Fort Lewis College began the 2015-16 school year Friday with its Convocation, officially bringing freshmen and transfer students into the collegiate fold.
“I hope you make the next four years the most exciting of your life,” associate philosophy professor Dugald Owen said in his greeting at the ceremony in a packed Whalen Gymnasium. “You’re already discovering the magnificent mountains and deserts that surround the college. With luck, you’ll get out in rainstorms, stuck on mountain passes, encounter a bear, capsize on the Animas (River). But don’t swallow.”
Incoming students had already had a couple of busy days, with a wide variety of special activities for Native American, Hispanic, transfer and international students, along with the regular new-to-college orientation.
On Thursday, the Native American Center held a full morning session for the incoming students and parents, with more than 325 parents and students attending.
“We broke the students into 10 groups, with two upperclassmen per group,” said Yvonne Bilinski, director of the center. “We wanted them to interact with each other and start forming bonds and a sense of community.”
The upperclassmen took the students on tours, showing them the buildings where their potential majors are taught and the upperclassmen’s favorite spots, which ranged from Whalen Gym to the rim overlooking Durango.
“I was surprised when I came to Fort Lewis,” said senior Trevor Gomez, 24, who has a Chippewa-Cree heritage and helped with the tours, “because I only expected tribes from the Southwest, the Navajo, the Utes, the Hopi, the Pueblos. It can be uncomfortable to be around different tribes, which have different practices for students who haven’t been around this kind of tribal diversity before.”
Two statistics stuck with him from the session, he said.
“They think that as of this freshman class, 33 to 34 percent of the Fort Lewis student body will self-identify as Native American,” Gomez said. “And nationwide, only 0.7 percent of Native Americans graduate from college.”
Some of those students may not qualify for the tuition waiver, which is a big draw for many Native American students and is a complicated formula. FLC is only one of two institutions of higher learning in the country offering the waiver along with Minnesota State University Moorhead. During the last school year, 25 percent of the student body was attending through the tuition waiver.
“This is one of the treaties the government hasn’t broken,” Gomez said. “The language of the treaty says something like the waivers will last ‘as long as the water flows and the grass grows.’”
