To clarify, my perspective as a Native American graduate student is distinct in various ways. I am a woman of mixed ancestry. My mother is Anglo-American, and my father is Navajo of the Towering House Clan. I have a fair complexion for an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. I was raised in a Christian home mostly far from the Navajo reservation in the D.C. metropolitan area of Montgomery County, Maryland. I grew up where some people did not know that Native Americans still existed. Starting in elementary school, my father would come to my classes to provide presentations on Native American culture. My father’s family continues to live on Navajo lands in New Mexico. I visited family occasionally in my youth.
Returning to the Southwest for post-secondary education enabled me to re-connect with family and Native American communities. In Phoenix, I find a diverse and strong urban Native American community. I have been able to participate in programs, free of charge, at the Phoenix Indian Center where my three-year-old son received tutoring in the Navajo language and where I started learning Navajo songs with the Diné Urban Singers. I am now taking Navajo language courses at ASU. I have served in the leadership of the ASU American Indian Graduate Student Association, making great connections with fellow Native American graduate students and helping to organize events that bring awareness to indigenous issues and share Native American culture with a diverse student body and population.
I have found these networks of Native American graduate support, but I still have distinct concerns as a Native American female graduate student. Last year, for example, I withdrew from a graduate course partly due to the atmosphere of the class and the instructor’s lack of mediating that environment. On a day dedicated to the theme of “Indigenous” on the syllabus, the class was assigned to discuss a study with part of the title translated as “Barbarians” that focused on how Spaniards perceived indigenous peoples in the colonial era. The class did not consider the indigenous voices of the history. Some students started to refer to examples of Native Americans in the postcolonial era and discussed modern Native American identity, when the reading materials and main topics of the class dwelt with the colonial period in the Southwest and Latin America. Most of the students and the instructor were unaware that I was Navajo because of my lighter skin. I felt uncomfortable with the disjointed references and speculations on indigenous identity. I did not want to speak, because I was irritated with the instructor and the class.
In a previous instance, I had once walked out of a class because of anger and mixed emotion, when a fellow non-Native American student spoke in tears about the “Othering” of American Indian children on the Mormon Indian Student Placement Program (ISPP). I have family and friends who participated in the ISPP. I have conducted interviews with former students of the program. Some of them have praised the program for saving their lives and ensuring a prosperous future, while others have criticized and condemned the program for abuses and depreciation of indigenous culture and society. Again, I felt uncomfortable to open a personal side of my experience and background to provide a more nuanced perspective of such historic programs and indigenous experiences.
Instructors and students who are aware of my Native American background sometimes expect that I know everything about every tribe in the United States. I think that people often homogenize “Native Americans” and do not consider the immerse diversity of indigenous peoples in the Americas. Instructors and especially students also have been quick to say that Native Americans did not have “history” before European contact, because they do not recognize that indigenous peoples had their own ways of understanding and knowing their world and its past.
For me to be in graduate school is due much to the perseverance of my parents who were both first generation college students. I am fortunate to have their examples and strength. I also went through a rigorous school system in Maryland and lived in an area that celebrated diversity. Still, being a Native American in graduate school is a great exception and challenge. I can only imagine the struggles that Native American graduate students face without the same support and background I have.
Remember that there is a Native American presence on this campus and in this city. Come to recognize, understand, and appreciate this presence. We are on the homelands of indigenous peoples, including the descendants of the Hohokam, the Akimel O’othom (Gila River Indian Community) and Akimel Au-Authm (River People or Pima) and Xalychidom Piipaash (People who live toward the water or Maricopa). Learn about these extraordinary peoples who have survived colonialism and persist. This knowledge and understanding of the enduring relationships between peoples and lands will enlighten us, illuminating how we can be supportive to each other as diverse and distinct graduate students.
Bilagáanaa niliigo’ dóó Kinyaa’áanii yásh’chíín. Bilagáanaa dabicheii dóó Tsinaajinii dabinálí. Ákót’éego diné asdzá̹á̹ nilí̹. Farina King is “Bilagáanaa” (Euro-American), born for “Kinyaa’áanii” (the Towering House Clan) of the Diné (Navajo). Her maternal grandfather was Euro-American, and her paternal grandfather was “Tsinaajinii” (Black-streaked Woods People Clan) of the Diné. In this way, she is a Navajo woman. She is a doctoral candidate in the U.S. History Ph.D. program at Arizona State University. She received her M.A. in African History from the University of Wisconsin and a B.A. from Brigham Young University with a double major in History and French Studies. King has written and presented about indigenous Mormon experiences in the twentieth century, drawing from some interviews that she conducted for the LDS Native American Oral History Project at BYU. Her doctoral research traces the changes in Navajo educational experiences through the twentieth century. King is also a dedicated wife and mother.
By Farina King