Description
Tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) are chartered by and serve tribal communities across the country. There are 34 such colleges in 14 states, primarily in the Midwest, Plains, Mountain West, and Southwest, and they enroll some 30,000 full and part-time students. While their principal mission is to provide tertiary education to tribal members, they also seek to produce and disseminate knowledge that will be useful to their tribes and to Native America more broadly.
This latter goal has been challenging to achieve: TCU faculty have heavy teaching loads and little time to devote to research; most are based on campuses that are distant from cities and the research resources they offer; and many have not been adequately prepared to pursue advanced research successfully. The American Indian College Fund (AICF) has been working to remedy the situation.
Now 30 years old, AICF provides scholarships to Native students seeking college degrees and aims to strengthen tribal colleges. For the last several years, the College Fund has made a concerted effort to bolster tribal colleges’ research capacity. Building on work initially seeded by the Mellon Foundation, AICF has begun hosting an annual research conference for tribal college faculty and publishing their work in a peer-reviewed journal. These opportunities have proven immensely valuable for TCU faculty, many of whom have only recently completed advanced degrees and have had little experience with the scholarly apparatus of academia.
In 2017, the Luce Foundation provided AICF funding to support the research conference and the journal as well as an intensive writing workshop and stipends to attend conferences in faculty members’ fields of study. Over the two years of the grant, AICF has hosted 34 presentations at two research conferences, published 8 articles in two journal issues, sent 31 faculty to external conferences, and enrolled 18 scholars in writing workshops. Altogether, 93 faculty at 32 institutions were engaged in one or another aspect of the project.
Given the interest and engagement on the part of TCU faculty, AICF hopes to continue the initiative and has sought renewed funding from the Luce Foundation. The project team have made some adjustments based on their experience over the last two years. They intend to enlist some of the participants in helping to plan and facilitate the events in order to develop their leadership and organizational skills. The team also plans to tailor the mentorship experience offered during the writing retreat to the needs of individual participants—rather than offering a more general advisement service.
The new grant would enable AICF, once again, to support travel and accommodations for the conference and workshop attendees, editing and publication costs associated with the journals, travel stipends for those attending external conferences, and evaluation and management of the project.