Indigenous in Academia
Presented by Navajo Technical University
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By Clint Carroll
When I think back on my twenty-year-old self working as a line cook in Dallas while attending community college, to imagine myself as a tenured professor at a research university would have likely led to a chuckle followed by dismissal. My mind goes here often, but not out of self-congratulation or amazement; rather, it’s an exercise of tracing back to reflect on the doors I chose to walk through and how I arrived at the threshold in the first place.
As a young person, I viewed PhDs through the lens of Layne Staley lyrics, “but try with your books and degreeee-eees,” and the tweed-clad Harrison Ford of Indiana Jones movies. Becoming a professor was certainly not a path connected to any of my aspirations, nor would I even have known how to get there. Still, tracing back helps me make sense of it all. And, as I write this, I realize a passion for food may have a lot to do with those doors and choices.
I carry with me a substantial amount of privilege: I am a light-skinned, cis-gendered, male-identifying person. I wasn’t raised with money, but I never went without food or had to worry about where it would come from. On the flip side, I am a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a first-generation college graduate. Naming these aspects of who I am acknowledges both the privilege and marginalization I’ve inherited. It also keeps me humble and makes me strive to leverage the privileges I have toward holding space for others.
There is not a singular narrative about what it’s like to be Indigenous in academia, but there are many threads shared between them. For one, we’re very few. Thus, we often experience higher education as an isolated and isolating space. The university is often far removed from our communities, and the continued privilege of the Western ways of knowing and being in the world can be stifling and oppressive.
My initial journey through academia entailed dropping out of a regional university after my first year, working, saving money, traveling some, then attending community college to figure out how I could relate formal education to the passion I had acquired for languages, cultures, places, and foods - and the connections between them. What I found was that although academia is often seen as removed from the ‘real world,’ the same principles applied: find your community, use your values and goals as a compass, and stay open to the unexpected.
As a Cherokee person who grew up in Dallas disconnected from our language, community, culture, and land, I viewed college as a vehicle for making my way home. I found there were helpers in those halls if you looked hard enough. And so, as my critical consciousness grew in my early twenties (aided in part by Smoke Signals, Robbie Robertson, and my Cherokee-language cassettes that I played over and over), a kind anthropology professor at my local community college took note of my work and suggested some possibilities that might lay ahead on an academic path.
Note: There is a difference between Arizona State University and the University of Arizona. Not knowing this, I applied to the latter thinking it was the former, which my anthropology professor had recommended. After my realization of this, I accepted the mistake as a gentle nudge toward where I was supposed to go and never looked back. I went on to earn my BA in anthropology and American Indian studies from U Arizona and my PhD from UC Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
Today, although I still pride myself on knowing how to hold a chef’s knife properly and I accept the teasing from my wife about my mise en place when I cook dinner, my focus on food is from a different angle. Through my work as a grad student, I was fortunate to develop deep relationships with Cherokee elders and knowledge keepers in Oklahoma. We have worked together for over a decade toward revitalizing traditional land-based knowledge and practices.
Most recently, we’ve developed a curriculum and pilot program for passing this knowledge to younger Cherokees while preparing them to think critically and creatively about the threats we face as an Indigenous nation regarding our lands and waters. Our activities through the program always come back to our traditional foods, although we also spend time learning about medicines and materials for our traditional crafts. In this work, we’re trying to build a tribal leadership model that centers reciprocal relationships to each other and the land, including all the life that dwells upon it.
The fact that our activities in the program have tended to focus on food is not surprising, as this fundamental aspect of our human existence is a sacred and relational connector to our land and waters. The concept of relationality that permeates Indigenous ways of knowing and being in the world is something I carry forward into my classes and work at the university. In doing so, I hope to make the journey through academia for Indigenous students less isolated and isolating, as well as to expose non-Native students to the richness of Indigenous thought and practice.
Although my attempts to trace back and make sense of my path in life may not always succeed (life often doesn’t “make sense”), it at least allows me to see more clearly where it could lead and how that can shape others’ paths. For Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend this year, I spent time with my daughter and nephews harvesting Indigenous foods from our garden (my sanctuary from departmental administrative work). We spoke the Cherokee names of the foods, talked about their origins and relationship to Cherokee people, and had plenty of laughs in the process.
This small slice of culture and language is more than I ever had as a child, due in large part to the ongoing attempts of the United States to strip us of our identity as tribal peoples. But if I’ve learned anything from my journey, it’s that each one of us has the power to turn that around—to find a path that reconnects us in the face of alienation and to build something that we never could have imagined.
Navajo Technical University, like all tribal colleges and universities, grew out of a prayer in the 1960s that envisioned all tribes moving toward self-determination by expressing their sovereignty and establishing their own institutions of higher education. It was as a result of this movement that NTU began as the Navajo Skill Center in 1979 to meet the immediate needs of an unemployed population on the Navajo Nation.
Students enrolled to learn the rudiments of a trade, graduated, and joined the workforce; however, it soon became clear that the students wanted more. In 1985 the Board of Directors changed the Skill Center’s name to Crownpoint Institute of Technology and in November 2006 the Navajo Nation Council approved changing the name to Navajo Technical College. In 2013, NTC became NTU - becoming the first university established on the Navajo Nation.
Today, NTU is one of the premier institutions of higher education in the nation, providing a unique balance between science and technology and culture and tradition. Much of what guides NTU’s success is our mission and our identity rooted in the Diné Philosophy of Education.
Clint Carroll is an associate professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, he works closely with Cherokee people in Oklahoma on issues of land conservation and the perpetuation of land-based knowledge and ways of life.
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