Roadside Rest

The Experiment in Tribal-directed Indian Education Has Spread Across the Country

More than two decades ago as I motored away from the Navajo reservation, my vision for a moment was clouded by tears.

For I was convinced that a bold and shining new idea was doomed to failure.

In the mid-1970s, the Navajo Nation initiated an educational movement untried in North America. The Navajo Council founded Navajo Community College (NCC), the first formal institution of higher learning wholly under tribal control.

A magazine assigned me to write about NCC. And this is what I found. In its first years, NCC courses were taught in borrowed high school classrooms, while a home campus took shape at a remote canyonlands crossroad. Admission standards were radically lenient.

A student body of 500 was assembled from all corners of the vast Colorado Plateau. Along with customary subjects, students were required to pass courses described as "Indian Studies 101" and "History 111: Analyzes imperialism, war, poverty, racial pride, and the tyranny of the majority."

And NCC by such means presumed to reverse the failures of a century of a free federal educational system? A system that had left only half of the population of America's largest Indian tribe literate in English? A system that had sent its high school graduates to off-reservation colleges where 90 percent dropped out? A system that had produced just one Navajo medical doctor, one lawyer, and a smattering of engineers and technicians? And NCC would change all of this? Impossible! So, my teary retreat. Later, in sympathy, I loaded my story with optimism. But privately the white man pragmatist inside me said, "NCC, not likely, and too bad."

The other day I phoned Dr. Tommy H. Lewis Jr., president of NCC. He acts as chancellor of a seven-campus network with 5,000 students in Arizona and New Mexico. Some attendees take just a class or two, but full-time students number nearly 2,000.

After 26 years of accelerating success, NCC enjoys accreditation from the same scholastic boards that monitor the larger iversities. Under way is a five-year plan, with $2 million in aid from the Ford Foundation, to graduate 1,000 Navajo teachers. NCC expects soon to grant advanced degrees. Where once NCC had to beg for used books, today the NCC Press lists 25 quality titles in its publications catalog. NCC is in partnership with the prestigious Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to study methods of energy management and Nature conservation.

Currently 65 percent of NCC's graduates go on to offreservation universities. Thirty percent of those earn degrees. Himself a holder of three degrees, including his doctorate from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Tommy Lewis symbolizes the realization of those long-ago dreams. Tommy quotes the NCC motto: "Sa'ah naaghái bik'eh hozhóón. It is a term with very broad but deep meaning. It asks for purpose and ethic in human life. All components are interconnected in our ideal, and how we spend every day on Earth from birth to old age is of highest priority to us all."

The tribal elders who gave vision to NCC were correct, says Tommy. "They realized that after hundreds of years of failed assimilation, we needed to take charge of our own goals. There followed a transformation of our thinking, our determination. NCC has become the pride and joy of its owners, the Navajo people. There's more. With NCC the inspiration, today 29 American and Canadian tribes operate community colleges. And whether they are named Little Hoop, Stone Child, or Dull Knife, Blackfeet, Little Big Horn, or Standing Rock: