Native American heritage month a success

The Native American Student Association made 2008 a big year for UNLV’s smallest minority.

“This past year we got a lot of students come into the group,” NASA President Simone Boutang said. “We’ve had a lot of students on campus that just weren’t involved because a lot of us work full-time and class schedules were making meetings and stuff during the week an issue. But this summer we picked up five or six more members and a lot of them had a lot of ideas.”

The ideas formed during summer came to fruition in November for Native American Heritage Month. The group held a variety of events including a pageant, student panel, film showing and various cultural demonstrations in an effort to make the campus community more aware of Native Americans and their culture.

“More people are willing to come up and help out because our month was pretty successful,” NASA member Shi-Tawanna Kedelty said. “We had a whole lot more people turn out at each event compared to what we had last year. I think the campus is really coming out to want to help our native students group and just the diversity now is awesome.”

It has been a quick turnaround for a club that seemed to have dissolved six years ago.

The Native American Student Association was founded in 1996. It was a small club with few members, but the group celebrated their heritage each year with the Miss Native UNLV pageant.

The pageant showcased the oral traditions and tribal customs of Native American women attending UNLV. The winner was appointed a leadership role within the group, becoming a spokesperson for NASA.

However the tradition weakened over the years as interest in the group shrank.

“Krystle Platero was one of the last Miss Native UNLVs and she was it three years in a row,” Boutang said. “But at the time there was only like two or three members in the group and that was like six years ago so the group wasn’t recognized any more and it kind of died down.”

In 2002 NASA went on hiatus until it was revived in 2004. The pageant, however, wouldn’t make a comeback until 2007 when it was won by Kedelty.

“Last year was the first time we redid the pageant,” Boutang said. “So [Shi-Tawanna], for students on the campus right now, is the first Miss Native UNLV that we’ve seen. She has kind of redefined what the role is.”

This year’s pageant was the most successful ever, with an attendance of more than 100 people compared to just 20 last year.

One of the reasons for the group’s revival was a jump in enrollment for Native students from 2004 to 2005. That jump also represents the last students admitted under the Native American Tuition Waiver Program. The program once granted Native American students from all over the nation with reduced tuition, but it was recently reinterpreted in 2005 to give reduced tuition only to Native American students from bordering states.

This has affected UNLV’s appeal to Native American students from Oklahoma, New Mexico and Washington, who no longer qualify for reduced tuition. Since the program’s cessation the number of Native American students enrolled at UNLV has dropped every year.

Of the students who benefited from this policy was Ote Kedelty, Shi-Tawanna’s younger brother.

“I came to UNLV because there was a program for Natives where we didn’t have to pay out-of-state tuition, ” Ote said. “Basically it was cheaper for me to go here than it is to go Arizona State, the University of Arizona or the University of New Mexico.”

The discount in tuition was big for Native American students coming from reservations, such as Shi-Tawanna and Ote, where the median income is less than $12,000 a year and unemployment rates can be upward of 50 percent.

 Ote is pursuing a degree in civil engineering in order to help the 70,000 Navajos who do not have access to running water.

“Agriculture is a big thing on our reservation and right now we are in a dispute with border towns over water rights,” Ote said. “We have water deep within the ground but there is no way to access it right now. We don’t have the knowledge to be able to tap that resource.”

“I don’t want my kids or my nephews or nieces to go through the same things I did, I want life to be easier for them,” he said.

About a third of NASA’s members came from a reservation and had never lived in a major city before coming to UNLV. Many more maintain close ties to their tribal reservations and want to go there after graduating to help improve the lives of their people.

“I want to go back to my reservation and teach,” Boutang said, despite spending the majority of her life in Las Vegas. “The [reservation] is very much my home and I want to go back. Every time I go home I don’t want to leave.”