This monument sign was erected during the installation ceremony for Dr. Henrietta Mann becoming the first president of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College.
Dr. Henrietta Mann’s return home to Oklahoma to lead building Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College has successes
By Albert C. Jones
America, The Diversity Place
WEATHERFORD, Oklahoma — Dr. Henrietta Mann came back to the area where she was raised to do the work of Ma’heo’o, which is the Cheyenne word for the Great One or God. It has to be Ma’heo’o who is guiding her steps because there are days when the body is not willing to do what she wants it to do.
Mann’s mind, however, remains as strong as in all the years she was professor and administrator at the University of Montana in Missoula and Montana State University in Bozeman, where she was also Special Assistant to the President.
“I am 75,” she said. “I will be 76 on my next birthday.”
The vision for which she works daily with a staff of four, including Mann as president, is to grow Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College, forever to be known as CATC, into an autonomous two-year institution of higher education.
“I want everyone to have access to higher education that this tribal college provides,” Mann said. “It’s a blessing to be able to do this work and I do it with a great deal of love. I bring home experience that could benefit all generations to come. It’s a beautiful work that comes at the end my career.
“I have lived a life of service,” Mann said. “You do what you can. I do get tired every once in a while and sometimes my body doesn’t cooperate.”
The mission is rooted in the tribal college movement of the 1960s:
“The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College is our national academic sanctuary and the home of traditional tribal knowledge which promotes the strong values that have always guided the hearts and minds of the people and which honors the treasured human gifts, the ability to think, to hear, to speak, to feel, and to walk on this good Earth.”
The mission of CATC “is to provide a quality, cultural-based and academically rigorous general education for tribal and non-tribal citizens. The main focus is upon traditional tribal knowledge, quality of life and enhancing the status of American Indians in contemporary America.”
Weatherford, Oklahoma is the home of two large manufacturing plants, Imation Corporation, a spinoff of 3M Corporation, and Kodak. Weatherford is also home to a large wind farm, the Weatherford Wind Energy Center, which has clusters of wind turbines that have a 147 megawatt total capacity. Population of the city is around 10,185. Native Americans are nearly 5 percent of the population.
It would be a misnomer to say CATC is a fledgling start because it shares facilities with 101-year-old Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford. Its students are dually enrolled in both schools. Mann’s office is on the ground floor of the Science Building at SWOSU.
The start-up college, however, has a lot of “ifs” if it is to survive, Cheyenne and Arapaho chief Lawrence Hart told Mary Annette Pember, a reporter with “Diverse Issues in Higher Education, in June 2008.
CATC began classes on August 25, 2006. Mann, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Tribes with an illustrative career in higher education, was interim president and then became the college’s first president on April 3, 2008.
Mann received her doctorate, at the apex of the American Indian Movement, from the University of New Mexico. She earned a Master’s degree from Oklahoma State University. She left professor emeritus status as the endowed chair in Native American Studies at Montana State University and Special Assistant to President Geoffrey Gamble to lead the effort to build CATC.
“Stone by stone,” she said, “and “dollar by dollar we will build CATC from the ground up.”
“I was working one-third time, semi-retired and served on the CATC Board of Regents,” Mann said. “Like others, I served with my heart. It was a calling, essentially, for me to come here. I answered that request to come down. I decided it was a way to give back to people I belong to.”
Mann commuted for two years from Bozeman, working to launch CATC while also working to raise $8 million for a Native American Studies Center at MSU and $2 million for scholarships for American Indian students. There are seven tribal reservations in Montana, where American Indians are about 7 percent of the state’s nearly 1 million people.
Then she relocated home permanently to Oklahoma before being installed as the CATC president.
“I always taught changes are needed,” she said. “Changes were not being made fast enough in my estimation. President Gamble is very supportive of what we are doing here. ‘You are going off to do God’s work,’ he said. ‘MSU should be helping tribal colleges. You go and do what you have to do. We will be here when you get back.’
“That’s a big commitment by a mainstream institution,” Mann said. “I am doing this work of the Great One, Ma’heo’o, in our language. You don’t say no to that.”
The Fall 2009 head count for SWOSU was 5,127, which 4,353 were full-time students. CATC students were among that head count. CATC plans to be the “Language and Cultural Capital of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.”
“We currently have 106 students, which is a good beginning,” Mann said. “Probably it’s a slow one, but you have to begin somewhere. We have a strong advocate in our tribal government. Right now, the administration is in transition. Budget hearings will determine what our budget will be. Hopefully we can purchase a track of land situated in proximity to Southwestern and continue to share resources.
“Southwestern, they are partnering with us and providing us space. They are incubating us.”
CATC, among its strategic goals, is expected to gain an associate membership in American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) and accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association of Colleges and Universities. Other strategic goals include recruitment of faculty, formulating partnerships and getting a financial plan, as mentioned earlier, approved by the tribal government.
“We started out with language and culture courses,” Mann said. “It’s a must. Language and culture are intertwined. You can’t have one without the other. Our languages are picture windows to the world. The means we express language around us. We are spiritually grounded.
“We want to keep the ways of the people,” Mann said. “Whether it’s through documents people can come to research. We have to develop our human capital. We accept everyone, but 51 percent of our students must be Native American to gain accreditation through the American Higher Education Consortium.
Fifteen different tribes are represented in the student body at SWOSU. Most come from western Oklahoma. Cherokee, Kiowa and Choctaw are also represented in the student body.
“The bulk of our students are Cheyenne and Arapaho,” Mann said. “The ratio is 50-50, male and female. We have a lot of non-traditional students. If they attend the tribal college, there is something here that helps them make the adjustment . . . take to the four-year college that will help them be more successful.
“Our female students, many are mothers and the head of the household,” she said. “Many are returning to school just because there is a tribal college. Many have had to come back to college because of the economic situation. They realize they have to develop new skills. Maybe now is the time to go back to college.”
The first CATC associate degree programs focus on preparing student to work in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, health science and meet federal mandates for certified Head Start teachers.
“A large number of employees are retiring,” Mann said. “We wanted to take advantage of those employment opportunities. Our students are going to work in tribal government, work in tribal programs and acquire skills and knowledge to operate these programs. They will work with our ongoing trusted relationship with the federal government.”
Federal mandates require children’s teachers in Head Start to have an Associate’s degree by 2011 and a Bachelor’s degree by 2014.
“There will be a seamless transition from the two-year program into the professional degree program,” Mann said. “We are giving back with this degree program for Head Start. It’s working for now, but it is not always going to be like this. We are not a wealthy tribe as some tribes are. The tribes have given within their means.
“Now it’s time to give a place where this college is going to stand,” she said. “We are making progress. We are moving at a turtle’s pace, but we are going to get there. We are doing this with four people, but we are getting it done.”
Alden Whiteman is vice president of Development and Planning of CATC; Gail Wilcox, administrative and admissions officer; and Oveta Lira, special assistant to the president. Mann brings a wealth of experience to this hard-working catalyst.
Mann taught at the University of Montana for 28 years. She was professor of Native American Studies and was a linchpin in formulation of the Black Studies Program there founded by Dr. Ulysses Doss in 1968. The American Indian Movement and the start of tribal colleges have parallel histories with Black Studies programs starting on college campuses like the U of M and spreading from Montana and California across the U.S. That same year, 1968, Diné College was established in Arizona as the first tribally-controlled community college in the United States.
Dr. Mann, always positive with a perky bearing, is the teacher that you adored and didn’t want to leave to go to the next grade. It is a good measure in life to hear praise from her. To do well in her midst produces a cornucopia of praise that stays with you one hour to the next, one day to the next, one year to the next, for a lifetime, really. All emails are returned and phone messages were responded to.
Mann, out of her lengthy syllabus as a professor and much sought after conference speaker, teaches a class on American Indian Literature. She also has taught at the University of California at Berkeley; Harvard; and, among others, Haskell Indian Nations University located in Lawrence, Kansas. She formerly served as the Director of the Office of Indian Education Programs and Deputy to the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Mann also was the National Coordinator of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Coalition for the Association of American Indian Affairs.
She teaches “American Indian Religions and Philosophical Thought,” “American Indian Literature” and the seminar on “Community Building.” Her contribution to academic research include the “Cheyenne-Arapaho Education: 1871-1982.”
In 1991, Rolling Stone Magazine named her one of the ten leading professors in the nation. She has been an interviewee and consultant for several television and movie productions and has lectured throughout the United States, Mexico, Canada, Germany, Italy and New Zealand. Out of these documentaries comes a truth that is impalpable, mournful with admonitions that correct going forward. Any conversation would be empty without going over this ground.
To be sure, there is much acrimony in the history of American Indians. Liberation studies are redemptive facets of educators in Native American Studies. Mann recalls, as what has to be overcome, the negative impact the Indian Schools, especially the one in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, had on several generations of Native students.
“There were 25 of them,” she said. “They intended to break up tribal identity, break down the family. I would call it a Cold War on Native American people. The first thing they did to boys was cut their hair and changed the way they dressed.”
Last century, Richard Henry Pratt was founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. “He said, “The only good Indian is a dead one. Kill the Indian to save the man.” Pratt often said, “To change a people, you start with the children.”
“Tribal colleges are reversing that process,” Mann said.
“Diversity that permeates America is the strength of our country,” she said. “We can all make strong contributions to this place we all call home — America. I have come to help these tribes to build this college stone by stone, dollar by dollar. We need our own separate facility and provide courses that will be essential to our students.
“I don’t know where we are going to next with our curriculum,” Mann said, thinking about the emerging green economy and all the cluster of wind turbines that belong to the Weatherford Wind Energy Center. “We are considering environmental studies or maybe media. We have two courses a semester now. Most are offered after 5 p.m. through distance education. We are utilizing every means to develop the human capital. We have big dreams and a lot of hope. We have struggles handed down to us by our ancestors. We want our children to know they are a unique people.”
Students in the College of Design at Iowa State University worked on a multidisciplinary service-learning studio in which ISU students developed proposals for the future of CATC. The project helped “imagine what its campus could be in the future.”
“We are still hopeful,” Mann said. “As soon as the dust settles, they might be able to develop land from tribal holdings. We can start with a multipurpose building. We have had talks with the tribal government. They understand our needs. We are being patient and assertive.”
It is not a scatter shot, but a process that takes precise aim. The return home is focused with directions from Ma’heo’o and an endorsement that cultivates the most powerful endowment for Mann, the other elders, the educators and the spiritual keepers and purveyors to follow.
She was recipient of “2009 Legacy Award” presented by “Working Mother’s Media and the “Lifetime Achievement Award” given in 2008 by the National Indian Education Association. She was also named “2010 Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe Educator of the Year.”
“My children won’t have to say nothing was ever done for their mother in her lifetime,” Mann said.
“My work affirmed and honored gives us some credibility,” she said. “Not that one has to have those kinds of acknowledgements, but it helps. I know I am doing what I was put on Earth to do and that is work in the field of education. This gives me the impetus to provide opportunities to those who have been locked out of education for too long. CATC is a place that honors us and teaches about us.”
Mann grew up in Hammon, Oklahoma, which is a town less than 1 square mile. It is just west of the intersection of State Highway 33 and State Highway 34. The last U.S. Census counted 469 people. Not much of a change since Mann grew up there nearly 76 years ago there.
Hammon is about 55 miles northwest of Weatherford.
The expressions are lasting, thinking about someone you just met each day since. One sees it as difficult to say Mann returned home, but she does, when removal and then containment of Native people had them assigned to lands that may or may not have been their historical homelands.
Bear Butte, on the northeastern edge of the Black Hills, a few miles from Sturgis, South Dakota, is a sacred site for Plains Indians, among them the Cheyenne, including tribes in the United States and Canada. Continuity in place and foretelling are central among that which has been kept without a second of interruption. Sweet Medicine is the Cheyenne prophet who dates back 4000 years.
Sweet Medicine would be discussed during another installment of “Chronicles of the Welcome Table” at Casa Soto, a Mexican restaurant, on Main Street in downtown Weatherford. Sweet Medicine received guidance and gifts for the Cheyenne people at Bear Butte.
“The Cheyenne people continue to come to Bear Butte to fast and pray,” said Mann, who has responsibilities to the Cheyenne as one of their prayer women. “We do not want to see developers come in and develop too close to Bear Butte.”
Mann is among the prayer women in the Sun Dance of the Cheyenne Tribe.
The “HAPPY” sign on Dr. Henrietta Mann’s desk reflects the spirit she shares as first president of Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal College.