Origin Story: The Genesis of Tribal College Journal

At the 1988 AIHEC summer retreat, Paul Boyer (far left) met with TCU leaders, including journal adviser Joe McDonald (Salish/Kootenai) and AIHEC chair Lionel Bordeaux (Sicangu Lakota) (front center). Boyer’s father, Ernest, is standing next to Bordeaux.

I was 24 years old when I started Tribal College Journal. From the vantage point of middle age, that seems shockingly young, and, I must now confess, my qualifications for the job were proportionately thin.

I had recently completed a master’s degree in journalism and had briefly worked as a reporter and freelance writer. But my experience as an editor was limited to running a small college newspaper and starting a tiny environmental newsletter. This is the kind of résumé that would qualify me for an entry-level position at a newspaper where I could look forward to covering city council meetings and fires until I moved up to stories about corruption in state politics.

This struck me as a dreary career path. I wanted more adventure and I was determined to make a difference in the world. As a teenager, I fantasized about living abroad while writing the great American novel; as a young adult, I thought the life of a foreign correspondent in a war-torn country sounded grand. But then I discovered tribal colleges.

My father, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, had learned about the existence of community colleges that were located on reservations and started and run by tribal educators. This piqued his curiosity and he asked me to visit a few campuses to find out what they were all about. I threw myself into the task and travelled to a half-dozen colleges, filing dispatches to my father as I traveled. “Why don’t you write a report about the movement?” he asked. So I did, which was published by the foundation in 1989.

But while I was still making my campus visits, I was formulating another project. Tribal colleges represented a new educational movement, yet administrators and faculty knew very little about the work of their counterparts on other reservations. In these pre- Internet days, the colleges didn’t even sponsor a newsletter. When Lionel Bordeaux, president of Sinte Gleska University, acknowledged that they needed a magazine but didn’t have the people or funding to create one, I sensed an opportunity.

I spent about $1,000 to put out a prototype of Tribal College Journal—a 24-page publication designed on an early Macintosh computer and frugally printed in black and white. It was well received, not always for the intended reasons. I recall Georgiana Tiger, who represented the tribal college interests in Washington, DC at the time, telling me that she liked the first edition precisely because it was not fancy or slick. Instead, its primitive design showed lawmakers just how needy and poor the colleges really were. This was meant as a compliment, so I thanked her.

The growth and development of the journal during my seven-year tenure primarily reflected the incremental growth in funding— the result of rising circulation, increased contributions from the colleges, and, in the early years, vital support from the American Indian College Fund and later the Lannan Foundation. But, to be honest, it also reflected my own learning curve. Four times a year for seven years, thousands of readers watched me learn how to run a magazine.

This is not something I would have admitted 25 years ago. I wanted to be taken seriously, and I tried to present myself as a competent and knowledgeable professional. Above all, I wanted to do justice to the work of tribal colleges and the sacrifices made by their leaders. I didn’t want to parade my inexperience. I wanted to do my best to show the colleges at their best.

Boyer (with son Avery) worked out of a spare bedroom and designed the journal on an early Macintosh computer.

But now, with hindsight, I am increasingly fond of those early editions, in spite of their limitations (and frequent typos). To me, the journal’s humble origin story is in perfect harmony with the larger history of the tribal college movement.

Yes, I was young, inexperienced, and a bit over my head—filled with passion and good intentions while lacking practical skills and a clear plan for the future. But the same can be said for many of the early tribal college founders. I am currently writing a history of the tribal colleges and through my interviews with the movement’s founders, I am constantly reminded that the institutions were invented by, frankly, a bunch of kids. Many were no older than I was when they helped start their college; a few were even younger.

Their qualifications for running a college were, in some cases, limited to having recently been college students. Most did not yet have doctoral degrees in education administration; that would come later. A few had gained additional experience as campus radicals, which meant they knew more about fighting systems than creating them. What did they know about the tedious but essential machinery of higher education: budgeting, accreditation, Title III funding, or articulation agreements? At first, almost nothing.

But that, as it turned out, was not what mattered most. To succeed, they really needed something less tangible: a sense of passion, a conviction that change was needed, and above all, the belief that they could help make change happen.

Tribal colleges have grown a great deal over the past 40 years. They have accumulated the trappings of maturity and respectability, including accreditation and land grant status. Most now have campuses that actually look like campuses, not (as was originally the case) a mismatched collection of double-wide trailers and rented storefronts. Some now offer four-year and even graduate degrees. And they are also run by skilled and experienced administrators. This is evidence of progress and offers hope for the stability and growth of the movement into the future.

But I also remember that the movement began with people who did not have these credentials and who did not even see their work as a “job”—let alone a viable career path. The odds were so fully stacked against them that nothing less than a sense of obligation to a larger cause can really explain the commitment made by the early founders and those who joined the movement. I’m reminded of what Janine Pease, founder of Little Big Horn College, once said on this subject: “Tribal colleges are like a religious order,” she proposed. “You take a vow of poverty and stay for life.” Amen to that.

I don’t mean to suggest that my efforts to start Tribal College Journal are comparable to the efforts made by Pease and others to start their colleges. Their task was much harder, the stakes were higher, and the opposition greater (in fact, I enjoyed full support from the colleges). But I do think that both efforts illustrate the often underappreciated virtues of youthful energy and good intentions— even when experience and formal credentials are lacking.

Carol Davis once told me a wonderful story about her efforts to create Turtle Mountain Community College when she was 25 years old. She used her own money to fly from North Dakota to Seattle for a meeting of the first tribal college founders, but felt that she was being excluded by leaders of the more senior institutions. They told her she could only participate in efforts to win some vital federal funding if she developed a funding proposal. The deadline was a week away. “Do you have a proposal?” she was asked. “My proposal is written,” she shot back. But what she was really thinking was “What’s a proposal?”

Did it matter that she didn’t know what a proposal was? In the long run, no. She quickly figured that out and wrote a draft on the flight home. Instead, the vital ingredient was a willingness to pursue a goal in the face of unrelenting opposition. This is a gift given to the young. In fact, being young, inexperienced, and even naive can actually be an asset. It’s easier to start a project when you don’t know the odds of failure. If I had known what I was getting into, I might have looked for that newspaper job. Running a magazine, it turns out, is hard work.

Paul Boyer, Ed.D. is the founding editor of Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education.