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:
“What is this conversation, now secular,
A speech not mine yet speaking for me in
The heaving jelly of my tribal air?
It rises in the throat, it climbs the tongue,
It perches there for secret tutelage....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)