Challenges Faced by Native American Students and Professors

Highlighted at Annual AISA Conference.

By: Jacob Snelgrove

The challenges faced by Native American scholars and students were the focus of this year's 24th
annual American Indian Studies Association (AISA) conference which was held at Arizona State
University (ASU).

This year, the focus of the conference was on the "social legal and political challenges," faced by
Native American or Indigenous scholars and students.

The conference had many speakers who not only spoke about how Native Americans are
misrepresented, but also how they are forgotten all together.

Angie Bautista-Chavez, is an ASU assistant professor of the school of Politics and Global
Studies. She teaches a Border and Immigration class at ASU.

Despite attending Rice and Harvard Universities she had a limited understanding of indigenous
or Native American history and had to learn much of it at ASU in order to properly teach her
subject.

During the conference she spoke on a panel about her previous experiences.

She said, “I Realized how limited I was. I had neglected indigenous perspectives on borders. I
had to look back on how I was doing research on the United States border and unlearn and
retrain myself to study all perspectives of U.S politics on borders.”

Harrison J. Yazzie Jr. is an ASU undergraduate student majoring in Political Science and
American Indian Studies(AIS). He was a speaker on a 5 person panel at the conference.

He was shocked when a professor played a video in class that he found personally offensive.

He said, “One time this professor put a video on in class that had misrepresented information
about indigenous people, portraying them as savages. I wish the professor would have mentioned
a trigger warning prior to playing it. The video made me scared to talk.”
This is one of many examples where Native Americans are too scared to speak about their
culture because it isn’t really talked about from their perspective.

Another undergraduate student, Marcil Roanhoarse majoring in AIS, said she has been able to
connect with her heritage through the AIS program during an interview.

“Ever since taking my first AIS class it really made me a better person. I relearned my language
and culture and I don’t feel empty anymore” said Roanhoarse.

Previously she said she had not heard anything about indigenous people or been given a single
thought until she took an indigenous class at ASU. She expressed her disappointment with the
education system.

This is because as a whole, indigenous history isn’t well represented in the community at all
according to participants at the conference.

For example, as ASU students mentioned prior, students in Arizona have to really go out of their
way and dig to learn about indigenous history.

Dr. Jerome Clark is an assistant professor of the school of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies
at Arizona State University with a Native American background.

He said, “As professors we should respect students because they need to succeed in their
personal life as well as the classroom.”

He learned to be a more understanding teacher because most of his students were from an
indigenous background.

He was able to relate from his experiences that sometimes their truth isn’t always heard.

While Clark said sometimes students' experiences aren't recognized, for students like Harrison
Yazzie, part of the motivation for his studies is to keep alive the legacy of his ancestors.

Yazzie Jr. said, “We have to keep going because if our ancestors did it then so can we. As
indigenous people with our minds and ideas we can accomplish anything.”