PALENQUE RUIN. During their visit to Chiapas to study climate change, College of Menominee Nation students visited a seventh-century Mayan ruin, Palenque. Photo by Lance Hill

Schyler Martin (Stockbridge-Munsee) attends the College of Menominee Nation (Keshena, WI) and was one of six students to travel to Chiapas, Mexico, this past summer from June 10

17. Without a trace of doubt, Martin says that trip changed his viewpoint on many issues. “Now I’ve seen what true poverty is,” he says. “I’ve seen how other people are being mistreated around the world.” He adds that the students were not just tourists. Rather, they observed how communities function.

Traveling outside one’s comfort zone can plant the seeds for a collaborative, positive exchange of ideas, information, and perspectives. And that’s just what happened when two groups of tribal college students, representing many nations, embraced traveling far from their families and communities.

These two groups of students and faculty – one from the College of Menominee Nation and one from Sitting Bull College (Fort Yates, ND) recently traveled to Chiapas, Mexico, and New York City, respectively. Each group had a clear purpose when they embarked, and participants returned home with sharpened sensibilities on how they and their communities fit into the larger world.

College of Menominee Nation: Chiapas, Mexico

A National Aeronautics and Space Administration-American Indian Higher Education Consortium (NASA AIHEC) Enrichment Grant enabled six students from the College of Menominee Nation (CMN) to travel to Chiapas, Mexico, to learn directly from the Tzotzil people how climate change is affecting them. The NASA-AIHEC collaboration is meant to recruit under-represented students into geography, sustainable development, biology, math, and geology.

During their week in Chiapas, the Menominee group was fully immersed in the Mexican culture. They stayed in a youth hostel in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas. Since Spanish was the primary language spoken, they either tried to understand and speak Spanish (some students had rudimentary Spanish-speaking skills) or else worked with translators. Their faculty guide, William Van Lopik, Ph.D., speaks Spanish and facilitated discourse among the students and the Mexican people. Stephanie Erdmann, a business instructor at CMN, also accompanied the group.

Van Lopik, who teaches geography and sustainable development classes at Menominee, says students came to realize that the struggles of Indigenous people are the same everywhere. These struggles include preserving cultures, overcoming colonialism, developing and expanding self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty. Their trip provided many insights into the different culture. For example, the Indigenous people of Chiapas differentiate rainfall by gender, according to Van Lopik. “Male rain is the torrential downpour, whereas the female rain is a more gentle rain, which doesn’t erode soil and wash away crops.”

OVENTIC MURAL. During their trip to study climate change, College of Menominee Nation students noticed that corn (maize) is used a lot in Indigenous murals and paintings in Mexico. Photo by Lance Hill

The group visited community markets, an Indigenous technical college, the Mayan ruins of Palenque, and local environmental and socio-political organizations. They also traveled to the Tzotzil community of Acteal and the Zapatista village, Oventic. Students also observed firsthand how Indigenous people grow coffee and witnessed the erosion of the soil due to deforestation. Consumer demands drive deforestation, and without trees to hold soil in place, erosion occurs from torrential rainfall – another phenomena that can be linked to climate change. Already, the climate there is hotter, and that affects weather patterns.

Student Reflections

CMN student participant Martin says climate change is already affecting farmers: Coffee farmers need a colder climate, but temperatures are already rising. “In addition, their corn crops that grow on very steep hillsides are being washed away by violent storms,” he says. “Now they can only grow half their usual crop. This land erosion is caused by deforestation.”

Martin felt frustrated when they were warned to avoid speaking about politics or Zapatista communities. “The Mexican government has said that Zapatistas are terrorists,” he says, “and the United States believes them.” While both governments have placed the Zapatistas on a terrorist list, they are a paramilitary group organized to raise awareness about Indigenous rights.

Martin, who is pursuing a degree in public administration and is leaning toward a career in emergency management with FEMA, concludes: “This trip made me realize I need to be a more responsible purchaser—which corporations will I support? I’m aware now that I don’t want to just use up the world’s resources.”

Student Dean Davis (Menominee) also participated in the trip to Chiapas. Although Davis has lived on the Menominee Reservation most of his life, he has traveled to Amsterdam (to play basketball), Afghanistan, and Australia. Davis says day-to-day activities consisted of breakfast at the hostel followed by short meetings with tour guides and instructors. “Our time was very well spent attending meetings with local groups who specialize in [improving the conditions] of the communities and people,” he says. “We toured schools and asked many questions about climate change. One thing everyone [agreed on] was that climate was definitely changing, and there was more violent weather.”

Davis says the trip to Chiapas marks a turning point in his opinion of energy resources. “I had my eyes opened as to how other people conserve energy in their day-to-day lives, and I think Americans should do the same,” he says. “We should think about what we do in our lives because what we do may affect others.”

MODEL UNITED NATIONS. Sitting Bull College student Jerl Thompson (kneeling in center) works with Texas Southern University students and members of other delegations during a caucus session as they negotiate for their country’s positions. Photo by Mark Holman

Students as Tribal Ambassadors

The trip to Chiapas was Van Lopik’s second, and he hopes these excursions continue. The original idea to travel to Chiapas came about when the students were selling shade-grown coffee to raise funds to support two campus student organizations: SEEDS (Strategies for Environmental Education, Development, and Sustainability) and AIBL (American Indian Business Leaders). “They wanted to know about the people who grow this coffee and what kind of lives they live,” says Van Lopik. “Chiapas is predominantly Indigenous.”

In addition to learning about climate change, students had an international experience and an opportunity to connect with colleges where most of the students are Indigenous and from different tribes in Chiapas. “Each tribe has its own dialect,” Van Lopik says. The group toured Centro Indigena de Capacitacion Integral (CIDECI), located in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas. CIDECI translates into Indigenous Center of Integrated Training. Established in 1989 by and for the Indigenous people of Mexico, CIDECI’s overarching objective is to help students return to their villages and contribute to their sustainability.

“I think the more you see of other cultures, the better you know who you are,” he says. “The people of Chiapas would ask the students about their culture, their language. They were seen as ambassadors of their individual tribes.” Other students who participated in this trip were Lance Hill, Doug Littlehat, Cherie Thunder, and Sheena Danforth.

Sitting Bull College: National Model United Nations

Learning about global issues does not necessarily entail leaving the country. This is what five students from Sitting Bull College (SBC) realized when they traveled to New York City

from March 30-April 3, 2010, to participant in the National Model United Nations (NMUN) program.

NMUN is a global conference attended by 5,300 students from nations around the globe. SBC students worked closely with students from large universities in the Americas, Europe, and Asia to seek consensus on important global and national issues. Students are often in committee meetings from 8 a.m. until 10 or 11 p.m. and experience an intense simulation of how the real United Nations works.

According to Mark Holman, one of the faculty participants and Sitting Bull’s library director, SBC students were partially funded by a two-year, capacity-building grant from the NMUN Executive Board. The Diversity Building Scholarship Initiative (DBSI) was supervised by Dr. Karen Young of the NMUN Executive Board. Students also appealed to the Standing Rock Tribe and received $2,500.

This was the second year that SBC students participated in the program, and this year they represented Chile. “Students were assigned a committee based on their country’s actual membership in UN committees and affiliated organizations,” says Holman. “As part of their committee, they submitted a position paper on various global issues representing their nation’s position.” Throughout the course of the week, the papers were merged with others and eventually, through a process of attrition and diplomacy, some became resolutions.

Sitting Bull students worked as a team with students from Texas Southern University, a historically Black college in Houston. The two groups of students had been paired together last year, when they represented Bosnia Herzegovina. Because they had worked so well as a team in 2009, they asked to work together again this year.

The week ended on Saturday at the New York headquarters of the United Nations. Each nation cast a vote for or against the final resolutions. This was followed by a closing ceremony in the UN General Assembly. The final resolutions were then forwarded to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to become part of the UN archive.

Many of the discussions centered on the devastating earthquake that hit Chile in February. In fact, the students met with the Chilean ambassador for three hours examining the fallout from that quake and possible solutions. To Holman, the one-on-one time with real UN delegates was invaluable.

“This all took teamwork, a broad knowledge of issues, leadership skills, and the ability to work on the world stage,” says Holman. The transformation in the students’ levels of confidence is apparent to Holman. “They know they can work with other people at the national level,” he says. “I think the whole experience has been a catalyst for enhancing their skills in speaking, writing, negotiating, and diplomacy.”

Student Voices

This was the second time Jerl Thompson (Standing Rock Sioux) attended the NMUN program. “The confidence that it builds is something that can only be achieved when you are working with the best and the brightest in the world,” he says. “We also had the unique opportunity of representing our race and culture to delegations from countries that are completely unversed and unaware of the Indigenous peoples.”

Kourtenay Iron Cloud (Standing Rock Sioux) says that one of the biggest challenges initially was venturing outside of Times Square. “Reading [and understanding] the subway maps was a new study that we all had mastered by the end of the week.” And students did end up adjusting to the crowds of New York City, she says: “Even beating the morning rush to and from our hotel became the norm.”

Melissa Miklos, a non-Native student participant, says that the hardest challenge was understanding others’ languages. Participants came from all over the world, and some struggled with English. Majoring in elementary education at SBC, she feels this experience couldn’t have come at a better time. She plans to use it in her classroom teaching.

Other students who attended were Yvette Ward (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) and Monique Runnels (Cheyenne River Sioux).

The students from the College of Menominee Nation and from Sitting Bull College grew from their travel experiences, changing their attitudes and their understanding and tolerance. The experience clearly changed their lives.

Barbara Ellen Sorensen was senior editor for 15 years at Winds of Change magazine, which focuses on educational and career opportunities in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields for Native Americans.