Native American Colorado Springs residents offered free tuition at Pikes Peak State College
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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Pikes Peak State College is offering free education to Native American students beginning in the 2024 school year.
Members of federally recognized American Indian tribes in El Paso, Teller or Elbert counties are eligible for the school’s First Nations Promise Program, which will waive any tuition and fees not covered by financial aid.
“While we can't change history, we can try to positively impact the community that we're a part of,” said the school’s president Lance Bolton.
The grant seeks to assist the Native American community in the Pikes Peak Region, whose poverty rates are high while high school graduation rates remain low.
Pikes Peak State College intends to provide academic coaches for Indigenous grant students along with tuition funding. Bolton said the goal of the program was to both enroll and retain students.
“I feel community here because it's such a significance that this community college … is able to come together and provide this grant for us, especially as Native students,” said Wynona Tsosie, who studies cybersecurity at Pikes Peak State College.
Bolton cited a previous Promise Program with southeast Colorado Springs district, Harrison School District 2, which saw successful student retention rates following the addition of academic coaching. Fall retention rate jumped from 42% to 69% after the school provided academic coaches, according to Bolton.
Bolton said he would have been happy with a 5-10% increase in retention, “never mind that much.”
Bolton came across the idea for the program while trying to draft a land acknowledgement statement for the school.
Land acknowledgements are verbal or written announcements describing the history of the land a given organization occupies and the Indigenous people who were forcibly removed from the area.
The statement is meant to celebrate and honor the land while recognizing the cruelties imposed on the Native people during European colonization. Many colleges in Colorado have adopted land acknowledgment statements for their respective campuses including the University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado State University and Colorado College.
Scholars and anthropologists have pointed to the sometimes performative nature of many of these acknowledgements, arguing that such statements can shadow and misinterpret the traumatic past associated with the forced removal of Indigenous people.
Some historians have called university attempts to include land acknowledgement statements in their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts “a naïve, left-wing, paint-by-numbers approach.”
“Frankly, I didn't feel good about standing up at events like our graduation, for example, and making a statement with no action,” said Bolton.
Pikes Peak State College has yet to draft their land acknowledgement statement, instead prioritizing the work going towards the First Nations Program.
Other colleges in Colorado offer scholarships to Native Americans but only Metro State University in Denver and Fort Lewis College in Durango also cover the full cost of tuition.
Colorado State University offers a program providing in-state-tuition rates to non-Colorado residents who are members of affiliated Native tribes. The University of Colorado Boulder offers a “limited number of scholarships to academically promising” Native students.
Two local nonprofits, the Dakota Foundation and the Daniels Fund, are funding the program with half a million dollars over the next five years.
The Daniels Fund serves states in the mountain region and provides grants and scholarships for students pursuing higher education. The Dakota Foundation provides philanthropy to several states, but primarily donates to Colorado organizations dedicated to fostering self-sufficiency.
Previously, the Dakota Foundation and Pikes Peak State College collaborated to provide full community college scholarships to Harrison School District 2 students.
Bolton believes the previous scholarship work and the college's attempts at retaining an active communication with local tribes will set the school up well for the grant’s deployment.
“Education has an ugly history within Native American communities,” said Maria de la Cruz, an associate dean at Pikes Peak State College with expertise in Native American advocacy at the scholarship’s launch.
“We've heard of the atrocities that have happened. We know of the forced separations with families. This is why we want to go forward in a good way,” de la Cruz said.
Bolton and de la Cruz said that the program is still in the “infancy stage” of development. Work toward the project began nine months ago and the college has already served 520 students through their pilot Promise Program scholarships, 48% of which said they would not have attended college without the grant.
Update: This story was edited to clarify that Fort Lewis College in Durango also covers the cost of tuition for students from a federally recognized Native American Tribe or Alaska Native Village.
Update: This story was edited to clarify that Fort Lewis College in Durango also covers the cost of tuition for students from a federally recognized Native American Tribe or Alaska Native Village.