(Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted with permission from reznetnews.org.)

Julian Manyhides stands in the D'Arcy McNickle Library at Salish Kootenai College, where he is a senior. Manyhides is president of the AIHEC Student Congress. Photo credit: Russel A. Daniels.

The American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) Student Congress and Salish Kootenai College (SKC, Pablo, MT) have landmark anniversaries on the academic calendar this year, and Julian Manyhides (Blackfeet) will be present for both occasions.

Manyhides is this year’s president of the congress, which just celebrated its 20^th anniversary, and a senior at the college, which marked 30 years of existence in January.

Manyhides, 35, moved to Pablo — the tribal government seat on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana — with Natalie Malaterre (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) and their daughter, Aspen, 12, to enter college in 2001. That was 10 years after Manyhides graduated from high school in Browning, MT, on the Blackfeet Reservation, 160 miles to the northeast.

Malaterre has since received a bachelor’s degree from SKC in human services and works at the D’Arcy McNickle Library on campus.

“She worked, I worked,” Manyhides said in describing the years he spent moving between jobs as a cook and a substitute teacher. “I floated around for 10 years.”

As an older student, his first months of college were not easy, said Manyhides, who relied on the school’s more personal setting and cultural aspects to help cope with feelings of doubt.

“He’s a lot more serious than when he first started here,” said Juan Perez, SKC’s director of student services, “serious as in serious about school and serious about life.”

Perez, 38 (Klamath), oversees campus tours, volunteer programs, and athletics. He said Manyhides has lent a hand in each of those areas in his years at the college.

Manyhides plans to graduate with a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology this spring, he said, but addressing unity among tribal college students is on his agenda first.

Distance is the major issue facing the AIHEC Student Congress in its efforts to build a stronger national presence and serve as a voice for tribal college students nationwide, he said. Stronger communication is crucial in dealing with that obstacle.

The congress represents more than 34,000 tribal college students in the United States and Canada. The students are in 13 states and the officers in eight, widelyseparated states.

“We’re a student government on a national level,” Manyhides said.

Manyhides, who has attended AIHEC student conferences since he started school at SKC, was elected president in March at the annual conference in Green Bay, WI. He is to serve as president until the March 2007 conference in Rapid City, SD.

“When I first started attending AIHEC [Conferences], I started out in Rapid City, so I’m finishing in Rapid City,” he said.

While Manyhides has a sense of coming full circle in his involvement with AIHEC, he said, he will look toward “pushing and expanding the envelope for Native American people” with computer skills he has developed in college and with his degree in InformationTechnology.

Communication is a theme tied into Manyhides’ work at school and with AIHEC. He plans to remember this when he graduates by staying in touch with other students.

“Don’t forget who they are, and they won’t forget who you are,” said Manyhides, who credits Perez for offering those words of advice.

Reporter Mary Hudetz (Crow) and photographer Russel A. Daniels (Navajo and Ho-Chunk) are journalism students at the University of Montana in Missoula. They are graduates of the Freedom Forum’s American Indian Journalism Institute. For more information about the AIHEC Student Congress, see http://asc.aihec.org/default.aspx.