Beyond Access

Reviews / Votes

"Beyond Access edited by Waterman, Lowe, and Shotton demonstrates the resistance of Indigenous students and educators to deficit models that fail to account for the effects of settler-colonialism. In addition, the editors and contributors do the work of both decolonizing postsecondary education and Indigenizing education in ways that promote Native students' personal and community achievement. This text is a contribution to Native National Building and a must-read for anyone committed to Indigenizing postsecondary educational practice."

Dafina-Lazarus (D-L) Stewart, Tri-Director: Student Affairs in Higher Education Program

Colorado State University

"Beyond Access is a pressing call to academics, practitioners, and policy makers to support the specific needs of Native students. This timely book is much needed, disrupting the educational invisibility of Native students while charting new and exciting directions to foster their success."

Nolan L. Cabrera, Associate Professor, Center for the Study of Higher Education

University of Arizona

"Authors in this book engage powerful stories, Indigenous knowledge systems, and pragmatic innovations to inspire culturally strength-based college access and retention programs for Native Peoples into and through colleges and universities. Indigenous epistemologies of identity, relationship, resiliency, respect, interconnection, reciprocity, mentoring, community, spirituality, social capital, success, and well-being are highlighted. Indigenized approaches to matriculate, educate, and graduate Native college students are shared. This book offers essential learning pathways for all who serve in education."

Alicia Fedelina Chavez, Ph.D. (Apache, Spanish American) Former Dean of Students, University of Wisconsin - Madison and Co-Editor of Indigenous Leadership in Higher Education

From the Foreword:

"Beyond Access: Indigenizing Programs for Native American Student Success is another important work in the growing body of Indigenous scholarship. Stephanie Waterman, Shelly Lowe, and Heather Shotton have once again assembled an impressive group of contributing authors. Members of tribes and campus communities from across the country, the authors report on model programs designed to support the success of Native American students in undergraduate and graduate majors in a variety of institutional settings. One can clearly see that these programs are framed in Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and the 4 Rs-respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility-are in clear evidence throughout all of them."

George S. McClellan, Former Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs

Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne

Beyond Access: Indigenizing Programs for Native American Student Success serves as a follow-up to Beyond the Asterisk: Understanding Native Students in Higher Education, providing deeper insight into the lived experiences of Native American college students. Beyond Access is an intentional effort to highlight programs that help Native American college students to succeed, whether at the pre-college, undergraduate, or graduate level. The editors intertwine the stories of graduate students from diverse tribal backgrounds, highlighting their academic and personal experiences as well as the programs that support them.

As an Indigenous scholar and practitioner, I would like to emphasize the importance of this book in highlighting programs that provide access to higher education for Native American students. This is a much-needed text that allows us to begin to decolonize higher education and to honor the ways we are Indigenizing higher education through these programs. Because of this book, a wider space has been created in Indigenous higher education scholarship for future Native American students and scholars.

Teachers College Record