The hurdles Native American teenagers face in and out of school are daunting. College Horizons, a small organization based in New Mexico, has proven they're not insurmountable.
Every year, the group sponsors week-long retreats on college campuses for teenagers from some of the more than 500 federally-recognized tribes in the U.S.
One of those retreats was at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., where 85 students gathered along with dozens of admissions officers from some of the nation's most selective universities.
The week kicked off with a boisterous rendition of the College Horizons motto: "College pride, Native pride!" Then, one by one, students stood to say who they are and where they're from:
"I'm part of the Eagle and Fox clan ... "
"I'm from the Cheyenne River in South Dakota ... I am a descendant of Lakota Chief Red Horse ... "
"I'm a member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma."
Beyond that shared heritage, another thing they all had in common? They're outstanding students.
Many are athletes, artists and musicians. Precisely the kind of students that top-tier colleges should be lining up to recruit. And yet, most of them are not on anybody's radar.
"We're talking about a population that is so under-represented and under-served," says Carmen Lopez, the head of College Horizons.
Lopez is Navajo and a graduate of Harvard University and Dartmouth College. She says native students are often overlooked because they're isolated. It's likely that no one in their families has gone to college. Sometimes, the schools in their communities are too poor, too under-staffed to offer meaningful advice or counseling about college. Many of these students said they had little or no access to college prep or Advanced Placement courses in high school.
[For more of this story, written by Claudio Sanchez, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/ed...e-land-that-made-you]
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