Native Americans find skewed representation at UNC

Shannon Ross walked on campus her first year worried she wouldn’t find a home.

She loves her hometown. Everyone in Pembroke, N.C., believes the same thing. Everyone talks like her; everyone acts like her. Life is comfortable.

Then Ross walked onto UNC’s campus and was instantly overwhelmed.

“You come to a place like UNC where you are the minority of the minority,” Ross said.

“I have an accent according to everyone else here. It makes you an open-minded person, and people believe in so many different things, it makes you become this person who has to see the world how someone else would see it.”

Ross, a senior psychology major, is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River.

Native Americans make up 1.3 percent of the state’s population, according to 2010 census data. The population comes from eight tribes, including the Lumbee and Cherokee, and four urban communities not recognized as tribes.

Last semester, however, Native American students only made up about 0.5 percent of UNC’s roughly 28,000 total students, according to UNC’s recent enrollment data.

Some people decide to tackle their curiosity in casual conversation: “So what are you, anyway?” they might ask Ross. Many think she is Latina. Many are puzzled when she answers “Native American.”

Some question her hair next. It doesn’t fit their predetermined idea of what a Native American looks like.

Some go further and question if she’s telling the truth, claiming Native Americans don’t exist anymore in this modern setting.

“Being a minority in general at UNC, we all face the same struggles, but we face them in different ways,” Ross said.

“So someone from a different minority group understands what I face, but they don’t understand how it makes me feel.”

The first event Ross attended as a UNC student was the American Indian Center’s Welcome Back Extravaganza. That’s how she found her home.

“We make up less than 1 percent of the student body and population, and it’s like we find each other, and it’s not even intentional,” Ross said. “You just come here, and other Native students reach out to you.”

Between classes, she and her friends hang out in the front room of the center in Abernethy Hall, which the center shares with the Department of Public Policy.

Like an airport lounge, people filter in and out to kill time before their classes start.

“Harley, three minutes and we’re going to take this test, so put your shoes on.”

“Did you hear that they broke up?”

“I want to decorate my (graduation) cap, but I don’t know how.”

It’s like clockwork every day at the center, Ross and her friends say.

“It’s like home in the sense that you know even though we are open to anyone, at the end of the day, I am surrounded by people who are like me,” Ross said.

‘Try to do better’

Stephen Farmer, vice provost of enrollment and undergraduate admissions, sees student recruitment as a way of being more engaged with North Carolinians as a whole.

That’s why Farmer thinks that while UNC has made strides with Native American recruitment — especially through its partnerships with the American Indian Center and the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs’s Project Uplift — the University still has work to do.

“In the scheme of things, I think we’ve done a good job by the standard of other institutions,” he said.

“I think it’s really important for our students and for our University that we be committed all the time and that we double our efforts and try to do better.”

Farmer thinks the best method of recruiting is through current students.

“We try to tell the stories of individual students here, and explain the ways that individual students from different backgrounds have found communities here,” he said.

“They’re not the same. They can’t be stereotyped, they can’t be pigeonholed, but we want to tell their story in richness and detail and hope that it resonates with people.”

Amy Locklear Hertel, director of the American Indian Center, said that while the center is designed to help both the state and campus communities and not focus solely on University recruitment, the center’s welcoming atmosphere has helped students transition to UNC.

“Being the front door, if you will, of the University for the Native community, there’s a lot that we can do to encourage students to come to Carolina because of the work that we do,” she said.

‘Keep our culture alive’

Even though Ross has spent her last three years living in Chapel Hill, she makes sure a part of Pembroke is always with her. She spends many of her nights with Native American groups on campus like Carolina Indian Circle, Unheard Voices and Alpha Pi Omega Sorority Inc. and Unheard Voices.

Every Tuesday, Carolina Indian Circle meets in the Student Union. It aims to both create a positive atmosphere for Native American students on campus and to educate the rest of the UNC community.

One March meeting last semester starts late, but fashionably so, around 7:35 p.m. It’s structured with games, like a photo scavenger hunt, interspersed with business matters.

And there’s Alpha Pi Omega Sorority Inc., UNC’s only Native American sorority. Membership can fluctuate between three and 10 active members each year, and the sorority is the reason Ross stuck with UNC.

After her first semester, Ross felt left out and contemplated transferring to UNC-Pembroke and going home.

“I felt like I wanted to give up. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to try to fit in,” Ross said.

Then she joined the sorority in her second semester and never contemplated leaving again.

“It made me open up to people and made me get out of my comfort zone, which I know I needed,” she said, about how sorority pushed her to be more open-minded. “And I know by now I’m a better person because of it.”

Alpha Pi Omega Sorority Inc. is service-based; past events have supported the Ronald McDonald House and Habitat for Humanity. The group also hosts events on campus to educate the community.

“It’s our job to keep our culture alive and our heritage alive,” Ross said.

“So through educating our peers, that’s how we can keep it alive.”

‘We’re not generalized’

UNC has multiple programs to help create a welcoming environment for Native American students, but according to Ross, more can be done.

Ross hopes that one day, recruitment will focus not just on Native American students as whole, but on the individual tribes in North Carolina.

“With the large number of Native Americans who inhabit the state, we should be larger than 1 percent of the student body,” she said.

“People think of it as, ‘Y’all are Native American, so y’all are the same.’ But in all reality, as indigenous people, we’re very specific with our tribal affiliation, and we’re not generalized.”

Hertel said that getting students enrolled at UNC is just one component. The community also has to try to keep them here.

“It’s not just enrolling students, but we also have to make sure they have a positive experience at Carolina, and that’s a place wherefor the center works to try to engage in that space,” Hertel said.

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