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Special Tthanks to Utne's Short Takes for resurfacing this article.
Chris Yazzie lives alone on a quiet stretch of land where he tends to his modest corn crop, planted with blue corn seeds from his Arizona reservation.
He left his Navajo family at 19 to attend the only tribal college in California, D-Q University, formed in 1971 after young Natives occupied a parcel of land in Davis.
Yazzie, now 25, has chosen to join that tradition of resistance. As the only student left at the troubled college, which closed abruptly in January 2005 after its accreditation was revoked, he is now the unofficial caretaker of its 643 acres, living in a single dorm room and relying on food donations and visits from the local Native community.
He is the last holdout of a group of students who had resisted the administration's order to go home until the college rectified its problems. All the students eventually left, many enrolling elsewhere.
Now, as a new school year approaches for students across the country, Yazzie is still awaiting an eventual return by Native students and faculty.
''This is very important for all Native people; a lot of people sacrificed everything for this school,'' Yazzie said. ''Just because a few people messed it up, it shouldn't reflect on the whole community.''
But it has. With mention of D-Q University often comes discussion of past mismanagement, rumors and quizzical remarks including, ''Is it still there?''
When a board member recently approached a tribe for donations, she was told, ''D-Q? I don't think so.''
But a new board formed in the summer of 2005, and several former students are now working to address many of the reasons the university lost its accreditation from The Western Association of Schools and Colleges and its BIA funding -- including a Native population that was below the 51 percent required. The rest of the student body was half Latino and some white. The premise of the school was to unite Indians from both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, hence the name: Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University.
Among the concerns outlined by WASC in its report was the school's lack of leadership. Students also accused the administration of embezzling financial aid funds. The administration denied the claims.
The school's seven-member board is now inviting people to submit applications to join the board. It needs nine more members according to college bylaws, although it has never met that requirement.
''We are pretty much a new board and we're trying to do everything by the book because that's why we lost accreditation,'' said new board member Calvin Hedrick, 40, a Mountain Maidu who is the youth program director of Inter-Tribal Council of California.
Among the changes the board has introduced includes a policy against ''handshake agreements,'' which has upset some who say it is behaving ''as a Western entity and not Indian,'' Hedrick said.
But it needs to be done, he said, when as recently as this summer people did not pay them after they hosted their sobriety pow wow on school grounds, he said.
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