Reflections on Native American Heritage Month: Part One

By Carlie Fishgold, student intern

Just a little over six years ago, I made the decision to drop out of high school in order to continue supporting myself as an emancipated minor. To this day, I confidently maintain that I do not regret my decision, especially because the gritty reality of vocational competition in this economy and the frustration of long hours for meager wages branded me with a perpetual tenacity that, today, acts as reserve rocket fuel when sleep looks over my shoulder as I refine and finish my assignments. After earning a GED certificate, I learned to balance my education and my work schedule, achieving a high grade point average at my local community college and becoming enamored with the studies of anthropology and art history.

After transferring to the University of Rochester as a sophomore, I found that, in all facets of my academic career, the faculty and staff are more than willing to sustain ambitious projects, as long as a student can demonstrate dedication and a capacity to execute a project in a way that benefits the University as a whole. This community-mindedness presented an opportunity for me to combine the progressive principles I learned as an art history/anthropology student of Native American peoples and material culture with my involvement as a student representative and tour guide in the Office of Admissions. Thus, the first-ever recognized Native American Heritage Month (November) became a Native/non-Native collaboration between Oneida student Chris Bethmann and me as Native American Recruitment and Outreach interns for Admissions.

While Native American Heritage Month was a multi-departmental project, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid Jon Burdick made it clear to Chris and me that our purpose was to coordinate the initiative with Admissions’ larger objective of increasing the Native American student population on campus, in order to create a strong, lasting, and engaging community of indigenous students. The most important goal was and still is to establish and maintain a dialogue with local Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) community members and to break down the barriers between UR and Haudenosaunees by providing a series of events that would familiarize the public with the campus. We also sought to cultivate student, faculty, and staff understanding of historical trauma as well as current issues that constitute aspects of colonized aboriginal peoples’ identities around the world.

For example, I hope that in making Native American Heritage Month a tradition at UR, we will preclude incidents like the student-organized Affirmative Action Bake Sale at a reputable California university last fall—a crude attempt to metaphorically depict affirmative action’s inequality by discounting baked-good prices on account of a customer’s “race.” This resulted in viral images of students wearing Popsicle-stick and rainbow-feathered headdresses in exchange for the cheapest pastries. Although it may seem funny on the surface to some, the image epitomizes a shallow understanding of Native American diversity, identity, and modernity while reinforcing the Plains Indian stereotype popular in Hollywood throughout the 20th century. By maintaining Native American Heritage Month as a collaborative tradition of bringing a variety of Native perspectives to our community, and by making our campus accessible to the best Native students out there, UR will serve as an example to counter the behavior demonstrated in situations like the bake sale. To me, this gives life to the University’s maxim, Meliora (“ever better”).