This past weekend, 17 Native American Dartmouth students attended the Yale University Midwinter Social to meet with Native students from across the Ivy League, eat Native foods like frybread and chowder, watch dances and listen to drumming from popular regional powwow groups.
The Association of Native Americans at Yale worked with the nonprofit Spirit Lake, LLC, to put on the social that included dancing, spoken word poetry and a raffle to raise funds for the nonprofit’s youth basketball league.
The event, open to all Yale students, also extended invitations to the Ivy Native Council, the New York City based American Indian Community House, Yale Native alumni and Native people from Connecticut.
The Ivy Native Council arranges two annual conferences, where Natives from across the Ivy League come together, NAD member Sara Schomburg ’18 said. This past fall the conference was held at Brown University and the spring event will take place at Harvard University.
The Ivy Native Council aims to promote and preserve the understanding of indigenous cultures of the Americas, to raise awareness of indigenous issues and to foster networks among any and all indigenous students and alumni of the Ivy League, according to their Facebook page.
In addition to these formal conferences, most of the Ivy League schools will hold powwows or other social events throughout the year, NAD member Brooke Hadley ’18 said. Powwows are events that celebrate Native American cultures through food, song, dance and drum ceremonies.
Hadley said that she believes that Dartmouth sent the largest number of students to the event, with 17 participants, all from the Classes of 2017 and 2018. She contacted the Ivy Native Council at Yale and organized vans to take Dartmouth students to the event.
She said that she enjoyed the experience, and in particular the opportunity to eat traditional Native foods and enjoy the community aspect of the event.
“We still have a GroupMe amongst all the students that came,” Hadley said. “I think it created a bond and a continuing relationship.”
Hadley noted that for Dartmouth’s powwow in the spring she plans to arrange hosts for students who attended the Yale social. She said that she hopes to develop relationships between Native communities across the Ivy League during her time at Dartmouth.
Brandi Reano ’18 said that she attended the conference because she has friends from several other Ivy League schools that she was hoping to see, many of whom she met during the Brown conference she attended last fall.
“I really like powwow music,” Reano said. “There was a mini powwow — so to be around that kind of music and people I genuinely like is what I looked forward to.”
Reano said that the social was well executed. She said that the familiar faces, music, laughing and joking around made the social a good experience.
“It was really meaningful to have a lot of Natives in one central location,” Reano said.
Schomburg said that she appreciates that the Native American communities in the Ivy League are not competitive with each other.
“I feel like it’s super inclusive and I think we all really just look forward to getting together,” she said.
Schomburg added that it was fun to go to Yale and see how campus life there compares to Dartmouth.
All three NAD members interviewed said that the Native community at the College is similar to those at other Ivy League schools, with the exception of its larger size.
Reano said that having a bigger community comes with advantages and disadvantages. She noted that the program at Dartmouth is more established and has more resources than other Ivies’ programs.
She noted that the larger, more widespread community means that students do not get to be together as much. She said that she believes smaller communities at other schools, such as Yale and Brown, are more connected and get together more often.
Schomburg said that the College’s strong Native community is part of what drew her to the College. She noted programs like the Native Fly-In Program that provides Native seniors an opportunity to visit Dartmouth and Native Pre-Orientation that helps Native students feel welcome.
While she said she enjoyed learning more about Native culture at Yale, “at the end I was really excited to come back here,” Schomburg said.
