The Univ. of Oregon will be covering tuition and fees for in-state Indigenous undergraduates who are enrolled members of any of the 500+ federally recognized tribes in the U.S. The policy is part of the university’s new Home Flight Scholars Program, which is aimed at helping ease financial burdens on Native students residing in Oregon while also providing them with other resources, such as mentorship, counseling, and help when looking for jobs. Upwards of 150 undergraduate students who are already enrolled at the university will automatically be eligible for the program.
Various calls have been made to pay greater attention to Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) and the students served by these institutions of higher learning. TCU leadership historically has been provided by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), which notes that “each of these institutions was created and chartered by its own tribal government or the federal government for a specific purpose: to provide higher education opportunities to American Indians through programs that are locally and culturally based, holistic, and supportive.” TCUs were established as land-grant institutions through the 1994 Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act, which is why they sometimes are referred to as the 1994 land-grants.
School administrators at the University of California, Berkeley are working to repatriate thousands of human remains and artifacts that the school took from Native American tribes and housed in its anthropology museum. The effort is one of several at U.S. institutions of higher education to repatriate thousands of Native American artifacts and human remains that have been housed in the anthropology collections, in accordance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. This comes as the Barre Museum in Barre Massachusetts is returning over 100 sacred artifacts to descendants of the Wounded Knee Massacre in early November.
