An Open Letter from the Native American Student Services Proposal at UC Davis
To whom it may concern:
We are contacting you as a community to express our distress regarding the University of California, Davis stance on supporting Native American students and the programs directly associated with the Native American community.
While efforts to recruit international students and underrepresented minorities (URMs) at UC Davis has increased, investment in the first peoples of this land and nation-to-nation relationships with Indigenous communities are not being prioritized. There has not been additional funding or staff support allocated to actualize an increase in outreach, recruitment, and retention of Native American students. The harsh reality is that for decades, our students have struggled to recruit and retain their peers as well as themselves while the university has continued to diminish the resources available to them. The current infrastructure does not adequately support Native American students and the one-size-fits-all approach fails to recognize the unique needs of our diverse community.
For this reason in July of 2014, students presented the Native American Student Services Proposal to the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs and met with Associate Vice Chancellor for Student Life, Dr. Milton Lang and Executive Director Sheri Atkinson. Years in the making, the proposal reiterated student, staff, and faculty concerns regarding the institutional lack of commitment to Native student recruitment and retention and called for structural change in how the university handles these items. Students expressed the dire need for a Native American student center, Director of Native American Student Services, full time Native American Community Program Coordinator, and a full time Powwow/NACD Program Coordinator. However, AVC Dr. Milton Lang was unable to provide a response on behalf of the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs and requested a month’s time to discuss these items with Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Adela de la Torre, before reconvening with an action plan for the items listed in the proposal. Unfortunately, when we reconvened in a month’s time we did not receive a response from VC Adela de la Torre. While we thank Dr. Lang and Sheri for their commitment to working with us to address these issues and find viable solutions, it has become painfully clear that the Vice Chancellor herself does not prioritize our community’s needs to the same degree.
We have repeatedly expressed the need for an official response from the Vice Chancellor on these issues and continue to wait for change as decades of students did before us. But we can no longer wait. Our students and community can no longer afford to sit at the bottom of the Student Affairs agenda. We cannot sit and wait while our student and community needs are continuously disregarded. We cannot sit and wait while our students’ well being and future remains at stake. We cannot sit quietly as we see the work of generations pushed aside, and our community’s voices silenced in the process. We refuse to let another generation of students inherit this legacy of institutional neglect.
For this reason, we will be holding a rally on October 13, 2014 to raise awareness of the institutional barriers Native American and Indigenous students face at the University of California, Davis and in higher education. Let us stand in solidarity in honor of the first peoples of this land! Lets us come together as generations have before us and remind the university that WE ARE STILL HERE!
Enclosed: Native American Student Services Proposal and info graphic.
For further information please contact us via email at nassproposal@gmail.com or visit our websitehttp://ucdnassp.strikingly.com
Also, this is the Facebook event page for the Day of Indigenous Resistance https://www.facebook.com/
In Solidarity,
Fabian Iglesias and Liliana Mendoza
Native American Student Services Proposal (NASSP) at the University of California, Davis
