A date has been set for the co-chairs of the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Committee on Tribal Relations to meet with the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees to discuss ways to provide more financial support to enrolled Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal members attending the school.
Representatives from both Tribes said they plan to join the state lawmakers at the meeting, which is scheduled to take place at 10 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 26, in Laramie.
“Our commitment is deep,” Northern Arapaho Business Council co-chairman Lee Spoonhunter told the Select Committee during a meeting this week in Fort Washakie. “The University of Wyoming is the home university of the Northern Arapaho people, (and) the Tribe is all in … to make sure that our students are successful and will graduate and obtain their degrees from UW.”
Twenty enrolled members of the Northern Arapaho Tribe are currently attending school at UW, Spoonhunter said – in addition to six enrolled members of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, according to Eastern Shoshone Business Councilman Waylon Large.
Those numbers are far lower than the totals UW shared with the Select Committee this week representing all Native American students at the school: 307 overall.
UW Provost and Executive Vice President Kevin Carman said the university doesn’t collect the “more granular” data about Tribal affiliation.
“That is something we could (do),” he said. “We understand the desire to have that more detailed information, and we would like to work to provide it. But currently we just don’t have that information to provide.”
Carman also shared an estimates with the Select Committee showing how much it would cost to provide full tuition waivers for all of UW’s 234 in-state Native American students: about $1.2 million.
Spoonhunter pointed out that the estimated expense would be “significantly lower” if lawmakers were able to focus solely on enrolled Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribal members, and he challenged the leadership at UW to “continue to work with the Tribes and continue to make progress (toward) meeting us halfway” – because as of now, he said, “we as a Tribe don’t feel the university has done that.”
“I have to clearly express that,” Spoonhunter said. “The Northern Arapaho commitment to the UW is very deep, (but) they’ve got to do a lot more.”
Options
The Select Committee discussed several options for providing additional financial support to local Tribal members attending UW this week.
For example, Wyoming Rep. Ken Chestek, D-Laramie, said UW and the Wyoming Legislature could work together to create an endowment fund that would generate enough money to cover tuition and fees for all enrolled members of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes who go to school at UW.
But Wyoming Sen. Affie Ellis, R-Cheyenne, said she would rather contribute to the endowments that already exist for Tribal members at UW, like the Chief Washakie Memorial Endowment, the Northern Arapaho Endowment, and the Sky People Higher Education Endowment.
In the last academic year, Carman said the Northern Arapaho Endowment Fund, which contains a little over $2.8 million, yielded $75,000 to four students; the Chief Washakie Memorial Endowment Fund, which has a value of about $690,000, yielded $20,000 to 12 students; and the Sky People Higher Education Endowment Fund, which contains about $130,000, yielded $6,300 to three students.
Spoonhunter agreed with Ellis about focusing on the endowments already available for students from the local Tribes.
“Why not go (with) the current endowments for Tribal members and increase those?” he asked. “Make those a priority. … Increase (that) corpus so that we can provide scholarships to anyone and everyone that is enrolled in both Tribes to attend the UW.”
Chestek also suggested that the legislature could “appropriate (a) large sum of money as a matching grant to induce private donors to add to … the endowment for Native scholarships,” and Carman said that strategy would likely create “an opportunity for a focused effort on support for Native students.”
‘Wait and see’
Ellis asked Carman to help the Select Committee develop a “proposal we can take to our colleagues” for providing more financial support for UW students from the local Tribes.
“It works better when the university asks,” she said. “I’m wondering if you’ve thought of that and what your idea is. … Have you given some thought to what that proposal might be?”
Carman said he doesn’t “have a master plan of how that would actually work,” but “this would be an excellent topic when you meet with the trustees next month.”
“(I’ll) ask that they be thinking about how they would respond to that question in a few weeks,” he said.
Ellis said she and her co-chair, Wyoming Rep. Ember Oakley, R-Riverton, would report back to the Select Committee in October about the results of the meeting with the UW Board of Trustees.
“We’ll wait and see how that shakes out,” she said.