By Diana Setterberg MSU News Service
BOZEMAN – On a fall day last year, from her office in Montana State University’s American Indian Hall, Lisa Perry listened with one ear to a colleague teaching traditional beadwork skills to students in the next room.
“I could hear them out there laughing and visiting and enjoying each other’s company, being present and not worried about anything else,” said Perry, director of MSU’s American Indian/Alaska Native Student Success Services. “One student went home to Washington for winter break and taught her three sisters how to bead, and now they’re probably going to continue sharing that knowledge, too.”
Similar episodes take place almost daily during the academic year in American Indian Hall, home to the Native student success office and MSU’s Department of Native American Studies in the College of Letters and Science. The two entities work hand in hand to provide academic and cultural programming to ensure that Native students are fully engaged in a supportive learning and social community as they work toward their degrees.
Thanks to a $2.75 million grant received in January 2022 from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies, the quantity and breadth of those programs have expanded significantly in recent years. Now, MSU officials have announced that their work will continue with renewed grant funding in the amount of $2.4 million over the next three years, beginning July 1.
At the time of the original grant, “we had never before received that level of funding,” said Kristin Ruppel, associate professor of Native American studies and co-principal investigator for both grants. “It has allowed us to really think freely about how to better support students.”
During the first grant period, Ruppel said, Cargill funding was allocated to several Department of Native American Studies programming areas: creation of an online Indigenous Food Systems Graduate Certificate; development of the Buffalo Nations Food Systems Initiative, a collaborative project of NAS and EHHD emanating from a research partnership between the Blackfeet nonprofit Piikani Lodge Health Institute and NAS’s Native Land Project; the Elders-in-Residence program, which aims to bridge traditional knowledge with academic pursuits in collaboration with a visiting tribal elder or elders; and increased cultural programming critical to maintaining the department’s accreditation with the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium, which it received in 2021.
“With this renewed funding, we will continue those efforts and also focus on moving students into either graduate education or meaningful forms of employment,” Ruppel said. “We want to offer students the whole variety of skills they can take wherever they need to go next, including if they want to go home and work with their communities.”
With the grant support, Native student services has doubled its staff from 2 ½ to five positions, which were needed to expand cultural programming and develop two new mentorship initiatives for Native students, Perry said. The Good Relations Learning Community offers peer mentorship to Native students as they learn to navigate college life, and Building MSU Families invites students to develop family-like relationships with trained staff and faculty members across campus who mentor them as honorary “aunties” and “uncles.”
The cultural component is key to helping MSU’s Native students feel at home and that they belong at the university, said Perry.
“Some students may be really engaged and know a lot about their culture, and others maybe know that their great-great-grandma was part of a tribe and so they’re trying to reestablish their cultural identity and connection to their people. We work with all students on that,” she said.
Traditional beading is one of the many cultural enrichment activities students can try, along with tribal languages, sweetgrass medicine, native plants, appliqué, star quilting and more. Some are taught by visiting knowledge sharers from many tribal nations.
“We get to reach out to different tribal communities and involve different community members and integrate their knowledge,” said Perry, who added that the interaction for students is invaluable. “You may not know it, but you’re being given this traditional way of knowing and all of a sudden, you’re a knowledge carrier because you were taught the way of doing something.”
Walter Fleming, head of the Department of Native American Studies, said Native student enrollment and retention continue to increase at MSU. Since 2020, first-year Native student enrollment has increased by 22%, Native graduate student enrollment has increased by 62%, and the percentage of Native students in the MSU student body – 7% – is now, for the first time, slightly higher than the percentage of Native Americans in Montana’s population.
“While we can’t say for certain that the grant moved these numbers, they do demonstrate that there has been a positive impact,” said Fleming. He noted that the grant was received in 2022 as the new American Indian Hall was being opened, so both events may have contributed to the correlation.
Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies supports efforts to enhance quality of life, and prevent and relieve suffering of children, families and seniors; preserve and promote the environment and the arts; and encourage the humane treatment of animals. Founded by the late Margaret A. Cargill, the foundation partners with organizations to make a lasting difference for individuals and communities, with particular attention to overlooked causes.
