Editor's note: Check back on August 4 for the audio version of this story.
Along the back of the gallery in the Clark County Commission Chambers sits a large group of Native American high school students from Nevada, Arizona, and Montana. They’re all wearing black T-shirts that read “UNLV … 2026 Native Youth Camp.” Tick Segerblom, Clark County Commissioner for District E and former state lawmaker, sees them from the dais and walks up.
“Thank you all for coming, it means a lot to us,” Segerblom tells the group. “Don’t gamble, though.”
The students are a part of this year’s UNLV Native Youth College Camp. Over four days, they explore the city and receive presentations from industry experts about the career paths available when they attend college. Camps like these help Native American students visualize themselves studying the fine arts, STEM, hospitality, policy, and law.
One of the students planning out her future is Brooklyn Williams, an enrolled member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe who’ll enter her senior year of high school in the fall. But she already knows she wants to attend UNLV to pursue either hospitality or law. Since the college is in Nevada, and she is a member of a federally recognized tribe, Williams would also qualify for the Native American Fee Waiver, which makes school even more affordable.
“I feel like I have a lot of support to get the funding, to help me decide where I can put all that funding in each section,” Williams says.
As of 2019, the rate of Native Americans who had at least a high school education was 88 percent, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics — only a few points away from the national average that year. But the rate of Natives with a bachelor’s degree or higher was just under 17 percent, less than half the national average of 36 percent. It became apparent that there is a Native American higher-education crisis.
The financial hardship of attending college and underfunded K-12 programs are among factors cited as causes. It’s also historical trauma, says Fredina Drye-Romero, the Nevada Department of Education’s education programs professional for Indian education. She’s an enrolled member of the Kaibab Band of Paiutes and grew up both on the Kaibab Indian and Moapa River Indian reservations.
“I think (of) the atrocities that our Native people have faced historically, with education being one of those places where it wasn’t us,” she says.
When Drye-Romero graduated from high school in 1989, she didn’t have the same resources Indigenous students have today, she says, noting, “Nobody talked to me about college.”
Her father helped her fill out an application to tribal college, where she wasn’t accepted at first. But she was determined to go, so they applied again and were accepted into the Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas.
“I was so excited, and I was pumped, because it was the first time I was learning about myself, my people,” she says.
Going from living on a reservation to a mainstream higher-ed institution can be a culture shock for Native students who don’t see themselves in the curriculum. Drye-Romero lived this alienation when she finished her bachelor’s and master’s at the University of Kansas.
“It’s not their culture, it’s a different culture,” she says. “It’s a different way of thinking. It’s having to reframe your mind because you’re learning something that’s not what you were raised with.”
To get Indigenous students to go to college, UNLV’s Tribal Education Initiative has started hosting the Native Youth Camps for high school students. “We’re working really hard at trying to create systems in place where our students feel like it’s a part of them,” Drye-Romero says.
In 2021, Nevada became one of more than 10 states to enact the Native American fee waiver law. In the 2021-22 school year, the Nevada System of Higher Education helped 140 students, awarding them $457,449 to aid with college expenses. These grants are opportunities for students to study for career paths that have the potential to uplift tribes and their families.
Williams has her heart set on going to college and becoming an example for her two younger sisters. She’ll be the first in her immediate family to attend a four-year college.
“I want to make a good impression for my younger ones,” she says, “and I want to make all my older family and my parents proud, and give them a sense of support, too, once it gets to my time to help them.
