When Burgundy Fletcher began her college education, she just wasn’t at a disadvantage by being an older nontraditional student with a family at home. Fletcher is also part Native American attending college at a school that, until just recently, did not have a community center addressing the needs of Native American students.
“When I started school in 2014, the school only had a few native teachers and probably only 100 to 120 Native American students,” said Fletcher, 44, who is now a chemical engineering senior at the University of California San Diego.
That isn’t an unusual situation for mainstream colleges, said Dr. Joely Proudfit, director of the California Indian Culture and Sovereignty Center and department coordinator of American Indian studies at California State University, San Marcos, even for colleges such as UCSD that are in a region with a large population of Native Americans.
Like many campus community centers for minorities, the UCSD Inter-tribal Resource Center was a product of longstanding racial tensions that culminated in 2010 with an off-campus fraternity party known as the “Compton Cookout” in which students mocked Black History Month.
Fletcher said the resource center was a long time in planning and was a welcome first step in making current Native American students more comfortable in the college life. “I think it was really one of the last cultural centers to get up and running, and it really took the Inter-tribal Resource Center a few years to get its own space.”
A paper published in 2008 by Southeastern Oklahoma State University said that, in 2002, Native Americans represented less than 1 percent of all students enrolled in college. Most of the students attended two-year colleges within the tribal system. As well, only 0.7 percent of all associate, bachelor’s and advanced degrees were earned by Native Americans that year.
The paper also concluded that numerous studies indicate that factors that include pre-college preparation, family support and supportive, involved faculty, commitment of the institution and maintaining an active presence in their home community as well as continuing cultural ceremonies are keys to academic success.
