FSUnativeAlumni

amarius_gina

Originally uploaded by gminks

This is Amarius and I at FSU’s MLK Day Celebration in 2001.

Anyone else have some pics?

Someone that posts to my company’s internal social networking site started this meme, and I thought it would be good to continue here. I’m also going to post this on my personal blog.

The idea is to list what you have to be thankful for from the last year. Here’s a list to get it started:

• I got into grad school
• I was able to reconnect with some old friends
• My son graduated high school and started college (for those of you who don’t get to hear me complain about him, believe me, that is a big deal!!)

Anyone else want to add to the list?

 Lance posed this question:

What “actively” is the University doing to recruit native students. I know when the mascot thing was going on they said something about “outreach programs” and things of that nature. Has anyone addressed that issue from the Admin?

Does anyone know?

Eve Ensler has been writing a column in O Magazine where she asks the “best brains across the globe” what they would do to save the world. This month, Wilma Mankiller contributed her ideas:

“When people cease waiting for great leaders or prophets to solve entrenched problems and look, instead, within themselves — trusting their own thinking, believing in their own power — and to their families and communities for solutions, change will follow.

In traditional indigenous communities, there is an understanding that our lives play themselves out within a set of reciprocal relationships. If each human being in the world could fully understand that we all are interdependent and responsible for one another, it would save the world”

UWF is digging at the Falling Waters State Park in Chipley, and finding tons of artifacts. The head research person, John Phillips, is excited about the find because he feels the historical record in the inland section of NW Florida has been ignored. According to the article, he says

“The Piney Woods area of Florida needs a little bit of attention,” he said. “There’s a story to tell here.”

Boy that seems like the understatement of the year.

They are trying to determine if they have found a cave painting. Anyone know the stories for the park? I never even knew about the Negro fort in Apalachicola National Forest until Susan took me there.

We scheduled a conference call with Juan Guardia, the current director of the Office of Multi-Cultural Affairs (OMA) at FSU, to discuss why his office can’t find students to run AISU.

According to Dr. Guardia, there was a director until last year (Spring 07), when she graduated. She is currently an FSU grad student, who will hopefully be participating in this forum too. No one stepped up to apply for the director position. His office has sent emails to all undergrads who self-identified, but no one has responded. He sent emails asking that they let him know why they weren’t interested, but no one responded to those either. (As a mom of a freshman, I get that…my youngest does not communicate unless it’s on Facebook).

I told Dr. Guardia how this will be the third incarnation of a native group at FSU. We talked about how unnatural communications within student government are, and that if the students do not have strong support from the university there is no way to navigate the insane political arena that is SGA.

I told him there needs to be at least one native person on the faculty or as part of the administration. It would be nice if the University could set a goal of having 1% of the student population be native. That would be 300 students. They are not even close to that.  If there was someone native on staff, that person would know how to recruit native students. That person could serve as an advisor for native students, as well as AISU. The students would have someone to go to talk about how to cope with college. FYI, there is not one faculty member who is native, nor is there an administrator who is native.

Joe Quetone of the Florida Governor’s Council on Indian Affairs  has already offered his assistance to the OMA. I urged Dr. Guardia to use Joe’s expertise.

Dr. Guardia is now going to meet with his supervisor to see if there are any ideas for keeping the union going, and to providing better support for the native students. I offered to round up the alumni, so we could serve as a resource to support the students as well. Thus, this site was born.

That’s the high-level overview of what happened on the conference call. Please add you comments and thoughts….

This is the first post of the site. The idea here is to reconnect folks who were involved with Native issues at Florida State University, whether it was NASA, AISU, or just being native @ FSU.

If you haven’t heard, current students at FSU need our help to keep the American Indian student union going. Maybe just being examples to the kids currently in school would be some help. Also, I miss some of you guys to death!

So, we’ll post news here. Anyone can post, you just have to sign up for an account to do it (it’s the only way to prevent comment spam). Sign up, say hi, let us know how you’ve been doing. I will be adding some links, send them on if you want me to add them.

I’ll post more about me later…I just wanted to get this thing going!