It's 7 p.m. on a cool Washington, D.C., evening and Dr. C. Kim Winkelman is outside a senate office building on a short break from a long day of briefings with government departments and federal agencies.
In a few minutes, he’ll have his dance card punched again—this time at a reception with a congressional delegation. Even after 12 hours of meeting and greeting politicians, the 58-year-old college president and Walden Ph.D. in Education alumnus welcomes another opportunity to meet with congressional representatives. Winkelman is president of Comanche Nation College, Oklahoma’s first tribal college, which was established by the Comanche Nation four years ago.
“When you’re the president of a tribal college, you have to make your college and its needs and successes known to the federal government. We are below a lot of politicians’ radar,” he says of the under-funded and remotely located college. “I’m here in D.C. to tell them about Comanche Nation and how we’re making a difference in the lives of our people, and hopefully, to get them on board.”
Tribal Colleges Meet Many Needs
Tribal colleges, the first of which was founded more than 35 years ago, provide tribal culture-infused higher education to American Indians who live on reservations or Indian lands. For their constituency, the tribal colleges offer away to escape reservations’ endemic poverty, preserve cultural heritage, and have a better life.
Winkelman, who is Oglala Lakota on his mother’s side and Comanche and Dutch on his father’s, began working for tribal colleges about seven years ago after careers in the military and traditional higher education. Winkelman, who grew up off the reservation (his father was in the military), wants to help Indians gain the tools they need to realize their academic potential, earn a decent living, and retain their Indian culture and communities.
He notes that tribal colleges serve a unique population and that this poses unusual challenges to higher education. For example, he asks, “How does a college operate among the extremely poor, when people are desperate, when they are living without electricity and roads, when students don’t have gas money? These are some of the issues we deal with every day.”
American Indians have the lowest level of college education and generally the highest level of unemployment and poverty of any ethnic group in America, he says. “Indians are smart people. So much of our talent has been wasted, historically,” he says, adding, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Comanche Nation College offers certificate and associate’s degree programs in nursing, education, and business targeted to members of the Comanche Nation, which numbers 12,550 enrolled members, 6,000 of whom live in the Lawton, Okla., area. The school currently enrolls a few hundred students a semester. One question Winkelman is often asked, especially by politicians, is why, with so many colleges and universities in the United States, do Indians feel they need their own? The question has several answers.
The first is that not all Indians are able to leave the reservation to go to school. Indians frequently have large extended families they support socially and monetarily, Winkelman says. “It is not part of Indian culture to leave your family. Not only that, for a kid coming off the reservation, a traditional college is culture shock.” A college on the reservation eliminates both these obstacles.
Another reason for the colleges’ appeal is their tribe-centered curriculum. All the tribal colleges, Winkelman says, are about more than building students’ skill sets. “Their mission includes cultural preservation,” he says. “Students at tribal colleges are required to study tribal history, tribal law, treaties, written and oral tribal language, and traditional subjects such as homeopathic medicine—all in addition to their major course of study.” Because of this, tribal colleges are culturally affirming, and a sanctuary from anti-Indian sentiment, which Winkelman says is still common—especially in cities near reservations. “In some places, to be different does not make you popular.”
Making History -- Gaining Experience
Winkelman knows this from his own college experience—as the first American Indian to graduate from and be commissioned by The Citadel, a private military college in South Carolina. “At the time, I didn’t realize I was making history,” he says. “My getting into The Citadel was not a big deal. I was a very good student and on full academic scholarship. Staying in was hard.” It was not the administration that resented Winkelman, it was his peers. The Corps of Cadets did not support his presence. “You have to remember, when I entered in 1967 – 68 a lot of schools were still lily white,” recalls Winkelman, who says he was routinely harassed. “People would call me ‘red ass’ and tell me I shouldn’t be at their school—that kind of thing.”
The poor treatment made the already regimented life at The Citadel even harder to take, but it didn’t dissuade him from graduating or from staying in the military. He enjoyed military life. “I was an Army brat,” he says. “My dad was an Army armor officer and an advisor to an Army reserve unit. We lived all over the country when I was a kid.” Winkelman and his family regularly came back to the reservation where his mother’s family lived. That’s where his extended family taught him ceremonies, including the most sacred of all ceremonies for the Lakota, the Sun Dance—one of the seven rites to the sacred pipe. In addition to his participation in such sacred ceremonies, he is a men’s traditional dancer and often participates in powwows around the country, an art he’s practiced most of his life.
During his 22-year career in the Army, Winkelman served as chief of the U.S. bilateral staff talks for international cooperation and treaty amendments for the departments of Defense and State. He lived abroad for 15 years, earning a master’s in international policy studies and culture and completing a program in executive management and strategic planning at the Portuguese Institute of Higher Military Studies. After retiring from the military in 1993, Winkelman entered academia. He took a job as director of community and continuing education at a New Hampshire community college in 1994, and in 1996 as associate director of extended studies and distance learning at the Oregon Institute of Technology. Those diverse academic experiences and others would lay the foundation for his future career as a college professor and administrator.
“I was already thinking about teaching in Indian country at that point,” he says. “I’d had a good life, a good education, and many opportunities. I wanted to give back to my people and especially help Indian youth. I wanted to teach them how to be Indians in the 21st century.” To become more competitive in the higher education job market, Winkelman enrolled in the Ph.D. in Education program at Walden in 1995.
Pine Ridge and Oglala Lakota
Not long after Winkelman earned his doctorate (and received Walden’s 1999 Outstanding Dissertation Award for his research, which explored why engineering continues to be a male-dominated profession), he began teaching at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Kyle, S.D. Pine Ridge, which is about the size of Connecticut, is well-known as the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, the 1973 standoff between American-Indian activists and law-enforcement, and the 1975 shootout that killed two FBI agents. It is also among the poorest communities in the United States.
In 2002, Winkelman became Oglala Lakota’s vice president of instruction and academic affairs. He did not set out to become an administrator, he says. “That was not on my radar screen at all.” But Winkelman realized that to bring about the kind of change he wanted to see, he would have to consider a position that combined teaching and leadership. “Frankly, I grew frustrated with the pace of decision-making in academia. People weren’t good managers,” he says. “So instead of staying a teacher and griping about what I didn’t like and being a thorn in everyone’s side at meetings, I had to be willing to lead.”
Despite Pine Ridge’s poverty, Oglala Lakota College is established and impressive. At 35 years old, it is one of the first tribally controlled colleges in the United States and is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission, just as Walden is. It boasts more than a dozen academic departments offering classes at college centers in nine reservation districts.
Winkelman says his and his staff ’s main accomplishments while he was at Oglala Lakota were getting the college through its 10-year re-accreditation process and revamping its graduate studies program. It is one of only a few tribal colleges that offer master’s degrees. “I made sure that every master’s student had a Ph.D. faculty member as a mentor,” he says, “so they wouldn’t get discouraged and quit.”
His goals for Comanche Nation College, which is comparatively in its academic infancy, are no less ambitious. Earning accreditation is one (it currently “borrows” accreditation from nearby Cameron University, its host school). The school itself is on track to achieve conditional accreditation within a few years, he notes. “I also want to build out the school’s infrastructure. Now, we are operating out of a former elementary school, which we have refurbished and made pretty high-tech, but we are growing and it’s not big enough.” Money to buy the building was donated to the Comanche Nation by a wealthy Comanche, Winkelman says. In the immediate future, Winkelman needs about $100,000 to add onto the existing building or purchase trailers to use for additional classrooms Eventually, he plans to build several college centers surrounding the main campus, using a model similar to Oglala Lakota’s to improve student access.
To make this happen, the college needs additional funding. Like all tribal colleges, Comanche Nation struggles financially. Unlike state schools, tribal colleges don’t receive funding from the state because Indian nations are sovereign nations. States are not obligated to them.
Tribal Colleges' Challenges
Tribal colleges’ primary source of support is the federal government, which allocates the colleges—if they are accredited—a certain dollar amount per student, an amount that is not enough to cover the cost of educating the student, Winkelman says. Nor are tribal colleges funded by property taxes, because reservation land is land in trust and no property taxes can be levied. What’s more, the colleges typically lack significant endowments because of their relative youth and the lack of accumulated wealth among their alumni. And contrary to popular belief, most tribal colleges do not receive substantial funding from tribal casinos. “Most Indian tribes are broke,” Winkelman says. “They don’t provide significant support to tribal colleges, because they don’t have the money. Comanche Nation College is fortunate to receive some funding.”
Since Comanche Nation College is not accredited, it is not funded by the federal government. For now, it is primarily funded by the Nation itself, via income from the Nation’s business enterprises. “The college submits a budget, and it is voted on by the Comanche Business Committee,” he says. The committee has a right to refuse to fund certain requests—and sometimes does, but Winkelman says the college is funded to sustain itself in the short term. It is not, however, funded for growth.
To expand its programs, the school pursues grants from various foundations and federal agencies such as the Department of Labor, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Education. Winkelman is currently the primary investigator on a $1.9 million Department of Labor program development grant (which the school shares with four tribal nations) to study the effectiveness of a laptop-based learning management system. Comanche Nation College uses the 140 laptops, which are built for education purposes, to teach courses in its nursing and security management programs. “The learning management system includes two mobile units that could turn any room into a classroom,” Winkelman says.
Whatever higher education costs can’t be met by federal funding or grants fall to tribal college students themselves, who pay for their education like anyone else, frequently taking one or two courses at a time, off and on. Even when students have the money, many struggle to stay in school because of family and socioeconomic crises exacerbated by poverty, and health and substance abuse problems. “Earning a college degree is a struggle for a lot of them, but one that is worth it if they don’t become discouraged and quit,” Winkelman says.
He recently saw a former student at a spring powwow. “She’s a school principal now. I was her faculty advisor at Oglala Lakota College when she was getting her master’s—this was when I was revamping the master’s program—and I was hard on her,” he recalls. “I redlined her papers, and I tore her thesis apart, and I know that at one point I had her near tears. I remember telling her, ‘This thesis is going to be at the same level as one at any traditional college, and I know you can do it.’”
When Winkelman saw her at the powwow, she said, “In my wildest dreams, I never thought I’d be here. Thank you so much for what you have done for us.”
“She never thought she’d be a school principal,” Winkelman says. “For most Indians, graduating from college is just a dream. You’re talking about people who basically have no self-confidence.” A number of Winkelman’s former students are school principals, he says, and one is a superintendent. Hundreds have gone on to traditional colleges and earned advanced degrees, and he’s sent at least one student to the Ivy League.
Publicizing the successes of his students and his school and the relevance of tribal colleges is probably Winkelman’s most important job. When the Comanche Nation College Web site made its debut a couple of years ago, Winkelman received a call from one of Oklahoma’s top higher education officials asking what Comanche Nation was. “They had no idea what a tribal college was. I had to go to their office and explain it to them,” Winkelman says. “Oklahoma never had a tribal college before. It’s been a big learning curve for the state.” Since then, relations with state schools have improved. “Some state colleges, and individual departments, have extended their hand to us,” Winkelman says.
To help Comanche Nation College overcome its obscurity and financial, social, and institutional hurdles, Winkelman spends a lot of time using his skills in diplomacy and networking to spread the word about the school’s mission and successes, hence his last trip to the nation’s capital.
“On an individual level, some of Oklahoma’s congressmen still don’t know very much about the school. Frankly, some see tribal colleges as a kind of social experiment,” Winkelman says. “They’re taking a wait-and-see attitude with us. They are waiting to see if we survive.”
Overall, however, Winkelman is optimistic about the future of Comanche Nation College—and tribal colleges in general.
“Congressman Tom Cole, the representative for Oklahoma’s fourth district, has been to our college and he understands what we’re trying to do. And we have great relationships with some of the federal agencies that provide grants and research support,” he says. “People are coming around.”
This article was first published in the Winter/Spring 2007 Walden Alumni Magazine.
