The community college serves both a role and a purpose within the higher educational and social landscape of America. As access to and through these institutions remains increasingly important in our ever-changing society, the purpose of this research was to shift the lens to not only include but to center the communities to which it serves. This…

Our university is a predominantly white institution (PWI) on the ancestral homelands of the Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, and Goshute; however, there is no evidence of them on our campus. At the request of Native faculty, staff, and students at the University, the coauthors attempted to address the erasure of Native nations and peoples from campus. This…

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological research study is to understand which factors influence the academic persistence of Native American students in higher education. In 2019, it was reported only 16% of those college students who identified as American Indian/Alaska Native attained a bachelor's degree or higher and in 2023, that…

Photovoice is a recognized art-based qualitative research method used in participatory action research. Photovoice's critical and pedagogical potential has made it a prevalent method in decolonizing research conducted with Indigenous youth. In June of 2023, the McGill Indigenous Studies Program (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) offered a land-based…

The problem addressed through this study was that Native American students in the area surrounding a local university participated in higher education at low levels. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore local Native American college student perspectives about becoming a college student, including their individual experiences…

In spring of 2024, Diné College students in the course College Composition II began the semester by reading "Making Kin with the Machines" (Lewis et al., 2018), an essay by four Indigenous scholars who suggest their understanding of kinship drawn from Hawaiian, Plains Cree, and Lakota epistemologies offers a productive model for…

Researchers have found that compared to the support offered at tribal colleges and universities (TCUs), American Indian students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) face a lack of support (Bryan, 2019). TCUs create environments that foster students' sense of belonging and their sense of self (Shorty & Robinson Kurpius, 2021).…

The problem addressed in this study was the unknown extent to which American Indian students' sense of belonging at predominantly White institutions compared to American Indian students' sense of belonging at tribal colleges and universities. The purpose of this quantitative correlational/causal-comparative study was to determine the extent to…

Literature exploring postsecondary undergraduate student experiences at the nexus of queerness, trans*ness, and Indigeneity remains relatively scant, as does scholarship taking a geospatial lens to understand the experiences of trans* collegians. Given the settler colonial history of higher education as a field and the colonial nature of the…

The purpose of this quantitative study is to test the correlation between perceived levels of faculty support behaviors on the Native American student's college degree completion experience. Sociocultural Learning Theory and the Social Integration Model are the theoretical frameworks this study used to connect to the related research on the Native…

In this chapter, we provide a systematic literature review of current scholarship on BIQTPoC within community colleges. Through a queer of color critique lens, we analyzed literature published over the last three decades. Findings demonstrated a lack of empirical research that perpetuates a gap for community college leader practices to support…

To understand why Native American members are hesitant to enroll in higher education, it is necessary to understand this population's barriers to achieving this goal. Degree attainment by American Indians has remained consistently low while other minority groups have consistently risen. The focus of this qualitative single-case study was on…

This article explores the experiences of project directors at two-year Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander serving institutions in the Midwest. Specifically, we examined how project directors faced racialized campus environments, navigated support structures (or the lack thereof), and continually combatted misperceptions about the…

Indigenous students often see higher education as a means by which they can meet their familial, community, and cultural responsibilities. Unfortunately, many collegiate institutions emphasize values and social protocols, a way of understanding, and a way of knowing that are unfamiliar and even hostile to Indigenous worldviews. To better…

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was enacted in the United States in 1990 to protect the rights of the descendants of Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Alaska Natives to their ancestors' human remains and sacred and cultural items (25 U.S.C; 43 CFR Part 10). Although enacted to protect and ensure that…