Tribal Colleges
Tribal colleges are vital to Native Americans and are beneficial to the country as a whole. They help Native communities and students gain a valuable education to help fight the poverty and unemployment within Indian Country and to also help in preserving Native language, culture and traditions.
The Navajo Nation was the first tribe to create the first tribal college, called Diné College, that was controlled by the tribe, located on the reservation and established specifically for the Native American students that wished to gain a higher education in 1968. With this first tribal college, the movement for higher education for the American Indian began. Since then, the number of tribal colleges and universities has grown to over 30 in the United States and 1 in Canada. The tribal colleges are located in Arizona, California, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wisconsin and served more than 250 American Indian Nations from every geographic region in the United States.
TCUs are very important to all they serve. They receive little to no financial support. They also do not receive any local or state tax support and run mainly on private donations and gifts from foundations such as the AICF.
Read more about this topic: American Indian College Fund
Famous quotes containing the words tribal and/or colleges:
“Totem poles and wooden masks no longer suggest tribal villages but fashionable drawing rooms in New York and Paris.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)