FSUnativeAlumni

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….