Indigenous Women College Students' Perspectives on College, Work, and Family

Headnote

Native American and First Nations (herein collectively referred to as Indigenous) women college students are faced with the challenge of balancing their cultural imperatives and the demands of the dominant Western culture in family, school, and work/employment roles. In order to explore these women's experiences and perspectives, this study analyzed unstructured qualitative interviews of 11 Native American and 9 First Nations female college students. The themes that resulted from the hermeneutic analysis were (a) honoring Indigenous culture and community, (b) living in two worlds, (c) pursuing individual fulfillment and goals, and (d) acknowledging the importance and influence of family.

College graduation has become an increasingly important contribution to career success. For many culturally diverse students, however, academic persistence rates are much lower than for those from majority backgrounds. This is particularly true for Native American and First Nations students (herein referred to collectively as Indigenous unless group- specific research is cited). Jackson and Turner (2004) reported that, as of 2004, only 9.3% of Native Americans held a bachelor's degree or higher as opposed to 20.3% of the general population. Mendelson (2004) reported that 60% of First Nations people age 20 to 24 who lived on a reserve had not yet completed high school or obtained a comparable certificate such as a General Education Diploma (GED). According to Statistics Canada and the 2006 census, only 9% of First Nations women obtained a university degree (bachelor's, master's, or doctorate) as opposed to 23% of women in the general population (Milligan & Bougie, 2009). Despite evidence of academic ability, postsecondary dropout rates were higher for Native American and First Nations students than for any other cultural or ethnic group (Freeman & Fox, 2005; Mendelson, 2004; Reddy, 1993).

One obstacle to academic success for Indigenous college students is the perception that they must live in two worlds (Juntunen et al., 2001)-that of their tradition and that of the "White campus" (Lin, LaCounte, & Eder, 1988, p. 13). For example, Jackson, Smith, and Hill (2003) found that successful Native American college students reared on reservations reported that getting through college required them to adapt to a different culture; these successful students also reported having kept a strong sense of their own culture.

Although relatively little research has explored Indigenous...