Late in the morning of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, smoke-filtered sunlight poured through the large windows of the Many Nations Longhouse, which held a crowd of Native American and Indigenous Studies students, advisors, press and community members.
Interim President Phillips announced the start of the Home Flight Scholars Program, a financial aid and wrap-around services program that aims to support all Indigenous students at the University of Oregon.
The state funded Oregon Tribal Student Grant program offers financial assistance to any student who is an enrolled member of one of the nine federally recognized Native tribes in Oregon. Students who are enrolled members in a tribe outside of Oregon, however, are not eligible for this grant.
The Home Flight Scholars Program will waive remaining tuition and fees for Oregon residents who are enrolled citizens of any of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the U.S.
“I’m very pleased that the Home Flight Scholars Program will have an immediate benefit to an estimated 150 to 175 eligible undergraduate students,” Phillips said. “This is my Oprah Winfrey moment: It starts now.”
Megan Van Pelt, a UO junior and co-director of the Native American Student Union, told the audience that she considered dropping out her first year because she couldn’t afford tuition. Van Pelt said she is a recipient of the Oregon Tribal Student Fund and is glad this new program will help all of the out-of-state Indigenous students who felt left out of the state fund.
“I know too many students who are from tribes outside of Oregon that just really struggled,” Van Pelt said. “Some of them are going to cry. This is going to be so huge.”
Van Pelt is the resident assistant for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Academic Residential Community, a residential academic cohort support system and dorm located in Kalapuya Ilihi.
“My ARC was 10 [students] last year, now it’s 24,” Van Pelt said. “We have such a variety of students. I can already tell there’s a huge sense of community.”
The Home Flight Scholars Program, along with providing financial support, will add a new American Indian and Alaskan Native Academic Advisor position, faculty and peer mentorship programs, early move-in dates and a trial course for Native students.
Many Indigenous students come from reservations, leaving predominantly rural communities and entering directly into college campuses, Jason Younker, chief of the Coquille Tribe, UO Assistant Vice President and Advisor to the President on Sovereignty and Government-to-Government Relations, said.
The student activities introduced by the program are intended to ground students in a collegiate community, Younker said. It will be much easier for students to navigate campus with the support of a cohort than by themselves, he said.
“Part of acclimation is knowing what a college class looks like, feels like, but also navigating your way around campus,” Younker said.
He said he remembered feeling underprepared and lonely as an Indigenous undergraduate. Without a support system, unsure of his class schedule and where to eat on campus, Younker said alienation is a big reason why he dropped out of public university in his second year.
Younker said if the university prioritizes making students feel comfortable in their academic environment first, they will have an easier time prioritizing their coursework. The integration initiatives introduced in the Home Flight Scholars Program were designed to give Native students a cultural foundation on campus, he said.
Kirby Brown, director of Native American and Indigenous Studies and an Associate Professor of Native American and Indigenous literary and cultural production, took the podium next. Brown, along with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Advisory Council, has been advocating for the Home Flight Scholars Program as a way to support students who didn’t meet the requirements of the Oregon Tribal Student Grant, he said.
Brown said he was excited Native students from all over the state would finally have the necessary financial support to pursue their academic goals.
“Coming through my own higher education, having no Native studies programs, seeing no Native faculty on campus, seeing no acknowledgement of the Indigenous history and presence on our land, this works to change that,” Brown said. “This is a crucial piece for students, not only for financial support but the larger infrastructure of support this introduces to the Native community here at the UO.”
But the Home Flight Scholars Program wasn’t the only thing to celebrate. Brown said he was also excited about the newly formed Native American Studies Major. The new major program — composed of history, English, philosophy, language, environmental studies, ethnic studies and the School of Journalism and Communication courses — would expand upon the NAS minor already offered at the university.
The major program was developed in consultation with the Tribal Education Coordinators of the nine major Native tribes of Oregon, Brown said. The major requires students to take at least one dedicated course on Oregon Native American tribes and at least one full year of Indigenous language instruction.
Brown said the UO Native Studies Major is one of the only Native studies major programs in the country that requires all students, Native and non-Native, to take one full year of Indigenous language instruction.
The instruction will be offered by the Northwest Indian Language Institute’s linguistics department at UO. The instruction focuses on Northwest Native languages like Ichishkíin, one of the common languages spoken in Umatilla, Yakama and Warm Springs but also supports students in learning and recovering their own tribal languages, Brown said.
Brown, who is a member of the Cherokee tribe in Oklahoma, said he is working to revitalize the Cherokee language, which hasn’t been spoken in his family for three generations.
“We see oftentimes that Native and non-Native students who come to understand the significance of language revitalization work, also come to see it as a way to come into relationship with their own home places,” Brown said. “We as a program will work with their tribal communities and language programs to get them accredited, so they can study their own languages.”
Brown said the Native American and Indigenous Studies program wants to continue hiring new faculty. Last year, the NAIS Advisory Council worked with the Institutional Hiring Plan to hire two cultural anthropology positions, an Indigenous environmental studies position and an Indigenous race and ethics studies position.
“We’d definitely like to work with the provost office in the next few cycles of the Institutional Hiring Plan, if not to do another cluster hire, to at least make sure that we’re opening conversations with other units that are hiring,” Brown said. “We want to work from within Native Studies to get good Indigenous representation in those hires.”
