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Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines “side by side” as the state “of existing beside one another” and “of being in the same place, time, or circumstance." What does it mean for rural and urban communities to live side by side? Join University of Minnesota Extension staff as we explore the interdependent relationship of rural and urban spaces and why this necessary and complex relationship matters.
Tribal colleges are underfunded miracles. About 80% of our native population in the United States lives off the reservation. And of that 80%, 60% live in major metro areas, like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. And so there is no reason for those tribal citizens to not engage in the tribal college experience, which is very successful with indigenous people.
Ellen Wolter:That's Nadine Bill, executive director of Red Lake Nation College's new site in downtown Minneapolis. She's talking about the importance of making the tribal college experience more accessible to native communities in metro areas. Nadine joined me for a conversation about the incredible accomplishments of tribal colleges. Despite facing significant underfunding, these institutions continue to provide essential education and support to their communities. In our conversation, Nadine shares about the history of Red Lake Nation College and its focus on language and culture preservation through intergenerational learning.
Ellen Wolter:And she also talks about the new site in downtown Minneapolis and its goal to build Red Lake Nation College into a tribal college without borders. Dominant narratives often portray Native American communities as living entirely on reservations and in rural areas. Minnesota Compass reports that actually 45% of Minnesota's Native American communities live in the Twin Cities. Nadine describes how the new site has opened up opportunities for Native American communities in Minneapolis to more easily access tribal college education. And she shares how tribal colleges play an important role in reconnecting rural and urban Native American communities with their culture, language, and land.
Nadine Bill:And when they've all had their quarrels and parted, we'll be the same as we started, just to travel along, singing a song, side by side.
Ellen Wolter:This is Ellen Wolter with the University of Minnesota Extension. Welcome to the Side by Side podcast. Well, Nadine, welcome. We are really excited to have you on today.
Nadine Bill:Thank you, Ellen. I'm so happy to be here.
Ellen Wolter:And I'm really excited about your new site in Minneapolis. I was just there for a training, as I mentioned, before we started recording, and it is such a beautiful building, beautiful site.
Nadine Bill:Yes. We definitely love our new our new site, our new space, and we are happy to be hosting different groups, like your group that was here in extension programs. And we couldn't be more pleased with the outcome of our project and, accomplishing a lot of the goals that we had when we started this construction.
Ellen Wolter:So before we dig into some of those, can you just tell me a little bit about Red Lake Nation College and how it's evolved and how it's grown, with Red Lake Nation?
Nadine Bill:Sure. Red Lake Nation College is a tribally controlled college. The main campus is on the Red Lake Reservation. The actual college, history began in 2000. It began with a feasibility study.
Nadine Bill:Red Lake Nation College emerged out of the need for, the tribe, Red Lake tribe, to have its own institution of higher learning. And as one of the only closed reservations in the United States, meaning that it holds its own land in common for its people. The leadership of the tribe really believed that owning its educational sovereignty was very important. So the origins of the college is definitely a journey. Creating a college from the ground up is no easy feat, and there's a lot of attributes that I think the community partook in to to make this happen, the realization of it.
Nadine Bill:It's part of the AHEC network, which is the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which is a consortium of 38 tribal colleges. It's also under the TCCU Act of 1978, which allows tribes to create and establish colleges.
Ellen Wolter:Nadine, you mentioned, you know, it was sort of built alongside or with community attributes. Can you describe what some of those are and and what community attributes were integrated into development of the college?
Nadine Bill:Yes. Language preservation, culture, and history. Those are the marquee of the mission of Red Lake Nation College, and the language also is a centerpiece of our current academic programming and and was really part of the origin story is language preservation is central to the learning components of our curriculum, central to the existence of indigenous people. And so, we put that at the center of our learning and identity as well. So, the attributes also come in forms of people, intergenerational learning from our programs that incorporate early learners, immersion school that was once housed at the college at by Red Lake to elders who will who just had a a student who was 70 70 something graduate from our 2 year program.
Nadine Bill:So I believe that tribal college is one of the strongest attributes is this intergenerational learning that as indigenous people, we do on a day to day basis, and we try to harness that within the tribal college system. The tribe has about 18,000 tribal members across the country. About half of those tribal members live on the Red Lake Reservation. We also learned that about 8,000 of those tribal members live in the Minneapolis metro area. So we are a public institution.
Nadine Bill:We're also a land grant institution. And so we serve a vast community. We have students who are non native and grew up on the Red Lake Reservation. We have students who are from other tribes, other backgrounds. And, you know, the uniformity of tribal colleges allows that to happen amongst our indigenous cultures.
Nadine Bill:But the centerpieces of our curriculum, you would either have to take 2 semesters of Ojibwe language, Ojibwe Mohan. And the history of Red Lake is is one of the offerings. But another requirement is intro to Anishinaabe studies. Our curriculum is steeped in language, culture, and history. And I found this really interesting as as one of our students from Minneapolis graduated.
Nadine Bill:He's actually from a North Dakota tribe, and we interviewed him recently for a job. He's our new admissions counselor. And, you know, of course, in the job interview, we're like, okay. Well, why do you why do you think you're a good fit for this job? And he goes, well, I know how to speak Ojibwe now.
Nadine Bill:And I just I thought that that was such so key in the fact that, you know, we can be from other tribes and yet learn each other's languages. Of course, we're our new location is here in downtown Minneapolis in the Dakota lands, and acknowledging that. And so one of our goals as a tribal college is also to offer Dakota language in the future. So we'll be working with some Dakota language speakers and Dakota, faculty to to bring that on board as well.
Ellen Wolter:And how did the Minneapolis site how did that idea come about? What prompted that or sparked that?
Nadine Bill:It was always part of the initial planning process that that did date back to the 2000, early 2000. In the planning and review process, we were like, okay. That that's gonna take time. We know one of the first steps was building the main campus at the Red Lake site at the you know, the main campus on Red Lake Reservation. That new building was constructed in 2014, 2015, and opened in this fall of 2015.
Nadine Bill:So initial accreditation was also happening at the same time. Previous to that, Red Lake had been a part of Fond Du Lac Tribal College
Ellen Wolter:and Leech Lake Tribal College.
Nadine Bill:And so in partnering with those two institutions, we were able to help each other through this, very rigorous accreditation process. Initial accredited accreditation was granted to Raleigh College in, late 2020, early 21. And, of course, 2021 were very interesting times for everybody. As COVID was reigning supreme, we were also going through our accreditation process, which was very rigorous, and having to do that. And sometimes, a a global pandemic was we were like, what what's going to happen to our college?
Nadine Bill:But from that and from the tremendous amount of resources that evolved, we were able to expedite, which were we thought we were probably 10 years out in creating a site in Minneapolis. When we did a community needs survey in 202012, the and did focus groups, all the 7 communities up at Red Lake and down in the cities in Duluth. The resounding word from the urban population was that this is great that you're doing a campus at Bear Lake, but what about us? How are we gonna engage in the tribal college experience? And we held that as a marker.
Nadine Bill:It's like this is always going to be a goal of Red Lake Nation College. The resources we knew were going to be hard to come by, but then COVID happened. And higher education saw, oh, and especially the tribal colleges saw a wealth of resources that we will probably never see again. We used all of our resources for COVID to remodel this location, and the tribe actually used their COVID resources to purchase the buildings in downtown Minneapolis, which were about $4,000,000. The total projects was was $16,200,000, and we used the vast majority of our resources to make this happen.
Nadine Bill:You asked, how did this happen? And it and it really it was part of the plan, but it also it happened very organically. As, my husband and I, my husband is Dan King, the the president of Red Lake Mission College. We were taking the trip, and this was right after I'm just kinda setting the stage here. It was right after the incidents in in downtown Minneapolis after George Floyd was murdered.
Nadine Bill:Most of Minnesota was under house arrest. We had to take a trip down for a doctor appointment in Rochester, and we drove through Minneapolis, and my husband grew up here in Saint Paul. And the city was still literally smoldering. It was still on fire. The Red Lake Embassy actually had just opened, but there was no occupants and there were a few people around and we stopped.
Nadine Bill:And we were, like, looking around. We're like, what a beautiful facility. We can't believe this has happened in the middle of COVID. And around us was a bit of chaos. And we took a tour.
Nadine Bill:We saw 3 classrooms where we're like, we gotta do something. We can't wait. We have to do something. We have to do something now for our community. And meeting our community, not just our native community up north on the reservation, but our community that was down in Minneapolis.
Nadine Bill:And we started with 3 classes that fall, fall of 2020. We held an open house, and the 3 classes that we had initiated filled up in one day. And so we moved our what we thought was an underserved community. We knew in that instance that we were serving a never served community with regard to higher education need.
Ellen Wolter:Well, that was one of my questions, Nadine. Is is it common for tribal colleges to have a site in an urban space? Is this kind of a new model? Is this a new way of thinking, or is this, or is it not?
Nadine Bill:It is new. Not new in the sense that there have been other colleges who have held, sites. I believe that we're one of the first tribal colleges to have and own a permanent site in a major metro area. That kind of is a testimony that we're not going anywhere. We built we own this land.
Nadine Bill:We're we're here to stay. We've been working with the American Indian College Fund, who works with all the tribal colleges, and they were like, no. You guys are the first doing it the way that you're doing it. So we're happy to to carry that. I'm very proud of not only our college, but, you know, working on behalf of the Red Lake Nation to carry that that goal.
Nadine Bill:We just hosted 29 tribal colleges a couple weeks ago. So our peers here and what we do know is that about 80% of our native population in the United States lives off the reservation. And of that 80%, 60% live in major metro areas, like Minneapolis, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago. And so there is no reason for those tribal citizens to not engage in the tribal college experience, which is very successful with indigenous people.
Ellen Wolter:And so when you say a never served community, can you describe what you mean by that?
Nadine Bill:I mean, never served by the tribal college experience. You know, commonly, you had to live at one of the 38 tribal college home communities that has its own tribal college. And, of course, we know that there's 500 plus tribal nations across this country, yet 38 of the tribes have a, established tribal college that kind of puts the indigenous learning at the centerpiece of our curriculum. And so engaging in that experience, whether it's through distance education, and that is what another net result, a large net result of COVID is that a lot of our tribal colleges have been able to expand our reach through distance education. And in fact, the what we called this whole project was Red Lake Nation College Without Borders.
Nadine Bill:And that name was symbolic is because we didn't want to create any borders or reasons why tribal citizens couldn't participate in tribal college experiences at at any stage, whether it's continuing education or academic programming.
Ellen Wolter:What is some of the, goals that you hope to achieve with the Minneapolis site? You've cut you've talked a little bit about some of those already. But what are what are some of those specific sort of, they could be pie in the sky or maybe things that you're close to achieving already, but what are some of those things that you're really excited about and and ready to kinda go after with this new site?
Nadine Bill:You know, first and foremost is is to increase the engagement and and opportunities for native citizens in the Minneapolis proper. We do have what's interesting is a lot of our students aren't just in Minneapolis. So they're in Saint Paul. They're in Apple Valley. They're in Lakeville.
Nadine Bill:And so they're in this larger metro area. So, again, expanding our reach. We also have students in New York, Texas, Florida who are enrolled. They're tribal citizens of Red Lake or maybe another tribe, and they're just engaging in that tribal college experience. So that's that's the big goal.
Nadine Bill:Another goal is, we've got about 4 pillars that we're gonna be focusing on. One is increasing high school student involvement in higher education and specifically in PSEO here in in Minnesota. So post secondary education for high school students. What our data shows is that when high school students up on the main campus at Red Lake engaged in 1 or 2 classes, the likelihood of them enrolling in our academic programs after graduation increased by 80%. Mhmm.
Nadine Bill:And so that we know that that is a gateway for students to engage in higher education and be confident that they can succeed when they enroll as a high school student and be introduced. And and that helps create a pathway, whether that's through us or whether they go on to the University of Minnesota and have, you know, 6 to 9 credits when they arrive, it really makes a difference, I think, for students of color to have that experience and engagement when they're in high school. So that's one of our goals. Mhmm. The second goal is, expanding our extension programming.
Nadine Bill:We had, language tables this last year, Ojibwe language tables so that our community could come in, sit with their language faculty, have discussion just in an immersive setting. We also have, sewing classes so folks could come in and make regalia. This next year, we're really excited. We have an art studio, and so we're gonna engage in, making a birch bark canoe. We're going we have a maker's lab where students can come in, make their regalia, make t shirts, make mugs.
Nadine Bill:We have 3 d printers. We have a garden. So we're trying to get hands on, get in the dirt with our extension programs here. Our third pillar, of course, is our academic programming. We offer an AA in liberal education, and we have articulation agreements with all of the Minnesota State Schools.
Nadine Bill:We're just finishing up our articulation agreement with the University of Minnesota, and we'll be starting to work with our private partners like Augsburg moving forward so that students have a transfer pathway and a career pathway. And the 4th pillar is career and workforce development. We, just received a couple of grants where we're gonna be focused on, some micro credentialing of our current student programs so that students, can take some really transferable work ready skills into not only a transfer environment, but into a work environment.
Ellen Wolter:What are articulation agreements?
Nadine Bill:Articulation agreements are, transfer agreements, meaning that a receiving institution like the University of Minnesota will receive all of our credits in a fluid manner so students don't have to lose or reduce any of the courses. And then, you know, most of those students who do follow, like, a 2 plus 2 model, they have better on time success rates. So they're not wasting credits. They usually have, like, a real fluid pathway. And so those articulation agreements just make it easy.
Nadine Bill:And, also, in some instances, the receiving institution has eliminated their application fees with us. So that that doesn't sound like a lot, but it is a barrier to entry. So the articulation agreement is one that allows us to to work with the institution and be like, here's our list of classes. Here's what our students are taking. Here's how we guarantee our students are prepared for your rigor at the 3rd 4th year.
Ellen Wolter:And then your extension programming, are you I assume or I'm guessing that you'll do that at both the the Minneapolis site and the Red Lake Nation College. So I'd love to hear about how you're thinking about that at both sites.
Nadine Bill:Yes. And our extension program is very vibrant on our main campus. They have off-site garden. They have a lot of work and internships and externships with the Red Lake DNR. So there's a lot of programming happening.
Nadine Bill:We're hoping to duplicate a lot of what they're doing down here, working with different part institutional partners. As a land grant institution, we're part of the 1990 what you call the 1990 fours in extension language.
Ellen Wolter:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Nadine Bill:And one of our goals as a tri all tribal colleges are land grant institutions. And so what we want to do is bring those outcomes and creating a sense of place. And having our students really understand what it means to be a people from a place. And, you know, that's not just an indigenous thing. That's a people thing.
Nadine Bill:That's a Minnesotan thing too, and understanding, you know, who we are, where we come from. How do we cultivate the land that we're on? How do we how do we engage with each other in that sense of community in place? And so through our extension programming, we want to harness that and really understand and begin to define in solid ways of what that means to be a land grant institution and create a sense of place.
Ellen Wolter:And and I let so a sense of place, and I love that you said a sense of people. And, you know, this podcast is about connecting across rural and urban spaces, however you might think and define that for yourself. So what does that look like for folks at Red Lake Nation crossing a rural and urban spaces? What can you describe a little bit about how folks are crossing rural and urban spaces?
Nadine Bill:Yes. I think one of the, we had this plan. Right? We we've listed all these things that we wanted to accomplish by creating this insight and and all the things you put on a strategic plan. What happened in practice and when we actually have created this space is we've created a place for people to connect and not just connect to our building and our location in this urban setting, but to connect to Red Lake itself.
Nadine Bill:A lot of our students and I can give you a couple examples. Some of our students are enrolled, but had never been to Red Lake Reservation. Or I heard one time a student say, I've only gone to the reservation for funerals. I hadn't been able to engage in my home reservation just to go visit and learn about what the reservation and the history is about. And so you were like, wow.
Nadine Bill:We as part of that underserved need or that never served, that we didn't realize that that was going to be a story that was emerging for students. We did a program last fall or I'm sorry, last spring called, northern exposure. We were kinda being cheeky about it following the the the TV show. I remember that so. Yeah.
Nadine Bill:Yeah. And we took 30 or so students from our Minneapolis site, and we created a 2 day program to go up north. One of our students knew she was from Red Lake. Her father was from Red Lake, but she had never met him. And long story short, this student left our visit, being an enrolled tribal member of red lake, met her family on her father's side.
Nadine Bill:And this amazing connection was created for this student. And, you know, a lot of people think, oh, 4 hours isn't a big distance. Well, sometimes it really is a big distance if you don't have a way to plug in and you don't have a way to connect. And so, I mean, we all were just like, woah. What just what just happened?
Nadine Bill:But a lot of things happened for this student by just being able to engage in a community that she she belonged to but wasn't able to engage in.
Ellen Wolter:That's really really powerful.
Nadine Bill:Yes. It was very powerful for all of us. And so at that moment, we knew that we were, you know, these were the types of things that we were able to do in in our one of our cocurricular outcomes is identity, that we focus on. And what we do know, like, in higher education is that students come to our institutions and we do informally help shape identity, you know, and who they are and learning about themselves and where they come from. And so, we were like, okay.
Nadine Bill:This is this is helping us achieve our goals as an institution by having the site. One of the first things we did also is invest in a very nice bus to to transport folks back and forth. And you start thinking about that practical thing about, you know, maybe sometimes people didn't have reliable transportation to get up north. And then for some of our students, that was the case.
Ellen Wolter:So is it would you say it's this isn't probably the right word, but like an exchange kind of a program where folks are are going in and learning about what it's like to be on Red Lake Nation and coming from an urban area? And then does it also happen vice versa where folks on the Red Lake Nation are coming into Minneapolis and also learning a little bit about Red Lake Nation folks living in Minneapolis? Is it vice versa too?
Nadine Bill:In in some cases, in some cases, I would say that our our our people can be very transient as well and, live up north and have a home there, but also have an established home in the cities with with friends and family. And so, we have a I have another good example of a student who was living down here. Her parents were up north, and, rents and life just became very expensive here. And raising a young child, she needed support. So she moved back home to Northern Minnesota, but did not have to quit going to school because we were in 2 locations.
Nadine Bill:And so that was to me, that's, like, huge for students so where they don't have to drop out anymore because we can be they can still be a tribal college student no matter where they're at. Mhmm. Is that Without Borders? Yes. Without Borders.
Nadine Bill:And so, we were kinda we didn't realize we were doing this at the time by creating this site, but it's kinda flipping the paradigm for higher education where you don't have to be present in a seat. You don't have to be you can be in in your location. And so another blessing in disguise from COVID is the HyFlex model that we adapted during COVID really works for us and our student population, because they can be working parents. They can be homebound, or they can be up north in Panima, which is a 40 minute drive even from our main campus. And so when you talk about rural, there's, like, extra rural.
Nadine Bill:There's rural and then there's extrarural. And sometimes within the tribal jurisdiction, there's that extrarural definition where there some of our students up north were even having to travel 40 minutes to our main campus.
Ellen Wolter:Nadine, we talk a lot about definitions of rural on this podcast, and I think you just coined a new term, extra rural. So we'll have to chat about how that's defined.
Nadine Bill:I will. Yes. Definitely.
Ellen Wolter:Nadine, do you run into issues around broadband at all? And the reason I ask is I think some rural communities or extra rural communities struggle with that, and some, I think, folks are surprised to learn really don't struggle with that. They do have really great broadband. So curious what your experience has been.
Nadine Bill:Yes. We have had students who have struggled with this, access to technology and Internet service. And and because, again, the higher ed model isn't face to face where you're turning in paper, you actually have to have an online thing to put your learning management system connected to. We took a survey in maybe 2017. We did one in 2017.
Nadine Bill:We did one in 2016 and 2015. I think we did one every year. And we're our goal was to measure our students' access to technology, how they got Internet service. When we first started in 2015, we used to have tribal members come park in our parking lot just to get Internet service, and they'd be in the parking lot on their emails with their phones. And so, you know, Internet access was spotty since there has been some big broadband initiatives up on the Red Lake reservation.
Nadine Bill:But, again, during COVID and having resources and because we tribal colleges are underfunded miracles. We had been able to do so much with so little in the past. With the resources that we experienced though during COVID, we started a thing called tech backpacks. And we had bought technology with a hot spot within the computers that we issued, and we issued the same computer to every student. It cut down on all of the phone calls that our help desk would get when a student base has 100 different types of computers and a 100 different ways to connect to the Internet.
Nadine Bill:We have seen our retention and our graduations rates go up 20 points. We were at a 26% graduation rate. Our Ipads data this last year, we've gone up to a 46% graduation rate. That's amazing. And we attribute a lot of that, not only to our holistic student supports, but to access to technology.
Nadine Bill:And we didn't know what a huge impact not having access truly had. We knew that students were coming into our site to access things, but we didn't really engage in all of that research until we we really had to start examining student by student what the level of access was. That's amazing, Nadine. Yes.
Ellen Wolter:What are what are some of the goals you have around technology or supports that are needed to continue that access to technology?
Nadine Bill:Yes. We and because of we were able to do a lot of research, we got a very large tech, next generation technology grant that we have for the next 5 years that is gonna fund a lot of these efforts. We have created within our two sites, the main campus and our site down here in Minneapolis, what we call innovation centers. And the innovation center is an innovation center for teaching and learning. So we have staff that are trained in our learning management systems for the delivery of distance education and on the student side, how students engage in the distance education process.
Nadine Bill:I'm actually in sitting in this podcast booth, which is part of our innovation center. Some of the goals are that we want students to engage in social media, not just be consumers, but be producers of doing podcasts, doing digital storytelling, engaging in technology. So this building on the Minneapolis site now is 21st century. We wanted it to not only reflect the history of Minneapolis, but be a technology hub for our students. So when you come in, you feel like you are in a space that that could be a work environment.
Nadine Bill:When we were looking at designs, we went and we visit Google's headquarters. We went to Amazon's headquarters. We went to institutions of higher learning that were doing things that were similar. And so what we've done is create a digital twin of our site and the main campus site. So all the technology coincides.
Nadine Bill:Everything's really easy for our IT departments, and and we're pretty much planned out to harness the technology that we feel students need to be be prepared for today's work environment.
Ellen Wolter:That is all super exciting. You know, one thing that strikes me is this idea of being, like, social media producers or telling story stories from the Red Lake Nation perspective or an indigenous perspective. And as a white person, you know, I follow, some indigenous folks, social media accounts. Right? And I'm learning about Ojibwe, or I'm learning about the culture.
Ellen Wolter:And in some ways, it's it's also a way to connect the white dominant culture too with indigenous perspectives and ideas and stories. So I so I'm just gonna center my experience for a second. I just think that's really exciting. So
Nadine Bill:Yeah. We actually have a class in digital storytelling. So, you know, we have some faculty who have engaged in those trainings. We're gonna be offering it again this year. And it really I mean, some of the creativity that comes out of that, but a lot of some of the learning and history that comes out of that is really engaging.
Nadine Bill:And some students, when I talked about, like, that intergenerational, community, some students have been able to go and talk to, 1st generation or, generation language speakers who Ojibwe Ojibwe Mohan on the Red Lake. That was their first language. And so capturing that, preserving it is critical. And that becomes very it informs our curriculum and it informs our knowledge base.
Ellen Wolter:What do you think people get wrong about the notion of rural as it pertains to native nations and native people? And and what do you think people get wrong about the notion of urban as it pertains to native nations and native people?
Nadine Bill:Well, I am a I'm an enrolled tribal member of the upper Skagit tribe in Washington state. I'm also a proud descendant of a Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. I grew up in the sale Tacoma area, the Washington state. And here's what I have observed as a professional and, and what I've observed personally. Personally, I was very fortunate to have a grandparent who taught me that I have 3 homes.
Nadine Bill:One of those homes is the home that I live in, you know, on a day to day basis in Tacoma, Washington. But my other home is at upper Skagit with my people. And I might not live there, but that's where my origin story is. And I had another home in Oklahoma with my family who's descended from there. And so I think what gets, I think the misperceptions drive from the fact that a lot of people haven't visited a a reservation, and that there's still some fear in that exchange of lifestyle.
Nadine Bill:What I see and what I feel is always this connectedness. There's always people know each other. It's no different than what people would say a small town vibe is. There isn't too many places that you can go that you don't know somebody, that you don't feel that that that connectedness and that you know that you're home. And so I think what happens, you know, a lot of times is that we we label people who don't wanna be from away from home.
Nadine Bill:Like, oh, you don't wanna leave the reservation. Well, it's because you've cast such a negative stereotype on the reservation. Why? It's beautiful. Red Lake reservations has some of the most beautiful, unmarked, untouched lands in our country as do other tribal reservation sites.
Nadine Bill:It hasn't been hasn't been tampered. It's natural, and it's beautiful, and it's home to it's home to to a lot of people. And so I think, you know, there's been we could say that that's a product of assimilation. We could say that's a product of the boarding school area. We could say that that's a byproduct of the relocation act where assimilation came into play and tribal citizens were taught that their home reservation isn't worthy of being there.
Nadine Bill:And so I think that era is gone, and tribal colleges have kind of helped to remedy that. There was a brain drain. Citizens left and made their homes in urban areas, but most tribal citizens knew that there was still a home. And so there's a reciprocal for a lot of people, a lot of tribal citizens. And, again, I can only speak for myself.
Nadine Bill:Those are things that I've witnessed personally. Those are things that I've witnessed professionally. And unfortunately, sometimes we've always put this connotation on on reservations that they're marginalized, that they're not worthy of the beauty that they truly have. And so I think those misconceptions happen a lot. It should change because it's some of the most magnificent land that we have in this country.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for sharing that, Nadine. I appreciate that. Yes. What are you most excited about for the the new Minneapolis site, for Red Lake Nation College? What's kind of on the forefront that just gets you gets you up in the morning?
Ellen Wolter:You're like, oh, this is I'm so excited about this.
Nadine Bill:I am just excited about the energy that we've been able to capture here. I'm excited to come to work every day, meet our students, engage in their stories, hear their goals, help them on their higher education journey or their learning journey. Sometimes students sometimes our students or community just come in to just be here and and be a part of what's going on. And so, I'm excited to be a hub of of connecting people. And I'm also excited to harness, be a a center of learning for non native community as well.
Nadine Bill:I wanna be a place where people come in and like, hey. What's going on at Red Lake Nation College? What's what are they doing this term? What's the what's the new thing? And just come in and visit us and and talk with us and meet with us.
Nadine Bill:And, you know, how do we how do we collaborate on on a lot of common goals? And so we're just excited. We hope to hope to increase our enrollment. We know we're we are, we're gonna definitely exceed our expectations. We're probably gonna end up with 300 students here in the fall.
Nadine Bill:So we're really excited about all this learning that's that's gonna be taking place here.
Ellen Wolter:The building itself, you know, if folks are interested in touring it or, you know, it is such a beautiful space or using it for an event, is that a possibility? Or or or how does that work exactly?
Nadine Bill:Absolutely. When we're not in session for our, our academic programming, we do have, the ability to rent space here. We've got a magnificent top deck, our deck that is awesome for receptions or get togethers. The, space here at, 900 South Third Street is right across from the US Bank Stadium. So we are centrally located in the arts and entertainment district, just one block up from the river walk area in Gold Medal Park.
Nadine Bill:So, we're really ex excited. We encourage folks just to stop by and and actually look at the architecture of the building. Sam Olbigson was our architect. He is one of 2, native architects. He's from the White Earth Reservation, who helped us design and help create this vision with us.
Nadine Bill:And, it's kind of it's I marvel about about the building too. I just I love being in here and and, absorbing the
Ellen Wolter:the space and and where we're at. Well, he your team did an amazing job. It is such a beautiful space, and I didn't get to the rooftop when I was there. So I need to make sure I go next time and do that. And I saw some pictures and yeah.
Nadine Bill:Yes. Yes. Please come back.
Ellen Wolter:Thanks. And thanks so much for your time today.
Nadine Bill:Thank you.
Ellen Wolter:Thank you for listening to Side by Side. We welcome your emails at sidebysideumn.edu. Side by Side is a production of the University of Minnesota Extension and is written and hosted by me, Ellen Walter. Nancy Rosenbaum is our senior producer. Special thanks to Jan Jackola, who designed our wonderful logo, and Jim Griswold, who sings and plays guitar in our opening and closing credits.
Nadine Bill:It really doesn't matter at all.
Ellen Wolter:You can find episodes of Side by Side wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode. I'm Ellen Walter, and this is Side by Side.
Nadine Bill:Singing a song side by side.