[Music] Lakeland Currents, your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

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Welcome to Lakeland Currents.

I'm your host Todd Haugen.

My guest today is the president of Red Lake Nation College.

His name is Dan King and we wanted to ask him some information and questions about Red Lake Nation College.

Dan welcome to Lakeland Currents.

Boozhoo.

Thanks for having me today.

I'm really excited about coming in and talking about Red Lake Nation College.

Well it's an exciting place and I think all you have to do is drive by that impressive building in Red Lake to think, you know if they don't know what it is, they're going to say, they're certainly going to wonder.

Yeah.

Is Red Lake Nation College just for Red Lake Nation members?

No, actually we're a public school so everybody's welcome.

We get federal funds so we cater to obviously to Native Americans.

We consider ourselves a family college, so we're really the college for all of our tribal members we hope come to our school.

We're open to other Natives and we're open to anybody, really any citizen is welcome at our college so and we feel like we're the best value, the most affordable college in Minnesota.

What's the enrollment of Red Lake Nation College Dan?

We're right about close to 300 in this last year and we're never going to be a huge school.

That's kind of our unique niche is we provide excellent higher education that's grounded in our language and culture and so really our goal is, we always say, we're in the people business.

We're building people up.

We build up their confidence.

We build up their academic skills and then after two years, we're a two-year school, so we feel like after that two years we want them to say you know what I could go to BSU or I could go to the University of Minnesota or Augsburg or Dartmouth like some of our students have done.

So, once given the opportunity and the education and then that self-pride and self-awareness of knowing about their culture, language, and their history, that builds our people up and then they're ready to go to that next level.

So that's really our mission.

And credits earned at Red Lake Nation College readily transfer to these other facilities?

Exactly, exactly.

We actually have to have the same regional accreditation through the higher learning commission, so we have the same exact accreditation as Notre Dame or the University of Minnesota or any other great university in the Midwest.

So we have to meet those same academic standards and then we have articulation agreements with all the other Minnesota state schools, so we kind of set our curriculum up so it matches perfectly with Minnesota, so that when our students want to transfer to BSU or somewhere else, they just say oh you're from Red Lake, we have an agreement, all your credits seamlessly transfer.

So it works out really good for us and then we're a good feeder system to like Bemidji State is probably our top school we send students to.

With your enrollment of 300 students right now Dan, is there still room for more?

Oh definitely.

Yeah and we are expanding our successful model.

We feel like our special sauce is really small classes, personalized attention.

About 80% of our students are first generation college students, meaning that they're the first ones in their family to go to college, so they need a lot of extra help and support.

So that's why we have to be small classes, personalized attention.

We help them with financial aid.

We offer free tutoring.

We offer a tech backpack, so every student who comes gets a laptop and free internet for the whole time they're in college, and we almost have to provide that because a lot of our students couldn't afford a laptop and they have, you know, not the greatest internet service.

So we provided all of that for everybody so that it helps them stay in school and finish and graduate.

Do high school students at Red Lake High School or any other high school for that matter, can they transfer their AP credits, too?

Exactly and we have a PSEO program, we actually work with Red Lake High School and we've done it before with Trek High School in Bemidji and now in Minneapolis we have two agreements with the schools down there because we're transferring our successful model, not only to serve our members on the reservation, but more and more of our members are living like in Minneapolis, St Paul, the Twin Cities, Duluth, everywhere else.

So we're serving them by offering this other campus that's right down there in downtown Minneapolis.

So we're actually opening this spring in like March of '24 and it's serving not only our members, we have about 6 to 8,000 members down there, but the 50,000 Native Americans in the Twin Cities.

So we'll be one of the first tribal colleges located in a major urban setting in the country.

This will be the first time that's happening.

So, you know, that's really what's happening is Natives are moving off of the reservation.

About 80% of natives in the country live off of reservations, and of those 80% who live off, 60% live in big cities like Minneapolis.

So that's what we're striving to do is to serve those members not only in person, but like how we do it we call it high flex, so they're either in person or online, it's up to the student.

We kind of had to do that during Covid and it really worked well so we're continuing that after.

Yeah.

It's pretty exciting about this new facility in the Twin Cities.

Is this a brand new building?

Well it's actually, it's an old building from 1905, and we bought, it's actually three buildings, it's like a little mini block.

We're right across from US Bank Stadium, so we could actually throw a rock and hit US Bank Stadium, it's that close.

So we're right across the street and then the Metro train goes right by our building, the bus lines go right by the building.

It's in a nice up and coming area of downtown Minneapolis.

We're kind of in the Arts and Theater District.

So it's a beautiful facility.

I love it when those old buildings get fixed up, you know, they look nice so you're kind of paying respect to that history but also updating and so it's going to be a green, 21st century campus with a third floor rooftop overlooking the stadium and the skyline of Minneapolis.

It's pretty amazing.

So that's going to be a $16 million facility, so I'm really proud of our tribe for stepping up and really being the leaders to say we're going to make higher education like the cornerstone of what we do.

We're investing in our tribal members because like up in Red Lake you mentioned the beautiful campus with the 300ft eagle wing and, you know, that's really to show that hey, we didn't want to just build a square box building, but we wanted to build something that said something about who we are as a people and we wanted to pay respect to our culture.

So the eagle with the wings, you know, kind of like accepting people in and it's just been a really beautiful facility with overlooking the gorgeous Red Lake and it's on that 75 foot cliff so it's gorgeous.

So I think we have one of the prettiest college campuses in the country.

But now this one in Minneapolis is going to kind of do the same thing where we're serving, you know, the Native community down there.

Dan that building in Red Lake it's beautiful, it's certainly striking, but I think when you look at it you read something more than just beauty, it's pride.

Oh yeah.

Yeah exactly.

And well the eagle is a very spiritual symbol and animal in our culture so it really it soars up there high with the gods.

It has the great vision and there's a lot of spirituality, a lot of respect, high respect, for the eagle and what it symbolizes.

So we wanted to incorporate that into our building.

So in really for all Native cultures, you know, the eagle is one of the highest symbols of spirituality, power, vision, strength, courage, and so we wanted to make that part of our facility and so it's really worked out that way.

I remember when I was giving a tour when we opened the facility we had one of our elders, I saw she had a tear in her eye, and I said what's the matter and she said I never thought we'd see a building like this on our reservation and so there's a lot of pride in our facility.

And so I'm really, I couldn't be more proud of our tribal leadership for investing in that.

We built that capitol, which was the center of our reservation, and we put a college right in the middle of that.

Education, higher education, for our people, which I think is the best investment we ever made, is investing in our people.

That was a $12 million facility.

The government center, everything, was $21 million and then it's a $16 million facility down in downtown Minneapolis.

So our Tribal Council has really gone all in.

They put all the chips on the table and said we need to educate our tribal members for the future.

When we were building that campus in 2011 we did a market study to see if we had the critical mass to have a college to support one, and so we found out yes we did.

But we also found out that the average four-year attainment at that time in the US for four-year degrees was about 29% for the US on average.

For a four-year attainment for Red Lake it was 1.5%.

So that's not an education gap, that's an education canyon, so we need everything.

We need teachers, we need doctors, lawyers, nurses, we need accountants, we need managers, we need social workers.

We need everything, any field you can think of we need it.

So that's why our tribe said all right, you know, do we want to continue on, we were like a satellite campus of Leech Lake and I asked the council I said, you know, we could stay as a satellite of Leech Lake and be, you know, Leech Lake Tribal College Red Lake site, and we were doing okay doing that.

But we said no, they said no, we want to be Red Lake Nation College.

So I said well this is a long investment.

We need a campus.

We need, it's 10 years to get accreditation and a big investment, so they made that big investment.

So they invested, you know, some years they were supporting us with a million dollars in operational funds just to get to that point.

So we got to that point, we got our accreditation, and then now we're expanding down to serve Minneapolis.

So I give our tribal leadership a lot of credit for having the courage to say all right we're going all in on this, we want our tribal members trained for what let's say 2050 is what our goal is to be educationally sovereign, which would mean where we have enough tribal members to fill all our top positions.

Whereas right now we can't.

A lot of our teachers, a lot of our managers at our gaming operations, they're non-members.

You know like our DNR is a good example.

We have one of the largest Department of Natural Resource departments in the country, about 55 people.

Only a handful are tribal members.

Why?

Because we don't have water quality specialists, they don't have biology degrees, they don't have forestry management, you know, degrees and that's what we need in order to manage all of our, we have a million acres, we're one of the largest tribes in the country.

We're actually bigger than the state of Rhode Island, our square footage, our mileage.

So we are large but we don't have enough tribal members to manage all that.

So that's why we're looking at adding business programs, four-year degrees down the road and, you know, DNR, natural resources, nursing.

So we're looking at adding a nursing program.

So there's just a lot of needs with our tribe, but to me it all starts with education.

So I think education is kind of the key for us.

What will be the enrollment capacity of the operation in the Twin Cities?

I would say that's probably going to be about 400 or 500 just like it is up in Red Lake.

Our capacity is about 525, so another 500 down there.

So we're never going to be a huge college, you know, and our membership's about 18,000 approximately.

So, you know, I would say you know a 1,000 probably capacity will be probably on the high end.

I would see us being maybe 3 to 400 students on average at any time at both locations and Minneapolis might end up having more than Red Lake just because there's a bigger population down there.

And you mentioned earlier what a great bargain Red Lake Nation College is.

What does it cost to go to school there?

We're about $195 a credit which is way cheaper than if you look around at most schools, even state schools.

We're about $4,200- $4,400 a year.

You know most state schools are about $10 to $12,000.

Private schools are about 50, mid-50s,$50,000.

I remember when I went to St Thomas back in the day, that was a long time ago, even that it was like $15,000 that was back in the 80's you know.

But, you know, just seeing what those tuition costs are.

My daughter goes to the U of M, so that's about $33,000 we pay a year.

So one of the great things about our school is almost 100% of our students graduate with zero debt.

So in other words they finish at least two years with no debt, but then once they transfer to somewhere else they might have to take out some loans but they at least finished those first two years with zero debt.

We don't offer any student loans.

We help every student get grants and things they don't have to pay back.

So to me that's really important too because the amount of debt that the average student, I think I was reading that about $33,000 is the average four-year debt in this country from a student graduating and that's kind of a lot to you know you're trying to get a car, you're trying to find a place to live, and then you got to pay all this money on debt, on student loans.

So that's a real problem.

But for our school that's how we manage it and we commit.

We don't turn any of our students away due to lack of funds, so we find a way to make it work.

Do you have student housing available?

We don't have housing right now and that's one of our future challenges.

We have a lot of people with not only food insecurities but housing insecurities so that's a big challenge for us.

So down the road that is one of our goals is to provide student housing, that's one thing we don't have right now.

I think you kind of already explained it Dan, but for students that are thinking they're in high school right now or maybe they've been out of school for a while and they never went to college, why should a student or a young person, young or old for that matter, go to college, what's the point?

Well I think overall just the broad education.

You know I think it's a great thing to have even a liberal education, which is kind of what we provide right now.

We provide that two years of general education and then after the general education then they would transfer to get a major, whether computer science or business or nursing or whatever, but those first two years help you figure out what you want to do.

And I think that's what that did for me, too.

I remember my first couple years in college and there's a lot of fear that goes along, we all remember what it's like going to college, you don't know what's going to happen, it's just like the first day of high school, you know.

But I think for our tribal members it's finding out about yourself, learning about your tribal history, your language, your culture, and then also planning for that next level because if we only have 1.5% of our tribal membership, and a lot of tribes are maybe not that low but you know still way below the US averages, so we don't have enough Natives in really across the country to manage their own tribes and to be leaders in their own communities.

We need educated tribal members.

So in order to survive in the future I think it's that critical that we need to have our own tribal members to be the accountants, to be the doctors, and the planners, and planning the strategy for our tribes and leading our tribes.

So I think it's really transformational and it's really a requirement.

You know I tell our young people that, you know, people like I'm one of the Chiefs up in Red Lake so I'm very proud of that and that's a hereditary thing, that's nothing I did.

It just, you know, it goes down.

We're one of the only tribes in the country that still has the chief system.

So our chiefs going way back in my great, great, great grandfather was Medweganoonind, and he actually signed the treaty with Abraham Lincoln, so that created our tribe.

So that passed down to me.

So I sit in his seat on the tribal council now but I tell our young people they sacrificed a lot for us.

So they didn't sell out our land up in Red Lake, they kept it all intact in one nice big square.

We're one of only two tribes in the country that have that, so they did that to preserve.

They were looking seven generations into the future and they were protecting us so that we have our reservation now, but now it's our time to do our business and we have to get educated so that we can lead our tribe into the future.

So now it's on our young people and that's what I tell them, your connection to the past is what you have to do now and that's to get an education.

So this is really, our tribal future is on the line with education, it's that important.

It's a critical issue for us.

It's an exciting time I would think for folks like you in education that the culture is being recovered because for so long the language was almost lost, and I have to imagine the rates of people being able to speak the language today are higher than they've been for maybe a hundred years.

Well it has gone down, we're losing a lot of our speakers.

You know most of the fluent Ojibwe speakers, you know, they're in their late 60's, 70's, and 80's and they're dying you know, so we need younger people to come up and I think Red Lake is doing a good job like with our tribal college and now we have an immersion school that's teaching the youngest and to me that's really important too is to do all that because then once we get the youngest people educated in the language, and you know I'm not a language expert myself, but we have Tribal members who can do that.

You know I feel like my contribution is the business side.

You know I used to manage casinos and I never thought if you asked me 10 years or 15 years ago would you be president of a college I would have said that's the last thing I would have thought I'd be doing.

So it just happened that I kind of fell into this job and now that I'm doing it though it's probably the best thing I've ever done and I feel like this is what I'm supposed to be doing right now is making sure that our colleges are financially sustainable into the future and that we're laying the foundation, and so that's kind of what I feel like I'm doing.

It's kind of weird how that worked out.

Like sometimes I've been doing my job and I feel like this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, all of my business training at St. Thomas and my education from Harvard is all designed to help me do what we're doing right now for our tribe.

And so to build our tribe up for education and the fact that our tribe is following that and doing it and everybody's kind of moving in one direction for that, to support that, that's a really good feeling.

Like I know we're making an impact and we're changing people's lives because once they get educated then we see a lot of parents going to school with their children, so they're getting education, and then their children are going.

Our students are a little older, they average about 29 years old, mostly they're female and with children.

You know about 70-80% of our students have children so.

Well that has to be a challenge, you know, especially if you have children.

Is there any child care available through the school?

Yeah we do have two daycare centers on our college.

We have a GED program right in our college and we kind of follow a business model so what we do is we don't try to run things like a cafe.

You know I know how hard it is to run like a business, like a food business, from the casinos.

So we try to, we like lease out space in our building.

We lease it out to them and let them run it.

You know then they're, you know, it's a private person does that.

Same thing with the daycares.

You know we have a Head Start program.

We lease out the space and they run it.

You know we have the GED program.

We let one of our tribal programs run that, we just lease out the space.

So we don't try to do everything, but we try to make it so that our revenues are covering our expenses.

So in a way we kind of do things a lot different than normal colleges, but it's really helped us, because right now our growth has been 25%.

This year we grew 42.5%.

Next year we're going to be about the same, so our numbers are going like this, whereas in the country most education numbers are going the opposite way and then they're closing and shutting down programs and that's just the, well partly just the number of people born in these certain years.

We knew this was coming, the numbers are dropping.

So it was kind of a natural thing.

But then combined with Covid and everything else, you know, just kind of a perfect storm of declining enrollment.

And you already mentioned it, but your students tend to be a little older than average.

Yeah older than mainstream.

We're getting more and more right out of high school but our average student is a little bit older.

They're usually working and they're going back to school and they have children at the same time, so they're juggling a lot and I give them a lot of credit for doing that.

But we offer a lot of extra support: free tutoring like I mentioned, the laptops, free internet, wraparound services, student support.

Or they can come in, we have a food shelf that's open, so we have to provide a lot of extra help that most mainstream schools don't.

So we provide that help mainly because we need to.

Are there some of your programs Dan that students can go through in two years and look to expect to get a high paying or decent paying job when they finish?

Yeah.

All of our students they're either transferred to another school and they're going to schools like BSU or Augsburg, University of Minnesota where more and more go to the U of M. As I mentioned we had one student go to Dartmouth.

So they're going, they're transferring everywhere.

But the ones who don't, they're making an average of $10,000 more in salary than when they came in, so we are finding that it definitely is a big plus to have that two-year degree, and almost any national study will prove that out, that the higher you go in education, two, four-year, masters and so on your salary and your annual income is going to go up.

Right.

And if that person, whether they're a high school student or an adult who might consider themselves being older than average for going to college, if they think yeah I'd really like to, I really need to, but I have no idea how I would afford that, is it fairly easy to secure these grants that you mentioned a little while ago?

Yeah it is a really unique time for Natives, for Natives anyway.

And I tell our students this all the time.

If we're trying to get a house or trying to buy, a job, or we go shopping in Walmart or something, we get treated a little differently, you know, we usually don't get the best opportunities, you know, or we might have a security person follow us around in a store or we get pulled over because we have a license plate that is from a reservation or something.

So there's a lot of disadvantages kind of built into the system everywhere, but for education it's one of the areas where we actually have an advantage because there's a lot of federal aid, there's a lot of state aid.

Most tribes have really good scholarships so if you want to go to college and you're a Native person and if you're a Red Lake member there are many advantages.

So that's what I always tell people.

As long as you have this unique opportunity and a unique window where there's a lot of aid right now, a lot of financial aid, and the state of Minnesota has been great with supporting Indian education, so there's a lot of aid right now so it's really to every person's advantage to get that education.

Get that degree.

That's never going to hurt you, it's only going to open up more opportunities.

Is this a good time of year to visit Red Lake Nation College?

Definitely, yeah, because we start actually pretty soon.

In mid-January we start spring term.

You can start at either term, so fall or spring term, so it's always a good time.

And we tell people start early, get your financial aid all straightened out, get that done ahead of time, and like I said we don't turn anybody away due to funding.

And in the state this last year, not only has our tribe been excellent for supporting us, but the state of Minnesota has been a huge supporter.

You know for 5 years I've been working with the state legislature to get funding for tribal colleges because we were the only three public schools in the country: Red Lake, Leech Lake, and White Earth to not get state funding for our public tribal colleges because we're public schools.

And we didn't get any funding.

So it took about 5 years of going to the legislature but once we explained that to them they said, you know, that's right, we should be funding these tribal colleges, they're all Minnesota residents and they're not getting funding at the school of their choice.

So they started funding us a million dollars a year in operational funds for each tribal college.

So Red Lake, Leech Lake, and White Earth and then they supported the final $3 million of our Minneapolis campus to help finish it because we were short, you know, due to the inflation and everything's going up.

So they ended up supporting us on that, too.

So the state of Minnesota has really been a big supporter of us so we're really happy.

Dan King we are out of time for this edition of Lakeland Currents.

So really appreciate you coming into the studio today to record with us and look forward to chatting again soon.

Hopefully we can chat again next year.

Sounds good.

I'll come back.

Dan King, the president of Red Lake Nation College, our guest for Lakeland Currents.

Thank you for watching and thank you for your support of Lakeland PBS.