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Inside the Eagle's Head
An American Indian College
By Angelle A. Khachadoorian
THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The University of Alabama Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-5614-9
Chapter One
Entering the Turquoise Gates The Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute
[SIPI] gives me an outlook in the world. It's kinda like it helps me prepare to ... go outside the gates. And know what I'll expect. And [be] ready for it. -Dallas Wicke (Sioux) SIPI's a great opportunity to pursue your education. It's a great opportunity to establish your academic career. There's a lot of great opportunities here, it's just how you take advantage of them. There's a lot of really good programs at SIPI. -Renee Verde (Navajo) I'm really, really glad I came here. I'm really glad I took the time to check it out, to see if it was something I could do ... I knew I'd be able to finish here, be able to do something here. You gotta take advantage of the resources that are available there. If you don't ask questions, if you don't participate, then you really lose out, I think. -Clayton Griego (Pueblo)
SIPI: An Origin Story
In 1971, Native Ameri can leaders were, after years of effort, able to persuade the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to fund and build a vocational-technical school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Native Ameri can students. The new school, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, or SIPI (pronounced "Sippy"), resolved a long-standing dilemma. In order for students from the Southwest to attend SIPI's sister school-the venerable Haskell Indian Nations University of Lawrence, Kansas-they had to live far from home, removing them from their communities and the daily life of their tribe. A Bureau of Indian Affairs postsecondary school in Albuquerque meant that students could stay close to home and continue to actively participate in tribal activities. The parcel of land the BIA chose for SIPI's campus is located on the western bank of the Rio Grande River and, the story goes, was once the dairy farm for the Albuquerque Indian School.
SIPI was initially designed to provide technical training and job placement services to Native American students who were either not ready for, or not interested in, a standard college education. In 1993, the school underwent a seismic philosophical and curricular shift when it became accredited as a community college with an emphasis on technology. While technology is still a central theme, in recent years most SIPI students have majored in liberal arts or business rather than technical fields.
The Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute's genesis was a result of the movement toward Native American educational sovereignty in the 1960s. The 1960s marked a significant shift in attitudes away from assimilationist educational institutions-which had been the norm for Indian education for most of its history-and a move toward putting control of the education of Native Ameri can children into the hands of Native Ameri can educators and parents. At the same time, postsecondary education was taking a step toward sovereignty as well. The All-Indian Pueblo Council began in 1960 to encourage the Bureau of Indian Affairs to create a federally operated post-secondary institution in the Southwest. It took another ten years before construction began for the new school, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI 1999:3). By then, tribal colleges and Native American studies programs were being founded all over the United States (Reyhner and Eder 2004:305). The original TCU, Navajo Community College (NCC)-now Diné College-was founded in 1968 in Tsaile, Arizona. Six other tribal colleges quickly followed, with the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute opening only three years after NCC was founded (Reyhner and Eder 2004:305).
During the 1970s, the number of Ameri can Indian colleges grew exponentially. Ten years after the founding of Navajo Community College there were sixteen TCUs (Stein 1998:83), and thirty years after the first TCU opened, there were thirty member schools in the umbrella organization for tribal colleges, the Ameri can Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) (Szasz 1999:242-247). When it opened, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute was an exciting addition to Native American education. The dormitories were filled with amenities not offered in the Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools that many of its students graduated from. An older Navajo student described visiting friends at SIPI in its earliest days. She listed the enviable luxuries that SIPI students had that were not available at her boarding school: The entire dormitory was carpeted, there were pay phones and televisions in the common areas, students could bring their own bedding, and best of all, they had lockers instead of the boarding school cubbies where there was always a risk of theft. SIPI, and its peers, represented the beginning of a new era in American Indian education.
For most of its history, SIPI has been operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a federal agency under the Department of the Interior, through its educational branch the Office of Indian Education Programs (OIEP). The BIA-and now its recently formed offshoot, the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE)-oversees all of the federal government's schools for American Indian children, and its two Native American-serving colleges. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has directed and managed the relationship between the United States government and American Indian tribes for almost two hundred years. The relationship between the BIA, tribal entities, and individual American Indian people is complex and laden with the weight of history; sometimes that history surfaces in unexpected ways at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute.
Throughout this book I will refer to SIPI as being administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs or its subsidiary, the Office of Indian Education Programs (OIEP). I do this for two reasons: First, the links between SIPI and historical American Indian educational institutions are derived from the BIA, and more important, the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) is so new that it was formed after the research for this book. The school that appears in these pages is a Bureau of Indian Affairs institution, not a BIE one.
SIPI was quite small when it first opened, with 342 students enrolled (Harbert 1996:B2). Its student population in recent years has varied dramatically from around two hundred students during the summer trimester to three or four times that in the fall. Only one year after its highest enrollment-914 students-in the fall of 2003 (SIPI 2004), the school struggled with a severe budget deficit and enrollment fell to 614 students (AIHEC 2005:1). The acceptance rate of applicants is 95 percent, and the average high school grade point average (GPA) is 2.11 (Peterson's 2008). Its student body is neither the largest, nor the smallest, in the tribal college consortium, but falls in the top third. The school has had more than 130 employees but is currently quite a bit smaller (Armijo 2005). When I was hired, there were more than thirty full-time faculty members; now there are fewer than fifteen.
The Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute shares membership in several small subsets of postsecondary institutions in the United States. First, SIPI is one of only two federally operated postsecondary institutions for Ameri can Indian and Alaskan Native students. Although the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute is the sister school to the far more established, and famous, federally operated Native Ameri can college, Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU, or more commonly known simply as Haskell), SIPI is no twin to HINU. HINU is a far less conflicted institution than SIPI. There are, I believe, several reasons for this: Its long history has allowed HINU the time to work out organizational kinks; HINU has a deeply committed and active alumni population, giving students a voice in the institution; HINU has double the budget that SIPI has; HINU operates more like a college and less like a government installation than SIPI. More recently, SIPI adopted a despised, controversial, and ultimately deemed illegal personnel system that has led to multiple lawsuits-and their loss by the institution. HINU rejected the same personnel system from the outset. HINU is not without conflicts. At the time of this writing, the president of the school was being pressured to step down, and the school's endowment organization had folded and given away its funds.
SIPI is also a longtime peer institution to the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). IAIA became a two-year college in 1974 and gained its federal educational charter in 1986 with more than $24 million in an endowment and investments (IAIA 2007:4, 8). Faced with a massive reduction in Congressional funding, IAIA reshaped itself into an independent institution. IAIA is no longer under the governance of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but receives its funding directly from the Department of the Interior. Students at all three schools regularly transfer and take classes back and forth among the schools, a trend that is especially common in the case of HINU and SIPI.
Many of their differences are significant to the two schools' (SIPI and HINU) organizational cultures. SIPI is far newer than HINU, which was founded initially as a boarding school in 1884. SIPI offers one-year certificates or two-year associate degrees while Haskell also has bachelor's and master's degree programs. Haskell boasts active alumni associations and famous alumni, and it is far more widely known by non-Natives than SIPI.
SIPI shares unusual characteristics with several types of postsecondary institutions. For example, one quality SIPI and HINU have in common, and that shapes the cultures of these schools, is the composition of their student bodies. These two schools only enroll Native Americans, which stands in surprising contrast to the other set of postsecondary institutions they are usually classed with, the tribally controlled colleges and universities (TCUs). In 2005, for example, only 79 percent of the students at TCUs were Native American (AIHEC 2005:2). Because of its accessibility to people of all federally recognized tribes, and even though it is a small school, at any given time, there may be as many as one hundred different tribes represented in SIPI's student population.
SIPI is one of only seven federally operated postsecondary institutions, a distinction shared by HINU and the five United States service academies, also known as the military academies. These include the United States Military Academy (USMA), commonly referred to by its home city, West Point; the United States Naval Academy (USNA), commonly referred to by its home city as well, Annapolis; the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA); the United States Merchant Marine Academy, and the United States Coast Guard Academy.
In many official contexts, such as research on American Indians and Alaska Natives in higher education (U.S. Dept. of Ed. 1998), SIPI is included with the small group of thirty- six tribal colleges and universities in the United States-again, a group including HINU-which are designed and chartered to serve a primarily Native American student population (IAIA 2007:4). Regardless of how it has been classified, I will show later in this book that SIPI is actually a very different type of institution than the TCUs.
In addition to the characteristics it shares with each of these types of colleges-TCU, federal college, sister to HINU-SIPI is also a fascinatingly hybridized institution that struggles to meld deeply conflicting institutional models, each with their unique corporate cultures, rules, and philosophies. SIPI is a community college, a federal installation, and a Bureau of Indian Affairs educational setting, and at least attempts to be comparable to a tribally controlled college or university. The various models for these types of institutions are all wrestling with each other at the school, with no one system taking the lead. This conflict between institutional models leads to inconsistencies in the rules and attitudes that are applied to students, leading to confusing experiences at the school-sometimes SIPI students are treated like adults attending college, and other times they are as heavily managed as children in a historical Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school. Students are whipsawed between the two conditions-independent adults and overly managed children-and it leads to frustration and resistance. Many cannot specifically name the source of the frustrations and inconsistencies they encounter at the school. They are, though, very able commentators on the experience of functioning within (or rather, maneuvering around) the school's contradictions. Oftentimes, their analyses of the school take the form of mental or verbal metaphors, which enable them to define the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute by comparing it to another, better understood type of institution.
In its relatively brief history, the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute has experienced a recurrent cycle of dramatic high and low points. Recent high points include earning accreditation as a community college, the funding and construction of the $12 million, 72,540-square-foot Science and Technology Building, and an increase in academic offerings and in student enrollment (Briseno 2003:1). The school's successes are often overshadowed by its near chronic state of crisis and institutional disorder, now near persistent features of the institution. Beginning with the threat to close the school little more than a decade after its doors opened, SIPI's administration has faced, or created, crises requiring significant time, effort, politicking, and legal action to resolve (SIPI 1999:4). The institutional disorder manifests itself in many ways: The high turnover rate of the institution's presidents; perpetual fiscal crises prompted by permanent and severe underfunding from Congress coupled with apparent overspending, like the 2005 budget deficit of $1.06 million that led to massive layoffs and a complete reorganization of the school (Armijo 2005b:1); conflict surrounding the unpopular imposition of a dramatically different personnel system, which faced repeated legal protests and which was subsequently overturned by court order in 2006; and lastly, but undergirding all the other issues, is the ever-present disorder caused by the lack of a consistent and clear institutional identity. Efforts to mesh incompatible organizational models-college, BIA school, TCU, and federal office installation-necessarily fail when there seems to be neither awareness of the inherent incompatibilities of these types of institutions, nor a systemic or systematic effort to bridge them.
Administrative attitudes and decisions do not appear to reflect an understanding of the inherent incompatibilities of these types of institutions. Complicating matters, much of the decision making occurs off-stage and out of sight, so that throughout this book, I use the term "administration" to describe both the administrators at the college level and the bureaucrats higher up in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As all major administrative decisions face some amount of Bureau-level oversight, the decision making and the general administration of the school happen at all levels of the federal chain of command. I do not reference the actions of any specific administrators, as I do not know the role of each individual actor in designing, approving, and implementing policy and institutional philosophy-rather, decisions were made and handed down from the school's administrative tier with no names attached. Whether decisions were generated at the individual or the group level (another unknown to the rank-and-file employees and students), decisions routinely betrayed a lack of awareness of how they reflected SIPI's fractured institutional culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inside the Eagle's Head by Angelle A. Khachadoorian Copyright © 2010 by The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission.
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