The American Indian College Fund is a leader in sponsoring tribal college and university (TCU) research about higher education in American Indian and Alaska Native communities and providing avenues for collecting and disseminating research. The College Fund hosted its fifth annual Tribal College and University Faculty Research Convening in Denver, Colorado, July 26-27, 2018 as part of its efforts to sponsor and promote the use of research to develop a greater understanding of ideas, concepts, and topics instrumental to the work the TCUs, their students, faculty, and community are doing.
The convening included presentations from 19 TCU faculty members about their research at the accredited TCUs the College Fund supports. Research is conducted on issues that impact Native communities and particularly on issues concerning the communities where the professors teach.
This year’s research projects were conducted across many academic fields of study, including the sciences, social sciences, architecture, philosophy, education, and business. They included Earth Systems Science and Tribal Resource Sustainability, Teaching Sovereignty at Cankdeska Cikana Community College in North Dakota, Developing a Course on Global Indigeneity, Community-Based Research on Water Resources of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (in Michigan), Teaching Philosophy in TCUs, to name a few.
Participants at the convening also enjoyed a poster presentation from the College Fund’s 2017-18 Indigenous Visionaries Native Women Leadership Fellows and a master artist presentation on Kansu Kutepi, the Dakota Dice Game.
In addition to hosting research convenings for TCU faculty, the College Fund also publishes this research on its newly created free online research repository that is open to the public to provide researchers and the general public access to the research the College Fund and others do to support AI/AN student success and also publishes a Tribal College and University Research Journal, the first academic research journal of its kind devoted to research being conducted at TCUs that benefits Native communities. The College Fund provides free access to its journal on its web site.
For more information about the College Fund’s research programs at the nation’s tribal colleges and universities, please contact the American Indian College Fund at 303-426-8900.
