American Indians In Science: Moving Forward, But Slowly

When Christine Benally was a high school student in Shiprock, N.Mex., on the easternmost edge of the Navajo Reservation, her educational goals went no further than getting a vocational degree--as her father, a mechanic, did before her and as many of her friends would do, as well. "I figured something like that would do me," recalls Benally. "Get a technical degree, get out fast, start earning money." Yet some 15 years later, Benally has a doctoral degree in environmental toxicology under her belt and is teaching science and chemistry at the community college where she earned her technical degree. Following her high school graduation in 1977, Benally enrolled in the Tsaile Navajo Community College in eastern Arizona, earned an associate degree, and found a job as a medical lab technician. The work got monotonous after a few years, however. "I got bored with it," she says. "You were capable of doing more, but because of the lack of education, the opportunities weren't there." Benally is one of only 36 American Indians who earned doctoral degrees in the sciences in 1990, according to figures compiled by the National Science Foundation. With a population of about 1.7 million (comprising members of more than 300 tribes), American Indians make up only about 0.7 percent of the population of the United States. The proportion of American Indians who pursue advanced degrees and careers in the sciences is smaller still: According to a report published by NSF ("Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering," NSF 90-301, 1990), American Indians earned only about 0.2 percent of the doctoral degrees in science or engineering in 1988. (NSF includes a caveat in this report indicating that because of very small sample~ sizes, and because estimates are based on self-reported data, "data for native Americans should be viewed with some caution.") While these numbers are low, American Indians have made substantial strides in the sciences over the last decade. In 1978, only 21 science or engineering Ph.D.'s were earned by American Indians--little more than half the 1990 figure. And, according to unpublished NSF data, the number of working doctoral scientists and engineers has nearly quadrupled since 1977, rising from about 200 to more than 770 in 1989. These increases can be attributed largely to improved educational programs and opportunities for American Indians--programs whose goals range from improving math skills to increasing self-esteem. Scientists like Benally are important role models for the next generation of American Indians aspiring toward careers in the sciences. But Hopi Indian Frank Dukepoo, an associate professor of genetics at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, points out that having an Indian role model is just one part of the equation: "We're not so much concerned about the color of the container as [about] its contents," he remarks. "If I'd been waiting for an Indian geneticist to come along, I'd still be waiting." Dukepoo himself has been a vital role model for many American Indian students, at Northern Arizona University and here. In fact, Benally credits him with getting her back on track when she was having trouble keeping up with her classes and research responsibilities as an undergraduate. "He encouraged me and told me how hard it was for him to go through school," she recalls. As more and more American Indians pursue careers in the sciences, this cycle promises to continue. The statistics describing elementary education for American Indians are still bleak, however. According to The Demographics of American Indians, a report issued in 1990 (Institute for Educational Leadership Inc., Washington, D.C.), the high school dropout rate for American Indians is the highest of any minority group. Reservation schools generally have low budgets, meager educational resources, and considerable turnover of teachers. According to Dave Young, director of American Indian Research Opportunities (AIRO), an "administrative umbrella" comprising five federally funded programs to assist American Indians at Montana State University in Bozeman, some high schools on reservations have a 70 percent dropout rate. Many educational initiatives that are geared toward American Indians--particularly those for grade- school children--aim to present science in a culturally relevant context. One program focused in this direction is a curriculum being developed by the Boulder, Colo.-based American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES). Cecelia Jacobs, curriculum developer and coor- dinator for the project, explains that Indian children, like other minorities, often feel ignored by mainstream educational materials: "One of the reasons why they never bond with the educational system is that it doesn't reflect them." And while illustrations of black, Asian, and Hispanic children are beginning to appear more frequently in classroom materials, American Indian children are rarely depicted. Jacobs's project, the Science of Alcohol Curriculum for American Indians (SACAI), strives to incorporate American Indian images and values. Stories based on Indian traditions are used to illuminate concepts in the lessons. The program's other fundamental goal is to present information about alcohol and its physiological effects within the context of science topics, such as digestion and human reproduction. "Science is the focus," says Jacobs, "but we're hoping that prevention [of alcohol abuse, a major health problem among American Indians] is the byproduct." While an approach focusing on cultural relevance may draw younger students into science, such an approach is not necessarily appropriate for college students. "I don't teach Hopi mitosis or Navajo meiosis, I teach them hard-core genetics," says Dukepoo. "We need to prepare our students for campus, for professional schools." At the Navajo Community College in Tsaile, the faculty is exploring ways of integrating Navajo culture into the curriculum, says Christine Benally. Benally worries, however, that such an effort at the college level may hinder students, rather than help them. "Students that age don't really have an understanding of our culture," she says. "Kids get more influence from television. Also, in grades K to 12, there's not much [Navajo] culture in [the curriculum] at all." And while some children learn about Navajo culture at home, she says, "more are not getting it at all." For these students, learning science may be enough of a challenge without adding cultural concepts, she says. "I don't know how that's going to work. It might confuse the students even more." Despite this lack of grounding, many American Indian students--particularly those who grew up on isolated reservations--experience culture shock upon arriving at college. Because of this and other factors, only about 25 percent of American Indians who enroll in college in the U.S. graduate, compared to about 75 percent in the general population, says Montana State's Dave Young. Bozeman veterinarian Ethel Connelly, a member of the Blackfeet tribe, earned her bachelor's degree at Montana State in 1985. She says that of the eight Blackfeet who entered her freshman class, only three remained by the end of the first quarter of that year. Some had family responsibilities to attend to, she says, while for others, "the change in culture was too much--they needed to mature a little more." Connelly earned her DVM at Colorado State University in 1989, becoming the first woman Blackfeet tribal member to earn a veterinary degree. Northern Arizona's Dukepoo, 49, was a college freshman in 1961, a time when American Indian college students were rare, and American Indians with Ph.D.'s were virtually nonexistent. He says that while the pressures of racism--"being called a dirty, dumb, stupid, drunk Indian"--were significant, "my biggest hurdle was nearly flunking out of college." Dukepoo started school with five scholarships, "but I lost every one," he says. "The transition from high school to college was a big one. I had free time and money and didn't know how to handle it." His education was salvaged with the help of a Mormon zoology professor, Charles Woolf, who, Dukepoo recalls, "pushed, pulled, dragged me all the way through it. He was my mentor." Dukepoo earned his doctorate in zoology at Arizona State University in 1973, becoming the first Hopi to earn a Ph.D. To encourage and recognize American Indian students who excel in their studies, in 1982 Dukepoo founded the National Native American Honor Society, for students in elementary school through college who achieve a 4.0 grade point average during any semester. The society now includes more than 700 members. Although painfully lacking when Dukepoo was an undergrad, programs to ease the transition from reservation life to college life--and from undergraduate life to doctoral-candidate life--can now be found at most schools with substantial numbers of American Indian students. Montana State's Young says that the program that got AIRO started--the Minority Apprenticeship Program (MAP)--was designed expressly for this purpose. MAP, which began in 1980 with three Crow students, brings juniors and seniors from reservation high schools to the MSU campus during the summer to live in dorms, take classes, and generally experience a taste of college life. More than 100 students have gone through the program since then, and more than 80 percent subsequently enrolled in college, says Young. Young's office also administers the National Institutes of Health's Minority Biomedical Research Support program (MBRS) at MSU. Students in the program work with a professor who teaches them the ins and outs of research, and are paid for working in a research lab. Students also travel to one scientific meeting each year, where they present their research. "It gives them real exposure to the adventure of science, and the art of science investigation, while they pursue their career goals," says Young. NIH's MBRS program was established in 1972 to strengthen biomedical research at schools with high ethnic minority enrollments. In 1977, when Young was appointed head of MSU's department of veterinary medicine, the university--with just over 2 percent minority students--was not eligible to participate. And although Montana's seven tribal colleges had 80 percent to 90 percent minority students, their two-year status--along with their scant research facilities--effectively eliminated them from the competition, as well. American Indians in Montana and many other regions were effectively shut out of the program. But in 1983, MSU formed a consortium linking the tribal colleges with the university, and since then, says Young, more than 100 American Indian students have participated in the program. Under the aegis of the consortium, the tribal colleges last year were awarded grants of $14,000 from NSF to strengthen their own science programs and to initiate programs at their local high schools. Many of these programs are geared toward "hands-on" science, in which high school and tribal college students take part in actual research projects, such as taking wildlife counts and measuring water quality. The Montana consortium has been so successful that AIRO was recently awarded a five-year, $4.6 million grant from NSF to expand the consortium to an eight-state region. This regional consortium will be called ASSIST--the Alliance of States Supporting Indians in Science and Technology. Other efforts to teach research skills at tribal colleges are taking place here. Benally, who has been teaching science at the Tsaile community college for about a year, recently was awarded NSF funding through Arizona State for a project involving her students in environmental toxicology research. The ethic of "giving back" to one's tribe is strong for many American Indians, and the strong sense of community on many reservations is a powerful force drawing graduates home again. In an essay written for American Indian students around the country who take motivational courses he offers, Dukepoo recalls feeling "proud and pretty important as I thought to myself, `I'm going to get an education for my people.' " Veterinarian Connelly, currently working at a clinic in Bozeman, decided to study veterinary medicine in part because she knew it would be a valuable profession on the Blackfeet reservation. Her "five-year plan" is to start her own practice there, she says, but she needs more experience first. She says that many of her friends studied nursing, teaching, and engineering, professions giving them a greater likelihood of finding work back home on the often-isolated reservations. Benally, too, was glad to go home. A job offer from the U.S. Public Health Service's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in Atlanta "sounded appealing, but it was too far away," she says. "I decided it was time to come home--I'd been away in school for long enough." Benally doesn't believe that "brain drain"--Indians leaving the reservation for an education, never to return--is a significant problem. "Some people might stay out five, 10 years--get some experience, knowledge. But even they come back."

American Indians In Science: Moving Forward, But Slowly

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