Just three months into his tenure as president of the University of Wyoming, Robert Sternberg visited the Wind River Indian Reservation on Tuesday to explore strategies for bringing the university closer to the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes. “I came to reach out and say that we want to partner with the reservation,” Sternberg said in an interview after an all-day meeting with leaders of the two tribes. “Native Americans are an important population in the state. They help people understand a different way of thinking. At a university you need to see how other people see things.” Leaders of the two tribes, as well as Native students enrolled in Laramie, often see the state’s only four-year university as an unwelcoming destination. One tribal leader at the meeting on Tuesday said he knew of only a dozen students from the Wind River reservation who attend the university, a number that no one at the meeting challenged. “UW is not student friendly for our students from a rural reservation environment,” said Sergio Maldonado, an instructor and the diversity coordinator at Central Wyoming College. Maldonado said reservation leaders made that point repeatedly at the meeting with Sternberg. “The community readily acknowledged that UW has failed to maintain a relationship that is not only retaining oriented but connecting oriented.”Get the Story:
University of Wyoming president reaches out to Wind River Indian Reservation (WyoFile 10/16)
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