Jodi Rave: Sam Deloria preps new generation

Monday, May 21, 2007  

"The best and brightest Native college graduates would work for Indian Country if tribes created job opportunities and invited them to apply, said Philip “Sam” Deloria.

College professors could help, too, if they stopped objectifying Indians and treating them as victims.

Students deserve better, Deloria said.

“Whose responsibility is it to help them get prepared to take these jobs working in tribal government?” said Deloria, newly named director of the American Indian Graduate Center in Albuquerque, N.M. “It becomes more of a collective responsibility.

“And the tribes that have the money and say, ‘We're only going to fund our own students,' that's pretty shortsighted politically, and also as an investment in their own future. They're not only going to be hiring their own students, they're going to be hiring people from all over. It's time tribes really thought about this.”

Deloria's arrival this month at the graduate center denotes an extraordinary changing of the guard in the arena of federal policy and law analysis. It simultaneously heralds a new era in building Indian Country's brain trust: an emerging corps of Native graduate students.

To nurture that corps, Deloria urges professors to quit perpetuating the theory that Indians are victims of multigenerational suffering because previous generations attended boarding schools: “Get over the trauma,” he said."

Get the Story:
Jodi Rave: End image of Native student victims, expert says (The Missoulian 5/21)

Relevant Links:
Jodi Rave - http://www.missoulian.com/jodirave

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