Symphony Oxendine: Not find out what is, what is going on in our institution that they’re not wanting to be involved, and how do we make a place that centers their needs, right? And so I think for all of us, that really has been a huge shift in how we’ve approached the work that we’re doing in higher education now. And, and I think many of us still hold deeply in how we root the work that we do. I think absolutely that deficit-based approach can very much be kind of the typical fallback to how we do research or how we write about things. But we really wanted to focus, I think, in this on how students, Indigenous students and people in communities have the strengths and, and the solution already when they come to us.

Raechele Pope: Welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Raechele Pope. Today we’re talking about the evolving field of Indigenous student affairs and Native student success in higher education all through the lens of a recent volume, Advancing Indigenous and Native Student Affairs: Evolving Knowledges and Practices.

And I am thrilled to be joined by four editors of this important collection, Symphony Oxendine, Cori Bazemore-James, Deborah Taub, and John Garland. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in, alongside, or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

We hope these conversations will be both, will both contribute to the field and be restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week at studentaffairsnow.com and wherever you listen to podcasts Today’s episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve offers four leadership coaching journeys designed to expand capacity and build capabilities, empowering courageous leadership to transform institutions and reimagine the future of education.

As I mentioned, I’m Raechele Pope. My pronouns are she, her, and hers, and I am joining you from Minneapolis, Minnesota, the ancestral home of the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples. Now let’s get to this conversation. Hey, thanks for being here. I really appreciate you being here, and I thought it would be really helpful to our audience if you first introduced yourself to the listeners.

What would you like us to know about your work and what brought you to your involvement with this volume? How about if you start us off, John?

John Garland: Great, Raechele. Thank you again for having us. My name’s John Garland, and I’m a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. I, for the last nine plus years, I’ve been director of research and scholar success for the Cobell Scholarship Program.

Prior to that, I worked in colleges and universities. So I’ve had about 25 years working with Native students or advising and supporting Native students on a college campus. And from that perspective, this has been my home for that period of time, really for the majority of my career.

And I worked with Deb for several years as co-ed, as assistant editor of New Directions for Student Services. And as part of that planning, we had both decided it was time for another volume on this particular topic, given that it had been two decades since the original Serving Native Students had come out.

And so we we thought we need to be involved in this, too.” And so we are very excited that this project, along with Symphony and Cori came to fruition. And so it was actually two years ago last month- That we came together in Phoenix and kicked off this project. In less than two years we had a complete edited book come out, so we couldn’t be more pleased, I believe.

Raechele Pope: That’s exciting. Deb, why don’t you take it from there?

Deborah Taub: Sure. I’m Deb Taub. My pronouns are she/her. I am speaking to you from Binghamton University, which is located on the traditional land of the Hauden- Haudenosaunee and Onondaga people, past and present. I am a professor here. I’ve been in our higher education and student affairs program.

This is beginning my 11th year here. I’m also the editor of New Directions for Student Services. And I first got interested in this wh- the whole issue of Native students, Indigenous students through working with some graduate students back at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, including someone who, on this panel, who-

was my master’s student and then my doctoral student. And through her I met so many people and learned so much, so thank you so much for that, Symphony Oxendine.

Raechele Pope: That’s

Deborah Taub: great.

Raechele Pope: Cori, how about if you go?

Cori Bazemore-James: Sure. I’m Cori Bazemore James. I’m an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation of Western New York and I currently serve as Assistant Vice Provost in the graduate school and affiliate faculty of higher education at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

So also in the Minneapolis area. Hello, neighbor.

Raechele Pope: I did not know that. That’s great.

Cori Bazemore-James: Yeah. We’ll have to get coffee sometime. Absolutely. Much of my career has been focused my career, my writing has been focused on centering Native students and staff and supporting them building community and the needs that they have in working in primarily white institutions.

And being a part of this 20th anniversary issue has been especially meaningful to me because I leaned so heavily on the 2005 volume when I was in graduate school, in my writing and my research. Because for the longest time, there have not been many Native publication, publications by Native authors- Right

and researchers. And so most of the writing out there is by non-Native folks. A lot of it was incorrect. And so to have this great volume and celebration of Native experiences and Native storytellers in the realm of higher education was powerful, and I cited it many times. And it was really great to be a part of this issue because now we’re celebrating this huge wave of new publications coming out by Native authors.

There’s so many great Native higher ed writers and researchers that are j- it’s an explosion of great work out there. So it’s been really humbling and honoring to join this team and celebrating the work that they’re doing.

Raechele Pope: That’s great. And Symphony last but certainly not least in this conversation.

Symphony Oxendine: All right. Thank you, Raechele. So yeah, I’m Symphony Oxendine. I’m joining you from Lumberton, North Carolina. And I am currently an associate dean for graduate education, professional programs, research, and faculty affairs at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. But I’m a student affairs professional turned faculty turned back administrator now.

So I’ve come full circle. I just finished my first year as an associate dean and I came into this work because of Deb. So I was a master’s student at UNC Greensboro in, in 2005, 2006, and that actually was when the first volume came out. And just like Cori, used it in all of my work.

It was really the first time I’d seen indigenous experiences in higher education be centered. And from that, of course, never ever thought at that point that I would publish or, that I was… any faculty was not in my realm of- … of career aspirations. And went back, did my PhD with Deb, and turned into a faculty member after I taught my first master’s in student affairs class.

And it just led my whole career down this pathway. And I think this is really the culmination of the wave of indigenous higher education experiences being represented by and for and with indigenous people in higher education. So this is just a wonderful opportunity, so thank you for letting us be here.

Raechele Pope: No, we are thrilled to have you. And I have to tell you that you all spoke to this in some way. That 2005 volume was so important to everyone because it didn’t exist, whether you were indigenous or not, and to know that it meant something even more special to the indigenous students, faculty, and staff that were working with this.

It’s amazing. So I wanna frame this. As John said, it’s been more than two decades since the original Serving Native American Students monograph was published. And so I have to think about, what made this the right moment for a new volume? What’s changed or not changed enough in higher education support of indigenous students?

Deb? Sure.

Deborah Taub: So let me just back up a step.

Raechele Pope: Sure.

Deborah Taub: When we, John and I first started to talk about this, and we were talking to folks, people kept saying, “But NDSS just did that.” You just published about that. So I think part of that maybe speaks to the importance and the continued vitality of that first volume.

But but no, it had been two decades. And I remember saying to John, “Surely we have more and other things to say.”

And so there were groups of students that the first book wasn’t able… The first book couldn’t do everything. And so we wanted to try to capture some of the diversity within the population of Native Indigenous students.

And I think we also were moved to do this in the context of sort of the current sociopolitical context. And how do we continue to support students in a time when special, different seems to be more difficult, particularly in some states.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. What’s fascinating is and I think that’s a really crucial point, that people still saw the volume, the earlier volume-

Deborah Taub: Yes

Raechele Pope: as accurate and relevant, and I don’t wanna take that away, but didn’t realize that had been 20 years. Yeah. And to think that we didn’t need to say more, do more, because we know the students have changed, we know the campuses have changed, and so on. So that’s it’s amazing that was one of the first pushbacks for you.

Deborah Taub: Yes.

Raechele Pope: In reading this volume, I thought was just, first of all, let me just say, I think it’s, I think it is a must read. I think it is a must read. And if people wanna use it as a companion to the other, fine, but it really is a standalone volume. And I thought one of the strongest themes across this volume is that the idea that Native and Indigenous students continue navigating institutions that weren’t originally built for them.

They didn’t think about them. They weren’t in mind. And what does the reality look like on pr- i- in practice on campuses today?

John Garland: Yeah, I’ll take that. I think that we, when we think about Native students, for so long it’s been You know, it’s been I think from a policy perspective, from a student engagement perspective, from just an enrollment perspective, Native students have always been either an afterthought or not a thought.

And that actually was how I launched my own career in student affairs during my doctoral program when I was reading in the 2005 Serving Native Students volume. I remember talking to my advisor at the time, Mary Lou McEwan, and I said, “I can’t find anything on Native students.”

And she w- she said, “Oh, this volume of New Directions just came out.” And and that was, like Symphony said, the first time I had seen Native students and Native professionals centered. And it… and it was a big turning mo- moment for me. And all of a sudden, I felt okay, so we do belong here.

It’s still not built for us, but we do belong. And and in fact, Dr. Shelly Lowe who had a chapter in that text for those of you who aren’t familiar with her, she was recently during the Obama administration, the chair for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and she is currently now president of American Indian Arts Institute in Santa Fe.

And she was also a co-editor of that particular volume. And in one of her articles there, she says when talking about quantitative data, that Native students are often re- relegated to a footnote.

And when I read that in 2005, so many light bulbs went off for me, and I was like, “Why is this happening?

What is happening that we just can’t reach the basic threshold of visibility on a college campus, and what’s keeping us from doing that?” And that really, was the question driving me, and it was also answering the question, why are these institutions not built for us? First, they weren’t seeing us.

And so if you don’t see people, you’re not gonna build for them. If you don’t know that they’re there, you’re not going to create a space for them. And and there are many reasons for that. We are not a monolithic group. We are not easily maybe perhaps visually identifiable within a campus c- culture.

And certainly access, historical access to education has been a a function of assimilation and not one of of support and independence and thriving. And when we think about the history of US higher education, certainly that, that answers a lot of this question for us. But on the flip side, I think is the is the notion that as 1% of the population, it’s really difficult to get our foothold and make our presence known everywhere that we are.

And unfortunately, the number can be so small on a college campus that visibility is left up to just a handful of faculty, maybe two or three staff, and the s- the students and which may be in the single digits on any given campus. And so that also leads us, I think, to this notion that visibility understanding who’s on our campus understanding our campus data becomes increasingly more important.

But when we think about these institutions homegoing for many Native students doesn’t follow the academic calendar.

The barriers to attendance is something unique for Native students that we talk about in the book. The the back and forth and the family dynamic is very different for many Native communities than how the institution is structured.

And so when we think about all of those variables it’s no wonder that we hear students say, “These institutions aren’t built for us.” But what we are here to say, I think, in both the 2005 volume and this new this new volume, is that we are here, we have been here, and it’s high time that higher education understand what the needs of Native students are on their campus.

They need to know who they are, where they are, what their needs are, and how to support them. And we go into lots of variables, and I’ll talk later about financial aid, but when thinking about the needs of Native students, it’s an easy thing to figure out. And that to me is where we are. We’re starting to figure that out, and we’re developing allies along the way.

Raechele Pope: Sure. And I think, I think, I love that the way you encapsulated that John. And when I, but when I also think about some of the other things that start those barriers, it’s the stereotypes that non-Indigenous people have about what native students look like. So they could be looking at a broad range of native students and say or as our chief administrator said she doesn’t look like an Indian to me.”

Talking about Trump. Yeah. And and- To unpack all of that makes it very difficult. So not only is it a- not built for us, we wouldn’t know if it were. Yeah. Because we don’t know who we’re dealing with, and that’s, and then as with many groups of students students of color, for example or first generation students or whatever, we then build up this, this image of who they are and what they need based in part on stereotypes, which moves me into my next question, that we need to s- move beyond these deficit narratives.

Because with all of these groups, we start there. And what I loved about this book is that so many of those chapters just push back against this deficit-based narrative, and instead centers indigenous strengths and re- relationality and culture and community. So why is that shift in framing so important?

Talk to our listeners about that. Why is it so important for student affairs professionals and higher education leaders to understand that this shift in framing is crucial to meeting the needs of these students?

Symphony Oxendine: I’d like to kinda chime in here. So I think for me in particular, the way that we talked about wanting to approach this from an asset-based approach really came from, when I was coming up in as a student affairs professional and then into my kind of doctoral program and moving into faculty, that, that was a huge time, I think, of a very prolific kind of deficit-based research that it was what is wrong and how do we fix it?

Which in and of itself, wanting to fix something that you see wrong i- is not necessarily always a bad approach. However, when we’re talking about humans and we’re talking about especially indigenous people and students, for me, my philosophy and how I approach my work is that students are a solution to be embraced, not a problem to be fixed.

Raechele Pope: There you go. Yeah.

Symphony Oxendine: Yeah. And that came from 15 years of trying to figure out where I sat with where I was reading, all of what are best practices and all of the things. And, a- as a professional working with indigenous students, often we would have philosophies from senior administrators say, “Why are native students not involved on campus?”

“You need to go fix that.” And what you’re telling me is to go fix a people.

Not find out what is going on in our institution that they’re not wanting to be involved, and how do we make a place that centers their needs, right? And so I think for all of us, that really has been a huge shift in how we’ve approached the work that we’re doing in higher education now.

And I think many of us still hold deeply in how we root the work that we do. B- but I think ab- absolutely that deficit-based approach can very much be the typical fallback to how we do research or how we write about things. But we really wanted to focus, I think, in this on how students, Indigenous students and people in communities have the strengths and the solution already when they come to us.

They’ve been successful already in many areas of their life. And so recognizing and building upon those strengths is really what we wanted to center. So what were the strengths they’re bringing from the cultures? They each have an i- individual cultures that they’re bringing of their tribal beliefs and knowledge systems the communities that they come from, how they think about relationships, what their ways of knowing are.

So we just really wanted to frame that. And I think in particular, a highlight for me, and I will say this is, was a very vulnerable place to be as a scholar and a practitioner Stephanie Waterman and I wrote an article in here called What Matters to Us: Contemplating a Holistic Indigenous Identity Framework.

Because as faculty teaching in student affairs professional graduate programs We were the only two indigenous faculty members that we know that taught specifically student affairs professionals college student development.

And when you are teaching other people who are gonna go work with students and you don’t even have an identity framework that you can harken to of your own people, so really it’s just who are you and how do I use how I know you as an indigenous person to frame every student I meet?

And that’s not how that works, right? ‘Cause we’re not monolithic. So she and I really, we actually worked on this manuscript for I think six years. That’s how vulnerable this has been to say- … how can we present something that is not treating us as monolithic, that is not treating us as a deficit mindset or trying to focus in on every one is just one thing.

And so we took the, the kind of st- traditional student development questions that we teach about- … and reframed them from an indigenous approach of saying there’s kind of four questions. If you can answer these with any individual you’re working with based on who they are, then that’s gonna help you know how they develop, and that’s where are we, which is based on land, belonging, community, place.

Who are we? How do they understand who they are based on where, who they come from, right?

Who am I responsible to, which is relationality, it’s collective responsibility, it’s that collective mindset. And then how do we know what we know? So instead of how do I come to understand knowledge, it’s how is my indigenous knowledge systems feeding into who I am and how I know the things from what’s being passed down.

And I think that is certainly something that I feel especially was written for our non-indigenous professionals who need to have a better framework for understanding how to work with indigenous people, specifically the college students that they’re working with. So I think our hope is that this will help folks be able to get a grasp on what the, grapple with what these questions mean for each student they’re working with, and then design their services and their environments and the cultures of their institutions around meeting those needs.

Raechele Pope: Symphony, that that, that chapter that you and Stephanie worked on and those four questions are so central. And what’s amazing to me, and this is not to take it out of an indigenous context- But rethinking the way we think- … about approaching students, those four questions are appropriate across the board.

Yes. Yep. And this is what I hear scholars of color talking about all the time. It’s not a matter of building something for this student group. It’s really saying reset your mindset. And y- you did it, those four questions are a lovely way to help people see that. Because if you stop and think, who aren’t these questions about?

That they’re so necessary in so many cultural contexts. And if we start retraining our mind to see things out of a one, identifying our own cultural context, and then that other people have a different cultural context, we respond differently. We create policies that are different.

We prepare campuses that are different. So I think that’s lovely. And again, li- listeners, if there’s nothing else you get out of it, listen to what’s in these chapters for you. So it’s amazing. Another thing that came up with me, and you’ve many of you have said it, at least two of you have said it, but I think all of you said it in your introductions, that there is a diversity within these indigenous experiences.

And to think, okay, I met this person, or I live in this community, and this is what indigenous life is like here that you can’t just pick that up and set it down somewhere else. And so this volume intentionally includes a wide range of indigenous experiences and communities, including Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students, Alaska Native students, Native graduate students, Native Tribal College context, and Native alumni engagement and more.

I wonder if you can talk about how you came to that. Why was it important to resist treating indigenous students as a single monolithic group? I know that sounds like a simple question. We know the answer to that, but I think it’s important for us to be clear about it.

Deborah Taub: And this is something that was really super important to us at the outset, was to attempt to represent some of the diversity within the indigenous and Native com- sort of umbrella.

And we know this about lots of groups.

Raechele Pope: Yeah.

Deborah Taub: That there are some- reasons to talk, to group people together.

There are some ways in which that’s helpful. But there are lots more reasons why also to think about the differences within groups. And it’s a vast difference, and it’s just seems to me that people there can be an unfortunate tendency to think, “I’ve met a Native person.”

“I know Symphony. I know what Native students are like. I can just superimpose that on all my interactions.” Yeah. And so what we wanted to do was try to open this up for people to get some, some sense of different ways to think about the diversity within what we were talking about.

Somebody else wanna jump in?

Raechele Pope: I’ll give someone t- a time to think of that. Yeah. But I think about this is so true in just about every culture you talk about. We know that we talk about Asian students or Asian American students- … as if they’re… that’s one culture, right? There was… It’s the same thing, and that people need to hear that about indigenous groups.

There’s 48 different countries. How many cultures outside of that in terms of Asian countries, right? Same thing within the indigenous experience, and the indigenous experience in New York, where I lived for, 25 years, is very different than the indigenous experience in the Southwest.

And yet someone who works with Native students, I know Symphony. Yeah. I got it. I know those issues, yeah. Something else you… Anyone want to add to that? Deb threw that out there for you all. Yeah.

John Garland: Yeah. I would just offer that in one of my first jobs in student affairs I won’t say where, but I was tasked with going to a student event And with a form that had racial and ethnic list on it, and I was to physically count who were the members of each of those groups so that we could have a better count in student affairs about who was attending what.

And I remember thinking, “This has to be the most fraught exercise I have ever seen in my life.” And I’m sad to say that I think those elements are still alive and well in in some of our campus programming when we’re trying to figure out who’s attending our events and who’s not.

That we do in fact don’t account for that big wide, diverse group within any student identity. So that to me I think is still a hurdle yet to overcome, but it’s I think it speaks to what Deb was saying- … about how, the challenges of understanding the within group diversity.

Raechele Pope: Sure.

Cori Bazemore-James: And I’ll add that tracking Native students has always been really difficult in institutions because our lists, and i- when we’re working in Indigenous student affairs our lists are very different of who Native students are versus- … institutional lists.

Raechele Pope: Yes.

Cori Bazemore-James: And so our numbers are always off, and the question of whose numbers are accurate, are any numbers accurate is always there.

But then also, institutions aren’t usually tracking what tribes-

…

Cori Bazemore-James: Students are coming from. There’s kind of a new trend that’s starting in some places. I don’t know how wi- widespread that is so far, but you’ll see at least in one of the chapters someone talking about how important it is to know which communities are they coming from?

Because their needs and experiences of life are gonna be really different- … depending on where they’re from. And institutions don’t, leadership don’t necessarily think about that. They just think of, oh, Native American students, they fit in this one bucket, one category. They all need the same thing, and it’s just not true.

And then you have Native students who didn’t grow up around the Native community at all.

And they’re connecting to Native identity for the first time as college students, and getting to know Native faculty or Indigenous student affairs units. And so it’s just, it’s a such a wide variety of experiences that they’re coming from, and there’s so little data available right now.

Symphony Oxendine: And I will say I just to add a personal experience, my oldest is a senior in high school starting next week. She applied for her first college application, submitted, and you wanna talk about identity crisis of- … picking your, on the application, Native American, and then a list of tribes.

She’s… I’m Cherokee and Choctaw, my husband is Lumbee, my daughters are enrolled citizens of the Lumbee Nation, what do they pick?

They’re only allowed to pick one.

Raechele Pope: Yeah.

Symphony Oxendine: So do they pick what the government, the federally recognized Lumbee re- that because that’s what they’re enrolled in? Do they pick, we live in Lumberton, we live in the seat of the Lumbee Nation.

But they are, have been raised biculturally with both indigenous knowledge systems from my family and his family. So they have to pick one because that’s what these institutions are requiring them to do. And that is a huge dissonance for them because, they’re like, “But wait, h- how do I not honor all of the ancestors that I come from?”

And that’s just a really hard place to be. And these are things that we deal with on a, on like a micro level, multiple times daily basis for many of us.

Raechele Pope: Those checking of those boxes never tell our story. Particularly if you’re biracial by by ethnic, by anything,

Symphony Oxendine: right?

Raechele Pope: So I wanna ask about this area of Indigenous student affairs because we are seeing more campuses it’s… We’ll see if we continue to see this as a growing area, not that it doesn’t need to be- … but that we’re in some in interesting times right now. But you have some chapters that focus on Indigenous student affairs professional and professional networks.

And I thought those were especially compelling. What are some of the realities of Indigenous student affairs professionals that they’re navigating right now in their daily work, and what support do they need from institutions? And I would suspect that one of them is checking a box, right? How do I check this box of who I am?

But- I’m calling on you to take that for us.

Cori Bazemore-James: Sure. Yes. It’s complicated times right now. It’s really interesting to see how institutions are responding in this moment-

…

Cori Bazemore-James: Around all their multicultural centers, and how a lot of institutions are take- taking and accepting this anti-DEI stance that is coming from the federal government, and doing away with multicultural centers, but also sometimes leaving their Indigenous student affairs units because of tribal sovereignty.

It’s a different political nature to our support. And so that is good when our services are still intact, but also complicated when our peers, our closest peers who are running other cultural centers are going away. And that is a strange, privileged place to be, which is unusual for us.

And I would say that I call it ISA, In- Indigenous student affairs professionals are doing so much more than typical student programming.

They have to have expertise that spans cultural practice, tribal relationships, sovereignty rights, community building, identity politics, institutional advocacy, as well as student support.

And as Symphony said, it’s all without formal training in how to do work in Indiges- Indigenous student affairs. And most folks are coming to the work not necessarily with the expectation, “I’m gonna work in higher ed and be a student affairs professional,” but because they were a student once, and now they feel a cultural obligation to support the next generation-

Of Native young people So as I found in my research, and as you’ll see in these articles, Native staff talk about having very similar experiences as staff as they did when they were students, and also that’s paralleled with the experiences of their current students.

So all that to say, if you’re a Native person in higher ed, no matter what level of higher ed, you’re having a very similar experience in regards to being one of very few and being misunderstood and the units being under-resourced and constantly navigating this culture clash between what tribal nations need and cultural practice calls for versus institutional expectations or institutional priorities.

So while we are working on providing community for Native students, we ourselves, the staff, are often lacking that community for ourselves on our campuses, and that isolation contributes to burnout and sometimes high turnover.

However, there’s also a lot of great allies that are coming out and doing their own work to read things like our value.

They’re reading our work, they’re listening to our podcasts and watching our videos and they’re working really hard to understand Indigenous students and practitioners and offer allyship, which is really a powerful form of support that we need. And we need institutions to stop relying on the resilience and grit of an individual Native staff.

We need Native voices in decision-making, adequate staffing and resources, supportive supervisors, sustainable career pathways, and like one of the articles focuses on access to Native professional communities.

Indigenous professional networks such as those at ACPA and NASPA have been crucial professional homes where practitioners share knowledge and build the field together.

I know for me, when I was the sole Native grad student at the University of Georgia- My one saving grace was finding native scholars in these native networks, including all of these editors here. My co-editors this is where I met them, was at ACPA. And the native and then… Native, Aboriginal, and Indigenous Coalition and ACPA was supportive of us creating the Indigenous Student Affairs Network.

So it was exciting really to be able to include a chapter about the importance and contributions of these networks and its value.

Raechele Pope: Sure. I think about I the last podcast I hosted was on racial exhaustion. And I’m thinking that in the ’60s and the ’70s, we started talking about these issues broadly on campus.

21 years ago was the first volume that we’ve all talked about. Here it is, 21 years later, and we’re still addressing so many of the same things. And so there is this exhaustion, but we see the points of light that you’re talking about. As a committee or a commission or the networks grow, we get a little bit more support, someone else to lean on, to help give us the strength to make it better for the other students or for other people who are experiencing the same thing.

And so it’s just exhausting and maintaining that hope at the same time. John, you had mentioned earlier something about financial aid. And so I wanna bring us back to that, financial aid, scholarships providers, and Indigenous-centered support. And again, several chapters also address financial aid.

They address scholarship providers. They look at the different support systems. And one of the things that I found that was especially compelling was the framing of support, not simply as funding, but as nation-building, belonging, and relational care. That came so clearly through this volume. And how should institutions rethink support beyond traditional financial aid models?

And I just wanna be clear, you weren’t saying get rid of those financial aid models. You were saying we just needed some additional support because this financial aid is necessary

John Garland: That’s right, and talk about exhausting. Oh my gosh, I think financial aid is exhausting for just about everyone. And one thing that I would th- that we probably don’t talk explicitly enough about, but one thing that I’ve come away with, and this is I, I was thinking about my whole awareness of financial aid as a student is one thing, but my awareness of financial aid as a student affairs administrator is a whole other type of journey.

And I remember I was working on my doctorate at Maryland, and I was really fortunate to have a professor there, Laura Perna, and Dr. Perna is now at Penn, I believe. And her research is on and around financial aid, especially for first gen and lower resource students. And that’s when I began thinking critically about, what is financial aid, and how is it positioned in the institution, and what kind of what kind of staff training go on there, it’s, it… We really don’t think about it a lot in student affairs, ev- even today. And there’s one thing that I would say to my student affairs colleagues is reach out to financial aid advisors. Invite them to events. Welcome them to student affairs as a partner. And I say that because we don’t really think about them that way.

And in fact, financial aids a- aid advisors can be that one link- The last link for an Indigenous student as they make a decision whether they can stay in college that semester or not.

And what a burden it must be for a financial aid advisor to be having that kind of conversation, but to also be doing it likely without many tools and resources, and without an understanding of who that Indigenous student might be.

And so I think, one of the things that, that we can proactively do as student affairs administrators is continue building those relationships across campus in places where we don’t typically find ourselves. And but the other part of that is, and it’s something we’ve mentioned throughout this conversation, is the invisibility of Native students, especially in financial aid data.

Raechele Pope: Yeah.

John Garland: And so what we’ve been attempting to do over the last several years, especially among those of us who work as a scholarship provider specifically for Native students, excuse me, we we launched our own research project on affordability in higher education for Indigenous students. And in, in the chapter on Indi- on what we call NNSP, the National Native Scholarship Providers Working Group, we collaborate to do research among the Cobell Scholarship Program, American Indian College Fund, Native Forward, which used to be American Indian Graduate Center, and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society.

We’re the four largest scholarship providers in the country for Indigenous students. And so what we decided was higher education is not doing enough to highlight Indigenous student experiences. We will combine our data and share our data and have a really robust data set, probably the largest within the United States outside of NCES Department of Ed or What we might call the other…

it’s hard to know how much data there is now at the federal level, let’s just be honest. So I’m not even sure we should be referring to it right now because I don’t know what’s going to exist by the end of this year. But what we do know is that across the NNSPs, we have likely one of the largest data sets on indigenous college students anywhere.

And so what we’re doing is we’re saying, “Okay, we have some power here. Let’s start answering some of these questions, and let’s start making visible what has been invisible.” And that includes affordability for indigenous students. And so in that study we published, and w- and we’ve been traveling around the country presenting this data, and we we are listing out, these are recommendations for higher ed and financial aid.

These are recommendations for secondary education. Just trying to get financial literacy to high school students is still a big lift. And and what does that mean for indigenous high school students? Who are we talking to there? And what’s, who’s considered family? And who’s considered fictive kin?

And how do we make those connections around the people who are gonna be doing the support for students? And it can be a whole other experience when a financial aid officer’s not just working with a student, but the student and their direct connection to a tribe.

And those kinds of supports and questions are just as important to a financial aid officer as they are to that student, because if we aren’t helping that financial aid officer on our campus, then we’re not helping the student.

And so I often say, it’s great to to do financial aid literacy for indigenous students, but let’s invite financial aid officers into our space as student affairs practitioners, because that’s where I think we can really start to make a difference. But, and that also creates a, what I would call indigenous-centered support because we’re centering the indigenous student by bringing That partner along with us.

And so I think that’s a big part of it. But there are many things that, that is emerging in the research and one of the most important things is emergency funding. And so if we can in just one way on any college campus is increase and make available emergency funding whether that’s through financial aid or through some other resource that can be, and seems to be in our data, one of the key elements to whether a student stays enrolled one semester.

If their car breaks down and this is true for any under-resourced student especially or off-campus student, if your car breaks down and you can’t get to class and that car is going to be out of commission for a while and you don’t have public transit that’s going to make the decision for you whether you can finish that semester or not.

If your car breaks down and you miss a, an important exam, those are situations that can really make or break an Indigenous student, especially because they’re commuting typically farther than most other students to and from campus. And are in most places in states with larger time to campus commutes than other areas.

And there are many variables affecting the Indigenous student experience when it comes to financial aid and funding their scholar experience. And so I I would just encourage everyone to read those those chapters or those articles, and to also really think about what else is going on out there off campus among, for example, the national native scholarship providers-

Who are our partners off campus who might help us fill in some of these data gaps and be a data partner when it comes to understanding our Indigenous students. So there’s a lot there. I could go on and on about what they might find but I would direct you to the the recommendations that we make in those articles especially.

Raechele Pope: John your dealing with financial aid was so broad, which was amazing. You covered a lot of areas for us to continue to think about, and it also had me thinking that there are other offices on campus that we should be doing the same thing, pulling in together, you know- Yeah … and working with rather than separate, for our students in general.

Again, how we organize our campuses, how we the policies that we create in support of students, so that was great. I wanna… we usually end our episodes by asking our guests what are you currently pondering, questioning, or troubling as you think about this work right now. I wanna combine that with another question.

We’ve had this time together to discuss the issues of natives, Native and Indigenous students, but also to discuss this volume that’s been created, and I want to begin with thinking as, as listeners walk away from this conversation remembering one thing or changing one thing about their practice, what do you hope that will be, and if that’s connected to the questions that you’re questioning or troubling right now.

So I wanna just combine those two questions. And I was wondering if I could get Symphony to begin for us. What do you want listeners to walk away with, or is there something that you, that we really should be thinking about differently now?

Symphony Oxendine: Yeah, so there’s two things. I think the the first thing that I’m that I in my work have been troubling or pondering or inquiring into is that it, this gap in higher education that we have the things we say we value, but what we actually reward- are not necessarily the same, right? Yes. And so we… I think belonging, when I started doing belonging research way back early 2010s that wasn’t the sexy term that it has gotten to be now, a buzzword. And belonging is not, I think, what we think it is, especially what institutions value or reward belonging to be, is that, it’s a either/or.

And it, that- … it’s much more complex than that. But I think as we think about how institutions really reward what it is that the work that we’re doing, I think the way I wanna see us change our practice is that indigenous students are not defined by the deficits, and that our success is not separate from- our identity, from our culture, and even more than that, from our community. That it is not about the individual, it is we before me. So I am successful because we are successful. And how we think about not just creating environments where we’re recognizing indigenous students, faculty, staff, communities, but that we’re valuing them, and even more, we’re nurturing-

Those identities. So I think there’s something to say for recognizing and valuing it.

Raechele Pope: Yeah.

Symphony Oxendine: It’s that going beyond to transform how you’re nurturing those identities in this environment. Yeah. And for me, that’s really what I would hope for.

Raechele Pope: Yeah. Symphony. Nice. Cori?

Cori Bazemore-James: Yeah, I would say that native people are a relational, communal people, and we don’t only need native folks to have relationship with.

So remembering that native folks are human beings. We’re just fellow human beings that need allyship, companionship, friendship. And so get to know the native folks on your campus. Faculty, staff whatever, wherever they are on campus, just offer, offer them to go to coffee. And just get to know them on a fellow human being level.

They don’t always have to be propped up as this in- mystical, indigenous, like … sometimes that’s really uncomfortable. It’s always really uncomfortable, actually.

Raechele Pope: Yes.

Cori Bazemore-James: To be like, “Oh, you’re just like magical human being.” No, I’m just person. And, just be human with us and get to know us as human beings and what our life goals and desires are and what we’re experiencing in life and from there we can see how we can support each other in the work.

Deborah Taub: Appreciate that, Cori. Deb, can you take us from there? Sure. Two things I think. One of them is

Examining what there is that we’re offering in student affairs and the way we frame it and talk about it in ways that don’t speak to Native students. This sort of grows out of the work that we did about leadership.

And how, How the way higher ed has tended to frame leadership doesn’t speak to the way that Native cultures typically frame leadership.

So this idea of, or this idea we’ve done some work on sort of pathways into the profession. And and we have some normal pathways, you’ve read grad applications and they’re- … they there’s a fairly typical story and how that’s probably not the way indigenous students are finding their way into our profession.

So if we’re interested in diversifying the profession, that’s something that we need to think about. The thing that’s on my mind a lot these days is student loneliness.

And so I’ve been sort of-

I’ve just been playing with that idea in terms of native and indigenous students, and how we could look at that without looking at it in a largely deficit kind of way. ‘Cause- … it sounds like a deficit kind of word, but it’s the ex- it’s the experience of that’s tr- we hear from, anecdotally from the counseling center that is the biggest presenting concern that they’re hearing from students, is they’re so lonely.

I live I work on a residential campus. People are surrounded by their age peers, and they’re lonely.

And what’s that about?

Raechele Pope: And how could students not be, in that we’re all- … so captured by our machines. But then how could indigenous students not be, when we’ve already talked about the numbers of they are so few- Yep

and so few- Yep … who are looking at me, who are treating me like an individual, and who are engaging with me. And where are my people? They might be at home, and is that close, or if that’s far, how quickly can I get to them? So that’s a very important topic across the board. And of course, with the information that we’ve been talking about today, how could they not feel lonely,

John Garland: right?

Raechele Pope: And John, why don’t you close us out here?

John Garland: Yeah. I think that for me, one of the best gifts that my student affairs training provided me was the connection to and the understanding of a tolerance for ambiguity.

And I was very fortunate to have both my master’s and doctoral programs be counseling based- in student affairs. And and I really, I value all of that training so very much. And and whether I was teaching native students in an undergraduate course or I’m teaching helping skills and counseling theories in graduate courses, one of the things that always made, helped me make space for every student that I was interacting with was a tolerance for ambiguity.

And I think if there’s one thing f- especially for my non-native colleagues, that I would ask from you is that you really explore and expand your tolerance for ambiguity. Because in that We make more space for understanding, especially an indigenous student who may not fit the stereotype that we understand to be native, who may not fit the Hollywood version of what it is to be indigenous, that may not fit the local tribes that are prevalent in our community, but who represents an indigenous community from across the country.

And so that tolerance for ambiguity really can be such a welcoming signal to to an indigenous student on a college campus that can make the difference I think many times whether they return the next semester or not. And student affairs, as we know, and even from my dissertation, I believe it was one of the first times that you could quantitatively indicate that interactions with faculty, Native student interactions with faculty is a predictor of student involvement on campus.

And so thinking about, what are those variables that I have influence over that I can even enhance by being more open and widening my widening my view of what is going, what is possible to be presented to me to support in a college student,

Raechele Pope: yeah. Yeah, that contact with a faculty member or an important staff member is going to not only see if they will engage and belong, but also whether they’ll persist.

Oh, yes. Will they remain on campus in general? Oh. I just wanna thank you all. Thank you, Deb. Thank you, Symphony. Thank you, Cori. Thank you, John, for this conversation. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve enjoyed being in conversation with you and in s- sharing this space with you. I really wanna thank you for your important work and for all of your authors, excuse me, that were represented in this volume.

I- I’m so deeply grateful for your time and for your willingness to join us on Student Affairs NOW.

Cori Bazemore-James: Thank you.

Raechele Pope: I also wanna thank our sponsor, Evolve. Given the current context of higher education, we need to invest in leaders with the capacity and the capability to transform their institutions and the future of higher education, not only around this general higher education, but around advancing indigenous and Native students.

The Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership offers four leadership coaching journeys, and they’re tailored to four different leadership levels. Each is a three-month journey that includes individual and group coaching, plus a curated curriculum of short asynchronous video modules. We als- also offer Evolve for leadership teams.

If you are ready to evolve your leadership voice, visit evolveinstitute.com to learn more. You can find this episode and many more conversations at studentaffairsnow.com. Please subscribe to the podcast, share the episode with colleagues, and leave a review. It really helps us continue building this learning community and keeping these conversations accessible to the field.

Again, I’m Raechele Pope. Thanks again to our wonderful guests and to everyone who joined us today. Make it a great week

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