Students strive at college on reservation: Indian women, nun pioneered a model to keep hope alive

National Catholic Reporter, March 6, 1998 by Pamela Schaeffer

TOPPENISH, Wash. -- From Portland, the approach to Heritage College is through the Columbia River Gorge. The highway runs along the river, passing by giant waterfalls and through the Dalles, named for the once-dangerous rapids here, at the eastern edge of the Cascade Mountains.

A century and a half ago, until completion of an arduous overland road in 1846, pioneers approaching the end of the Oregon Trail at the Dalles were forced to float their wagons over the rapids for the final stretch of their journey to new life in Oregon's Willamette Valley.

On the Washington side of the river and an hour north, in the Yakima Valley, a group of latter-day pioneers at Heritage College struggle to pick up the pieces of social upheaval wrought by 150 years of immigration -- first by white pioneers and later by Hispanics who came to work in their fields. This 16-year-old educational experiment, where undergraduates are 31 percent Hispanic and 22 percent Native American, is paying off in new life for both of these growing populations in the valley.

Founded by two Native American women and a Catholic nun, Holy Names Sr. Kathleen Ross, Heritage College is not a Catholic college. Yet Ross and some of the 13 nuns who have worked at the school since it was founded in 1982 see it as a model of Catholic outreach in the future.

Despite scant resources, the school's mission is so inviting that it has attracted faculty from far larger and more prestigious schools and kept most of them despite tough times.

"Everybody here has a story" about what brought them here and why they stay, Cherryl Jensen said of the faculty and staff. Jensen, formerly director of university relations at Iowa State University in Ames, is in her fourth year as communications director at Heritage. "Clearly a lot of people here could be at bigger places."

Last summer, Ross' efforts got their most prestigious recognition so far when the MacArthur Foundation named her among the top five of its 1997 recipients of coveted "genius awards."

The school's location is key to its distinctive identity. From the Dalles, the road to Heritage College crosses the Rattlesnake Hills, their miles of treeless tundra affording a view of snowcapped Mount Adam, sacred to the Indians. In the valley, growers produce 75 percent of the nation's supply of hops (and 25 percent of the world's supply), used in making beer, along with many kinds of fruit and Washington wines. This fertile land, with its ideal combination of long summer days, cool nights, rich volcanic soil and mountain runoff, drew Native Americans some 12,000 years ago to a cyclical lifestyle of fishing and hunting, gathering huckleberries, preserving roots and breaking wild horses.

The 19th century brought massive cultural change. For the Indians, white settlers meant wars, rampant disease, a drastically reduced salmon supply as dams were placed along the Columbia River, and finally, social dislocation marked by high rates of alcoholism and suicide. Today, the 9,000-member Yakama tribe -- its elders recently voted to change the spelling of its name -- operates a large forestry business, but 75 percent of some 5,000 Indians on the reservation are still unemployed.

Heritage College, threatened more than once in the past 16 years with having to close, has had to fight hard for the resources and credibility that make it a viable enterprise today. While the regions growers and business leaders are able to send their children away to college, strong family values, poverty and low expectations keep the Native Americans and Hispanics at home, where educational options are few and high school dropout rates are high. Yet by the time they begin programs at Heritage College, at an average age of 33, professors say their motivation is exceptional. Ross said that some 90 percent of the school's 2,000 graduates remain in the local area to work, many in education, community service and environmental sciences.

Heritage began as an outreach of Fort Wright College, a Catholic liberal arts school founded by Holy Names sisters in 1907 to train women to teach in Catholic schools. It was forced by financial pressure to close in 1980. When Ross, then Fort Wright's vice president for academic affairs, told two members of the Yakama tribe, Martha Yallup and Violet Lumley Rau, that the outreach program was likewise doomed, she said they told her, "No way. You have brought hope here. How can you take that away now?"

"I tried to find another college or university to take over," Ross said, "but the program was so small no one was interested." When the two Yakama women proposed starting a college, Ross recalls telling them they were "nuts."

Still, she thought enough of the idea to mention it to her religious superiors. Instead of the negative reaction she expected, she got encouragement. Next she talked to Bishop William Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., then bishop of Yakima, who gave the project only a 50 percent chance of working, but urged her to try it. Neither her order nor the diocese was able to offer financial sponsorship.