American Indians at Harvard

Michael P. Tsosie '86 sat on the Phoenix-Boston flight answering the questions of a middle-aged woman about Harvard. Suddenly she turned towards him and said: "Are you Mexican?"

"No," replied Tsosie. "Are you Samoan?" "No," he said again. "Then what are you?" she let out in a high pitched voice. "I'm American Indian," he answered. "Oh" and she grew silent. Then she looked at him and said very slowly. "You-speak-Eng-lish-ve-ry-well."

"You speak English very well too," he snapped back.

American Indian students at Harvard have scores of similar tales of their trials and travails outside the reservation. At Harvard and elsewhere, Indian students say the are still fighting stereotypes that have relegated them to second-class citizen status.

Tsosie frowns at people who are disappointed when he says that he lives in a house, rather than in a tent. Rohana L. Fines '86, who is of white. Black, Seminole and Cherokee descent, but lives in Hawaii, says that matters have improved somewhat: "In the '50s. Westerns used painted Whites to play Indians, then in the '60s they used Mexicans. We're getting closer."

The 18 American Indians who currently attend Harvard are not very vocal, but they are discretely conscious of their roots. Tsosie is the president of the 10-year-old Harvard American Indian Association, which unlike the American Indian community at Dartmouth, has little Native American tradition to draw on.

Before recruitment efforts during the seventies brought in Native Americans, only two Indians had ever graduated from the College. This was despite recruitment efforts by the early Puritan Harvardians, who hoped to turn the Indians into missionaries to spread their beliefs

Caieb Cneesnante-aumuck in 1665, and Benjamin Larnell in 1716 were the only two who survived the rigors of University life and the diseases that swept the Harvard campus during the time, the Sunday Herald reported in 1908. Even the two graduates died of consumption shortly after graduation, and Harvard did not make further efforts to cultivate the Indian community.

But in the early 1970's, admissions officers launched a concerted effort to attract more minorities into the once Yankee-dominated enclave of Harvard, and Native Americans began to trickle into the yard.

Admissions officers continue to send Indian students to reservations around the country to convince fellow Native Americans to make the jump. One problem with recuiting on the reservation is that Indians must move from a position where they are in the majority to a place where they are a small minority, says Jennifer D. Carey '78, director of minority recuitment at the admissions office.

At the same time, Indian Americans show great reluctance to move off and into the mainstream because there is such resentment, says Tsosie, who goes on many such recuitment missions. Moreover, he says, many potential students are loathe to leave the secure environment of the reservation. "Life is comfortable back there, you can veg' out."

At Harvard, Indians say they face many of the same problems as other minorities on campus. John E. Murphy '87 says the University "cranks out" students and Tsosie calls Freshman week an indoctrination. Tsosie says the University conveniently forgot minorities' events in the 1982 Freshmen Week, which led to the Third World demonstrations on campus that following spring.

Indians at Harvard also say they must serve as role models for their peers. "There's great pressure to perform," says Tsosie. "If you fail it's indicative of everyone else." Student recruiters must convince other Indians that they can thrive at a prestigious college in the East. When Fines toured the country to recruit for Harvard, one school asked her to give a little speech. The teacher then turned to the class and told the students to grade Fines' enunciation.

Student recruiters must also combat a crisis of confidence among teenage Indians on the reservations. "People drop out because there is no support system, and because they are told they can't do things," Tsosie says.

Though Harvard and much of the East Coast appear to be far distant from Indian issues and concerns, only two-and-a-half hours away, at Dartmouth College, students, faculty, and alumni are embroiled in a raging controversy over the institution's Indian heritage.

Dartmouth was founded as an Indian college, but in 200 years only a dozen Indians graduated. But the Native American Program, started in the early seventies, now counts about 200 Native American alumni, according to the Admissions Office. This semester alone, 43 American Indians. Hawaiians, and Alaskan natives are enrolled in the program.

But it is the profile of an Indian, complete with feather, gold earring and big nose, which has served as an unofficial mascot for two decades, that is the center of attention. In 1974, Native Americans at Dartmouth asked for the abolition of the Indian mascot, and the administration agreed to a change. But ever since, with the football season and the beginnings of the right wing student-run Dartmouth Review fall term turns into the Indian wars. Fraternities, the Review and the football team--to the great displeasure of the athletic director--have attacked "liberals" who support the 1974 decision for destroying school morale.

This summer, the controversial Review sent 250 letters to Indian chiefs across the nation asking if they approved of Dartmouth's symbol, without including a picture. They received 150 answers, of which JI were negative, 132 were positive, and 15 declined to answer, says the Review's Executive Director Peter L. Arnold.

Colleen K. Larimore, president of Native Americans at Dartmouth termed the campaign "horrible." She says human beings should not be used as symbols and that you cannot stereotype a whole people in a picture. The likeness is that of a Mohawk Indian, who are not native to New Hampshire, she adds.

Dartmouth Indians have also criticized the continued use of the school's Indian imitation war chant that goes "Wahoo-Wah."

For Indians at Harvard, there is little of the turmoil that exists in New Hampshire. But each of the 18 students here brings interesting and important experiences that are surprisingly representative of Indians nationwide.

Yvette D. Roubideaux '85 is the daughter of the first Indian to become a lawyer in the state of South Dakota, and graduated at the top of her class as the only minority in her school. In Roubideaux's town of Rapids City, South Dakota, all the Indians lived on the "bad" side of town. She lived and went to school on the "good" side. "People at home don't tell Polish jokes, they tell Indian jokes," she says. She heard them all the time, because nobody could believe that she could be both Indian and intelligent. "Oh, but I don't mean you," they all said. But she was relieved when she came to the East and people did not know any Native Americans.

Galen F. Gawboy '85 says that he built his life around sports because he got tired of being beat up for being a half-breed. The bigger he grew, the more he was left alone, he adds. His father is a Chippewa and his mother is of Finnish and German origin. The whites considered him a second-class citizen and the Indian children fought with him because it was better than fighting among themselves, he says. "There is so much resentment on a reservation I understand why they did it," he adds. "I resent whites myself.

Tsosie, part Navajo, part Mojave, comes from Colorado River Reservation, Arizona. He is one of the two non-urban residents of his group here. He left his hometown to attend a private school in Chicago, while he supported himself. A Columbia recruiter convinced him to apply to Eastern colleges. He had never heard of Harvard before. In his small town of Parker, "counselors discourage you from applying to college," he says, "and Anglos tell you you're stupid." He adds that the Klu Klux Klan counts 200 members in his town. Now, whites at home hate him even more, because no one in town has ever been to Harvard, he says. And stereotypes stick: he is called "Mr. Harvard Accent."

The attitude of whites is more subtle than just open prejudice, say Tsosie and Fines. Sometimes, they say, a person will smile broadly and exclaim: "I have some Indian blood! Some very far ancestor of mine married an Indian princess." They call it the "Pocahontas' syndrome."

Another group of liberals is what Indian students jokingly call the "wannabee" tribe (translate: the Want-to-be Indians), who flock to reservations carrying the good word of education and health care. Of course they are appreciated, and Tsosie says his education started with them; but their outsider, holier-than-thou attitude is hard to stomach, Tsosie says.

For Harvard's Indian students, college means escape from the backwaters of the reservation. Tsosie, Fines Roubideaux, and Gawboy stress that their studies mean freedom from oppression and stereotypes. Tsosie says that of the 120 Indians who graduated from eight grade in his town, only eight made it through High School, and two got into college. He is the only one who will graduate.

Both Fines and Tsosie agree that coming to college is to "go capitalist." They say they have no qualms about using the whiteman's way. "We are not assimilative, we are adapting," says Tsosie Gawboy goes even further: "It's easier to destroy something from within than from without "You're out for yourself first," adds Fines.

But many agree that educated American Indians want to help their own, and will go back to the reservation at some point in their lives. Roubideaux, a pre-med is especially conscious of the health problems on reservations and in the poor section of her hometown.

The reservation conveys a loaded meaning for Native Americans Gawboy says that shortly after his birth his family moved off Boise Fort Reservation. Minn, "Anything that kept me off the reservation was good," he says. Roubideaux says that the horrible conditions on reservations are shocking and sad. The poor economy, the alcoholism, the heavy polities between Indians and whites, the unfair legal sentences, the police treatment, she says, make it unbelievable for some one who has not seen it. "There is such a sense of loss of culture," she adds. "It's difficult to keep tradition when it means being so poor."

Indians at college are not totally accepted in either world, and are stuck in a limbo, says Tsosie. To break away from stereotypes is a tough job, they say, and, for that reason, can count only on their own strengths.

But perhaps history could help them out. Harvard received a grant from a charitable organization in 1654 to build an Indian College. When it was torn down--in 1693, the bricks served to build the cellars of Stoughton hall, at the express condition that if any Indian showed up, he would be provided "lodging rent-free" in the hall.

The agreement still was being observed in 1939, when the Boston Herald reported on the rent-free deal