and traditional textbooks.
“We treat it like it’s something of the past, like something that’s not relevant, like ancient history or anthropology, and not as several cultures that are alive and thriving,” Cuadra-Saez said. “That’s a really big issue in the United States today.”
Student leaders also said issues such as rampant poverty, alcoholism and depression found on Native American reservations have been ignored as well, and addressing these issues must begin in the classroom.
“The problem is that we’re the smallest minority on campus, so we have to push a lot harder,” said AISU President Erin DeRiso, a senior government and politics and journalism major. “But to have the social change that’s needed, it has to begin on an educational foundation.”
But student leaders said they were optimistic after speaking to some administrators who they said support the cause, especially now that it has been brought more clearly to their attention. They are also excited after the first working group meeting, where some suggested creating a Native American “I”-series course and the launch of a website with resources for students interested in Native American studies, including a list of courses students identified as having a 25 percent Native American focus on their syllabi.
villanueva at umdbk dot com