A haphazard group of Creighton faculty, staff, students and administrators are helping to give high school students from South Dakota’s Red Cloud Indian School a chance to continue their educations – and maybe win a prestigious scholarship in the process.

The Rev. Raymond Bucko, S.J., along with nine faculty and staff members drove nine hours over fall break to the Pine Ridge Reservation and spent a day working with students on their Gates Millennium Scholarship applications. The group was participating in the the Gates Millennium Outreach Program, an initiative to help minority high school students take advantage of the opportunities offered by the scholarship, mainly monetary access to higher education, said Tami Buffalohead-McGill, director of Creighton’s Education Opportunities Program.

“We do more than just telling them how to apply for the scholarship,” Buffalohead-McGill said. “We walk them through exactly what they need to do in their junior year to prepare for

the scholarship.”

Buffalohead-McGill said Creighton uses the Gates scholarship as a vehicle for higher education.

“Everything they have to do for the Gates scholarship is what they have to do to go to college. They have to apply to colleges. They have to do a FAFSA. They have to write essays. They have to have a resumé,” she said. “It’s a good marriage between Creighton and the Gates program.”

At the reservation, the Creighton faculty and staff were paired with one or more Red Cloud students, who they will mentor through the process of preparing for college and applying for the Gates scholarship, which pays for the cost of college and any of the recipient’s remaining needs.

“When the Gates scholarship came out, it was clear that a lot of Native students weren’t completing the scholarships because they were so difficult and involved,” Bucko said. “Tami Buffalohead and myself came up with the idea of having faculty come and mentor the students and work with them directly and encourage them to finish up in time.”

Bucko, department chair for Creighton’s department of Sociology and Anthropology and director of the Native American Studies program, said the mentorship program accomplishes two main goals: allowing Creighton to serve the reservation and to educate faculty and staff about the realities of the reservation to help them relate to their Native American students.

“It helps people, but it also helps us to be better mentors for Native students,” Bucko said. “We don’t know their situations – with students who come from very different cultural and economic backgrounds, there’s often things we miss, and this helps us learn that.”

Arts & Sciences sophomore Cante Knight was a Gates scholarship applicant when he attended Red Cloud Indian School. While he was home over fall break, he gave a tour of the reservation to the Creighton mentors, which included a trip to the historical Wounded Knee Massacre site and a visit to a local radio station.

Knight said the Creighton faculty and staff in the mentorship initiative have a big impact on the students at Red Cloud, who need to meet 3.3 cumulative GPA to qualify for the Gates scholarship.

“Just because they meet the requirements, it doesn’t mean that they necessarily want to go to college because they don’t really think they have a chance out there. They don’t really think they deserve it,” Knight said. “But Creighton faculty members kind of pat them on the back, say they’re good enough, that they should come to college, and they help them write the essays.”

Buffalohead-McGill said the faculty immersion trips are valuable for the faculty because when they come back to Creighton they may have some Native American students in their classes, and now they understand their background.

“When some of the students actually choose to come to Creighton, the beautiful thing is they already have a relationship with a faculty mentor that can continue that relationship with them, so they feel connected to the campus,” she said.

Since the Gates scholarship was started in 1999, Red Cloud’s yearly recipients have multiplied.

“When we first started working with Red Cloud, we only had one student that was even eligible for the scholarship,” Buffaloahead-McGill said. “Now we’re averaging about eight scholarships for Red Cloud for a small student body of about 40 seniors.

“That’s really remarkable.”

Knight said Red Cloud probably produces so many scholarship winners because its students are well rounded and challenged academically.

“You have a lot to talk about, coming from the reservation,” Knight said. “A lot of the students have to know their past, know what’s on the reservation, but live in the future. The future is like the outside world.”

“The reservation is difficult and beautiful to live in. It’s an ongoing struggle, but there’s so much history there,” he said. “I think students are able to write a lot about the different struggles growing up, the good they experienced, how they relate to the outside world.”

The mentorship initiative has not only made a big impact at Red Cloud – it’s made a big impact at Creighton. Each year, Creighton has 10 to 11 students enrolling with a Gates Scholarship, Buffalohead-McGill said.

“We currently have anywhere between 38 and 40 students that are Gates Scholars at Creighton. We’re basically looking at a little over $1.5 million in Gates Scholarship money annually just from these kids,” she said. “They could go to any college they wanted to – they could go to Harvard, Princeton, whatever school they wanted to attend, and they could take that scholarship with them – but they chose to enroll at Creighton.”

Bucko, who led the immersion trip, said the faculty and staff involvement is important for Creighton.

“South Dakota’s nine hours away, but it’s a different world. You see some things there that you’d see in very poor parts of other countries, but also there’s a real richness,” Bucko said.

“It isn’t just about going to help people, it’s about making an exchange, making relatives and relationships. That’s a very big concept on the reservation – making friends, making relatives – and you do that by mutual help. That’s what we try to do.”