Program will ease Native students into college

Published on November 19th, 2009

By ALEX DEMARBAN

Mike Angaiak saw the world change from the tiny village of Tununak.

In his lifetime, motorized boats replaced skin kayaks, snowmachines supplanted dog sleds and cash played a growing role.

The government school arrived in 1925, and Angaiak, who died in 2001 at age 85, said he attended class just one day in his life, according to his son, John.

Still, Mike, and his wife, Susie, insisted their children get college degrees.

Seven of 10 did that, including John, who earned a bachelor's degree in 1972 and is now retired after working for Southwest Alaska Native organizations.

"It was mom and dad's persistence that I get my education, so that I will fit in my time," said John, 67.

The Angaiaks are unusual.

While Alaska Native students play an increasingly large role in college classrooms, their enrollment numbers and graduation rates remain low.

For example, while Alaska Natives make up about 16 percent of the state's population, they comprise only 9 percent of the students at the University of Alaska Anchorage, according to a 2008 paper. And just 10 percent of UAA's freshmen earn a degree in six years.

A new Alaska Humanities Forum program set to begin next spring might help improve those numbers, if slightly, using a key ingredient that worked for the Angaiak family: parental involvement.

The program, which doesn't yet have a name, will take to heart an Indian education model which found that family support and involvement dramatically increase a student's college success, said Laurie Evans-Dinneen, project director.

$1.6 million grant

That family support is especially important for students who are wrenched out of their tight-knit village and sent off to big-city schools to live among strangers, organizers said.

The program, paid for with a three-year, $1.6 million federal grant, will help 50 rural high school students attend college by introducing them to urban campuses early in their high school career.

Hopefully, the program will grow to include other Alaska regions in the future, Evans-Dinneen said.

The students, who have not yet been selected, will likely come from communities along the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers in Southwest, Evans-Dinneen said.

Here's how the program will work:

For two weeks in the summer after their sophomore year, the students will travel to the University of Alaska Anchorage or the Alaska Job Corps in Palmer, stay in campus housing, hear from Native leaders, take a one-credit college course and participate in other activities.

They'll temporarily return to the campuses as juniors to learn about such things as enrolling, signing up for classes and applying for scholarships and loans.

Finally, in their senior year of high school, they'll shadow a student on campus, following them to class and school events during a four-day weekend.

By the time they arrive at school, they should have a network friends and know some of the professors who might teach them, said Evans-Dinneen.

The effort is loosely modeled after the nonprofit's Rose Urban-Rural Exchange that gives city and village high school students the chance to temporarily trade places to learn about other Alaska lifestyles.

Selection criteria coming

Organizers don't know what criteria they'll use to select the students - that's still in the works - but more information will be available on the nonprofit's Web site at www.akhf.org by early next year.

The program will also include a cultural immersion trip for professors, who will travel to existing rural Alaska culture camps in the summer in hopes that they'll become more familiar with the differences between village traditions and city lifestyles.

Those professors will hopefully serve as mentors for the rural students, Evans-Dinneen said.

Also, a community member in the student's village will travel with the student to the campus during their junior year. The community member will work with the family to let them know about the student's college options - the student won't have to attend UAA or the Job Corps - and will help to keep their grades up at home.

In Anchorage, the students in the program will have another contact who can offer loan tips, class-work advice and administrative help.

Trina Landlord, raised in Mountain Village in Southwest but now living in Anchorage, will serve as the family school liaison for the program.

Landlord has a huge family but only her uncle, James Landlord, traditional chief in the village of 770, has a college degree, she said.

Homesick and lonely

Some Alaska Natives have trouble going to college because they get lonely after leaving their village. Some might be overwhelmed by the size of the campus and their classrooms.

"So often, young people come in from rural communities and have a desire to go to school, get educated and help their people," Landlord said. "But I've seen them get homesick, or they get lost and become invisible."

The program will create a structure that will help the rural students succeed, she said.

Landlord herself went to UAA for four years, but never graduated.

She started a year later than she wanted to, delaying her studies because she found the administrative hurdles and paperwork for loans and scholarships intimidating, she said.

"I didn't understand the resources available, and I didn't quite know what I wanted to do when I got the university," she said.

She left after four years without a bachelor's degree, taking what she called a "dream job" for the Alaska Federation of Natives, where she did such things as organizing the annual Elders and Youth Conference and helped launch the Alaska Marketplace.

She might have started UAA a year earlier if she could have participated in a program like the one she'll be working on, she said.