Prairie Sages
About ten years ago my wife and I, with the help of a few anonymous colleagues, started an endowment at our university for Native American students. We already had a small endowment to help Native American nursing students.
I wanted one that would help those students who would become storytellers: historians, educators, artists, journalists, pastors, theologians, philosophers—and perhaps most importantly, lawyers.
Tribal elders have told me that one of the big challenges if you live on one of the reservations in South Dakota is that it’s easy to lose land and businesses, hard to pass them on to the next generation. Lawyers who know these things—and who graduate without debt so they don’t have to charge extreme fees—can make a huge difference.
Thanksgiving Day seems as good a day as any to invite you to join me in giving to my students. If you like, www.givecampus.com/campaigns… and then you’ll have to “Select a Designation,” then select “Other,” and then type in “Prairie Sage Endowment.”
I know, it’s clunky. I have no control over that website. But I have some control over my money, my time, and my knowledge, and I gladly give them to my students as I can.
I’m happy to report that each year one or two students (mostly from regional tribal nations) are getting half their tuition paid this way.
I’d love to do more, but big things often start small.
Join me if you can.
(Photo: one of the liatris species native to this part of the prairie. It’s not sage, but I like the way it rises up quietly and delicately, offering beautiful blossoms to the local pollinators, and then sending its seeds into the wind. It’s a perennial, and it will bloom again next year, surrounded by other grasses and forbs with which it shares the space. I took the photo last summer while on a run along the trails at Good Earth State Park, which is in a place where there used to be huge seasonal gatherings of the indigenous peoples of this region. It was like a seasonal city, with thousands of people gathering for a while before moving on. The parks on both sides of the Big Sioux River have some stones and some land art that still tell stories about the gatherings of people who came here perhaps for many centuries.)
