American Indian Stories of Success by Gerald E. Gipp Ph.D

Author:Gerald E. Gipp Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Baalee’ (Fall)—Moving with Community Purpose, the 1990s

Building the Tribal Colleges

The tribal colleges’ mission was deeply seated in Indian and tribal community development. My concept of the TCU mission was to provide a broad education to tribal member adults of all ages. In my mind, I viewed higher education as radical, even revolutionary, impacting one student at a time. The immediate impact of education was to give power to the learner, or the idea that knowledge is power. The power to live a good and decent life was the power I envisioned with the courses we offered at the tribal colleges.

At the ground level, the LBHC curriculum was tied to the local economy and to the students as they began their studies. The direct service in higher education was fundamentally a matter of bringing someone who knows the area of knowledge to the learners. However, a college, in terms of an accredited institution, is surrounded with layers of the learning enterprise. The library and learning resources are crucial to the educational experience for our students. At LBHC, we collaborated with Salish Kootenai College, Fort Belknap College, Blackfeet Community College, and Stone Child College and retained a Georgetown University graduate student to select books from the Library of Congress seconds stack each week on our behalf. Through this method, we gained 5,000 books, as did our colleague institutions. We found a means of giving free books to the community through Montana American Indian education leaders Robert Swan and Mike Doss.

LBHC was well known for the building trades program, which began in the mid-1980s. The college contracted the BT class to renovate parts of the college. Inside the gym, they built three classrooms where the bleachers had been, and the library on two-thirds of the playing field. On top of the classrooms, a series of faculty and staff offices were built. A couple of bridges were constructed across the classroom building to the library and archives. The second story of the library and archives became four classrooms. A U.S. Department of Education grant, Minority Science Education Improvement Program (MSEIP), supported extensive renovations for science laboratories. The UPS foundation supported the first computer lab with 20 computer workstations. Step by step, we reclaimed the tribal gym building for educational purposes. By 2000, Chairman Clara Nomee’s administration appropriated $3 million for the new campus construction. The American Indian College Fund of the tribal colleges supported the grant of $1 million for the construction of Cultural Center.

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