Bringing k'e to the table

When Cassandra Manuelito-Kerkvliet took the helm at Antioch College Seattle four years ago, she found a thriving liberal arts college with a commitment to public service, already partnering with the local Native American community.

She also found an institution badly in need of k'é.

"I couldn't believe the zingers people were throwing at each other at faculty meetings," said Manuelito-Kerkvliet, who is Kinyaa'áanii (Towering House Clan) born for Áshiihí (Salt Clan).

"I decided, 'They hired a Navajo, so as long as I'm here we're going to talk to each other the Navajo way: with respect.'"

At the next faculty meeting, Manuelito-Kerkvliet placed a jar in the middle of the table. Anyone she caught flinging a zinger paid an instant 25-cent fine. That went for latecomers too.

"I didn't tolerate 'Indian time' when I was president of Diné College (in the 1990s) and I don't tolerate 'Antioch time' now," she stated firmly.

For her part, Manuelito-Kerkvliet plunks a quarter in the jar when her meetings go past the allotted time. The money that accumulates is used to help faculty or staff who find themselves in financial crisis.

Manuelito-Kerkvliet wasn't sure how her no-nonsense policy had gone over, until she found in the jar a slip of paper wrapped around a dollar bill. It was a note thanking Manuelito-Kerkvliet for pointing out the author's zinger.

"I'm still carrying around a lot of anger," the anonymous faculty member wrote. "Things are changing, starting with me."

A new civility

 A more civil version of academia is just one thing Native Americans bring to the table, said Manuelito-Kerkvliet, the first (and so far only) Native woman to head a university outside of the tribal college system.

"I really think we have so much to offer," she said. "It's too bad there aren't more of us in higher education."

Antioch University Seattle (it's one of five Antioch campuses nationwide) is the kind of small, liberal arts school people used to make fun of back when the Seattle campus was founded in 1975 with 11 students.

You can't take the proverbial underwater basket weaving, but you can major in "ecopsychology" or "spirituality studies."

And if weave baskets you must, you might join the homeless women who are invited every Thursday for a free hot breakfast and an art class taught by the art therapy students. Today (March 24) they are reportedly weaving baskets from wood shavings gathered from a totem-pole-carving project a local tribe is doing to honor a tribal member who was shot by police.

Now that so many tech jobs have flown overseas, schools like Antioch are welcoming back the former computer scientists and IT types who need to diversify their skills. And no one's laughing.

Unorthodox program

Manuelito-Kerkvliet loves Antioch's unorthodox approach to learning, with written assessments of each student instead of grades, and students' ability to craft their own majors if they wish.

She doesn't find it fuzzy or indulgent - quite the contrary.

"Each student graduates with a portfolio instead of transcripts," she said. "If an employer wants to see their writing and critical thinking skills, they can see them for themselves instead of taking a professor's word for it."

Antioch is actually mostly a graduate school with an emphasis on psychology. About 80 percent of their students are graduate-level, although if a student has an associate degree or has fulfilled the basics at a four-year school, Antioch can help them finish up.

"We're good about transferring credits from other schools, and in some cases we can give credit for skills the student has acquired in their work or personal life," Manuelito-Kerkvliet explained. "Our question is, 'What can we do to get you completed?'"

At Antioch Seattle, however, the bachelor's  degree is generally seen as a step to the next level.

Since it's a private school, Manuelito-Kerkvliet hasn't run into the church-and-state issues she encountered while working at large state-supported universities.

"I keep my sage and my sacred objects right behind my desk," she said. "When I want to pray for the faculty and staff, I lay the staff directory there. My budget, a grant application ... anything I want to pray over."

Nobody gives her any trouble about it. In fact, bilagáana colleagues have been known to come to her office and ask to be smudged when they're facing difficult issues.

"If we're talking about a controversial issue at a faculty meeting, sometimes I'll lay an eagle feather on the table," Manuelito-Kerkvliet confided. "It's not that I want everyone to believe what I do about the eagle feather. Just having a sacred object there shifts everyone's focus and gives the meeting a more solemn tone."

Ties to home

Also behind her desk is a poster of her great-great-grandfather, Chief Manuelito, who famously uttered, "Education is the ladder" - certainly never imagining how far one his descendants would climb.

"He's my inspiration, along with my parents," Manuelito-Kerkvliet said.

Cassandra Manuelito grew up in Laramie, Wyo., in the only Native family they knew of there. Her father had only an eighth-grade education, but always encouraged his children to go further.

Every weekend, weather permitting, the family would drive the 550 miles to Naschitti, N.M., to see her mother's family, or 30 miles farther to Tohatchi, to see her father's kin. Summers were spent on the rez with her grandparents.

"I'm so deeply, deeply thankful to my parents for making sure we stayed connected to our home," Manuelito-Kerkvliet said. "I participated in ceremonies, I learned our language. Even after all my education and all my years living off the reservation, I still feel comfortable going back to my father's family's house, with no running water or electricity. Back there, I'm not a college president, I'm just a daughter in an extended family."

An open college

In spite of its location - if Diné Bikéyah has an exact opposite, it's probably Seattle - Antioch is, in many ways, a perfect fit for this girl from the desert. She likes its history as the first college, back in 1852 at its original campus in Yellow Springs, Ohio, to welcome both Blacks and women to its integrated courses.

Founded by education visionary Horace Mann, Antioch was also the first college to hire women professors at the same pay scale as men.

Manuelito-Kerkvliet, criticized at a previous job for having too egalitarian a leadership style, also loves the way Antioch faculty, students and staff mingle not only at the monthly community tea but at a university-wide book club and for the semi-annual "Clean-Up Day," where everybody dons grubbies, feasts on pizza, and declutters their space.

The school had a focus on the environment long before she came along in 2007, but Manuelito-Kerkvliet has instituted the President's Task Force on Sustainability, which has brought the college to a No. 4 ranking as the institution that produces the least waste among 400 competing schools (over 70 percent of Antioch's garbage is either composted or recycled).

There is also the 10-year-old collaboration with Muckleshoot Tribal College about 45 miles north of Seattle. Antioch provides professors for a teacher-training program, and recently started offering courses there from its Center for Creative Change - an innovative graduate program that equips its graduates to, for example, start their own non-profit. Navajos, take note: a Native American scholarship is in the works for next fall.

Manuelito-Kerkvliet plans to stay at Antioch "as long as they'll have me." And yet, there are those days when homesickness sets in.

"I do miss sunshine," she mused. "I miss the red canyons, I miss the smell of piñon burning, I miss talking in Navajo."

Most of all, it's kind of lonely at the top. Manuelito-Kerkvliet wishes that, somewhere, there were another Native woman university president she could talk to.

"While it's exciting that I've made it this far," she said, "how sad that after four years I can't convince a Native sister to join me. I'd really like to see another Native woman pass through that glass ceiling."

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