UAA’s Native Student Services are vital and help Alaskans succeed

I am the grandson of Elaine Abraham, founder of Native Student Services at the University of Alaska Anchorage, as well as a former student and NSS member. The current restructure of the NSS and the removal of staff members that happened really concerns me.

My grandmother had a long legacy of serving the University of Alaska and helping it grow. She was the first woman and first Alaska Native to hold a senior position in the university’s statewide administration. As the vice president for Rural Education Affairs, she helped expand the UA system to Nome, Barrow, Tanana, Kotzebue, Sitka, Ketchikan, Valdez, Kodiak and the Aleutians. With her work building Native Student Services in Anchorage, she brought in hundreds of Alaska Native students and supported them in successful educations. As her caretaker for the last 10 years of her life, I met dozens of UAA alumni who would come to thank her directly for her work and they would attribute their degree completion directly to NSS. In my own experience as a student, the NSS was a unique, safe place where I felt culturally understood and supported by both Native staff and student peers. It was a home away from home when the transition from my village of Yakutat to the city of Anchorage was difficult and overwhelming at times. I have heard this experience echoed by many, many other Alaska Native students.

Part of the About UAA page states: “Striving to be a place where every person who wants an education can be successful, UAA transforms the lives of its students and communities, while honoring our locations on the ancestral lands of Alaska’s First Peoples.” Keeping NSS in its current form is essential to making this statement true and would honor the legacy of my grandmother and the work she did for the university.

University leaders would honor Alaska Native students if they would:

1. Keep Native Student Services as it is, an independent office that offers support and services to Native students.
2. Ensure current staff members stay permanently, properly compensated and given the support needed to run NSS.
3. Change who NSS reports to, moving them to the Office of Student Success.
4. Ensure student worker positions, including tutors, are kept and funded.
5. Ensure all positions at NSS have long-term stability and credibility.
6. Keep Native Student Services as its own organization, not underneath another department or office at UAA.

Gunalchéesh, Thank you.