Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Haudenosaunee Promise Scholars

Brad Horn
TRT 7:22
promise_scholar_for_prx.mp2
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The first student to graduate as part of a Syracuse University scholarship for native students just got his degree last month. Created in 2006 under the direction of SU’s Chancellor Nancy Cantor, the program is one of only a handful of programs in the country that allows qualified Native Americans to attend a university free of charge. Independent producer Brad Horn has this story on the hopes for the program and its first graduate.

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Construction noises, conversations about siding colors.

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I stood with Montgomery Lyons and his girlfriend, Wayva Waterman, and watched their new home being built on the Onondaga reservation just south of Syracuse. Last Friday he finished his undergraduate coursework in psychology at Syracuse university—debt free I should add—and SHE’LL soon have a degree from a very prestigious school: Stanford. They both plan to attend graduate school. The couple has everything to look forward to. But it wasn’t always that way. Not long ago it seemed possible Monte, as Montgomery is known, might not graduate at all. It started when his parents divorced—he was a student at Bucknell at the time and had yet to transfer to SU.

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14:05 I was about 18 or 19 when they got divorced. And it’s pretty easy in a college environment to do self-destructive behavior if that’s what you wanna do. Trying to deal with it by not dealing with it sort of thing, and that’s just a cycle was just going down, down, down...........

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But a couple events started to turn things around for Monte.

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“I would have to say, even though this sounds kind of cliché, but I found my girlfriend. I never really talked to anybody about that sort of stuff. I always just kind of kept it inside: “oh, I don’t really need to deal with it...” I trusted her and could talk to her—felt that I could—then the Haudenosaunee Promise came and that really made me decide to go to Syracuse University. I mean I wanted to get a fresh start, close that chapter keep moving forward as they say.”
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Monte is the first graduate of the Haudenosaunee Promise Scholar program, which began in 2006. The scholarship allows academically-eligible members of the Haudenosaunee tribes to attend Syracuse all expenses paid, including room and board. Over four years the package would be worth more than $160,000. The Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy, are the tribes of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. Their territories are in several US states, including New York, and in Canada.

Chancellor Nancy Cantor is the person primarily responsible for the creation of “The Promise,” as the scholarship is known. I played her a portion of an my interview with Monte.
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“....And that Promise...I’d just like to thank Nancy Cantor and the board of Trustees at Syracuse University for giving me this opportunity to change my life. And I think it’s changed a lot of Natives peoples’ lives.
13:50 It’s very, very moving. And he’s an extraordinary person, done wonderful things. It’s great to see that it’s taking off and having an effect.”

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As provost of the University of Michigan in the 1990’s, Cantor became known for her steadfast push for affirmative action policies, believing that diversity inherently makes a campus a better place to learn. That same philosophy is clearly at work in her decision to bring the Promise to SU.

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14:30 For me, the really most important thing is that we think of how programs like this open doors of opportunity, but also are a real two-way street: they change the nature and the richness and the diversity and the intellectual vibrancy and social vibrancy of the university, as well. These are not simply programs for individual students or even groups of students, but they’re also ways of transforming the institution and of bringing to life history and culture and religion and the experiences of the world that different standpoints on the world bring to bear.”

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What I guess she expects, and what the students do, is to help the university learn about a different way of being in this world. Different than an American way of being........

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Regina Jones, an Oneida Indian who lives on the Onondaga reservation, is the director of the university’s Native Student Program.

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There’s actually just four simple principles: we always give Thanksgiving to the creator for the natural world, take only what you need, and use everything you take. And the fourth is don’t think of. If you think of thes 4 principles, it’s sustainability.

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Jones is the “campus mom” of sorts for the native students at SU. Her post was created with the inception of the Promise Scholarship, and in her two and a half years on the job she’s seen significant changes. When she started in 2006 there were only 18 native students on a campus of more 20-thousand. Today there are more than 100...60 of whom are Promise Scholars.

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28:55 The first Promise scholar is graduating in December. And I see Monte as one of my people graduating from college and it makes me proud. And I’m not seeing him as a Haudenosaunee Promise Scholar. That’s not tying in. I see him as a native person graduating with a degree, and with plans. Plans for a future and plans to include his people.

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Monte intends to return to the Onondaga nation as a counselor or clinical psychologist with the hopes of serviing a community with more than its share of challenges.

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I think that I’d just be able to connect with people better. Like I said, I come from a small community and they know who I am. They know who my family is. Like I said, everyone knows everybody......and everything about everybody...[laughs].....that in itself would lend towards me being a credible person to talk with about some of these issues.

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When I talked with Chancellor Cantor she told me this is exactly the type of cycle they’d hoped to establish when she and tribal elders envisioned the program functioning at its best: students going back home to heal the social fabric of their communities.

Monte’s grandfather is Oren Lyons, faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation and a former SU professor. He was instrumental in establishing The Promise. He was out of the country when I visited the Lyons’ home, but I was able to speak with Oren’s wife and Monte’s grandmother, Beverly Lyons. She was one many Native people I spoke with who expressed a deep sense of gratitude toward Cantor.

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I just think it’s a brilliant, brilliant decision on her part to bring together.....I mean SU is an awesome school. We have an awesome culture, we believe....and to have someone make such an offer and obviously respect the Nation and recognize the contributions is, well, it’s unheard of. It really is. It’s unheard of.

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Montgomery Lyons will join his girlfriend in California for her last semester at Stanford. But he’ll return to Syracuse in May to walk in the commencement ceremony with the 10 other native students who transferred into SU with him in 2006. Together, they will make up the first graduating class of Haudenosaunee Promise Scholars.