Dr. Jill Biden, a community college teacher and wife of U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden, honored Navajo Technical College by speaking at their commencement ceremony. She writes about the important role Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) play in President Obama’s educational goal of making the United States home to the best-educated, most competitive workforce in the world.
Rant-rant-rant is an expression of my developmentally- disabled- half- sister that she coined when she witnessed me feeling extremely stressed over challenges concerning getting her the care she needed. She calmly stated to me, “Therese, no rant-rant-rant.”
During my summer season I have created some heart-fluttering, wake-up-smiling, indefinable memories with my friends, some of which have been accompanied with acquaintances.
Friendship is among life’s sacred gifts. I have a small circle of friends, with an outer expansive ring around it that includes acquaintances, akin to the ripple effect on a pool of water.
For the past month or so, I kept hearing rumors about bears walking around on the beach within city limits and by houses in town. I haven’t actually seen them myself, but I believed them because it’s not uncommon for wildlife to sometimes pop into town out of nowhere.
The title is a song that has been skipping in my memory since I realized my feelings trumped my view: specifically the view of a barren, arid, desert landscape I passed through from a happy place to a place I have been in, pondering my emotions.
My hometown, Unalakleet, is an Inupiaq village located in the Norton Sound region of Alaska. We get a great deal of wind in our area because Unalakleet is located right on the coast: the Bering Sea. The town consists of about 750 people year-round. Most residents are of Inupiat Eskimo descent. The non-Natives that reside in Unalakleet are mostly teachers.
We all have our favorite activities and pastimes that magnify the summer season. Among the most common are reading novels while swinging in a hammock under a shade tree, watching the sun dance with the branches, sippin’ on an ice- cold- fresh- squeezed big gulp size tumbler of lemonade, jumping out of a tire swing into our favorite swimming hole, and letting our sweat drenched hair form their own string.
I remember the cold winters we had in the past, but this winter most likely beat the record low. Temperatures below zero are very common for Alaskan winters. Our winters typically last from mid-October to the end of May. This year we didn’t get our first snowfall until early November, so we thought maybe “Global Warming” was finally taking its toll. Boy, were we wrong! It wasn’t until January that the cold really hit us. It slapped us in the face!
I am Therese. I just completed my first semester at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am on Create My Canvas Path, majoring in studio arts and museum studies. My Native affiliation is what I refer to as “mixed media”-Native, Mayan, and Mexican.
My name is Lee. I grew up in Duluth, Minnesota and I’m an enrolled member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. I’m a full student at Leech Lake Tribal College and will be entering my second year of college in the fall. I will be transferring to the University of Kansas to complete a degree in biochemistry.
