"Blacks have been motivated by seeing successful black faculty and black administrators. They have been better able to associate and identify because of that. That is missing for the Indian student," Terri Brayboy says in a March 15, 1978 quote in The Daily Tar Heel.
Native American students on campus in the 1970s felt people only thought of blacks when thinking of minorities. Often when minority programs were planned, the Native American students had to ask to be included when the program coordinators should have come to them. The overall feeling among Native American students at the time was a sense of not only being forgotten, but also of being discriminated against.
In an interview on April 23 with Kevin Maynor, UNC alumnus and current employee, he told me the story of his older sister who was "turned away because she was Indian." In a quote from the March 20, 1977 DTH, Maynor said "White people look down on Indians because they're afraid of Indians; really, it's the white person who loses out. There are many Indians all around North Carolina, but most white people don't know it -- won't admit it. Hopefully, we can increase awareness in the richness and existence of American Indian culture right in their society."
With this sense of duty to educate the UNC community and the want to provide a social haven for Native American students, Maynor and others formed the Carolina Indian Circle in the spring of 1975. CIC was based on grassroots efforts to educate and change UNC's campus to present a better image of Native Americans. It also strove to bring more Native American students to UNC and to keep these students enrolled once they got here.
Despite the passion from its members, many of them felt frustrated. A Native American graduate student in 1978 noted that the difference between groups like the Black Student Movement -- formed in 1967 -- and the CIC is that Native Americans were politically powerless on campus and elsewhere. It was easy to ignore the demands of CIC and other Native American students.
As in the early days of the Carolina Indian Circle, Native American students today feel politically powerless and easy to ignore. Despite the passion and dedication of the CIC's many members, the progress after 26 years remains slow-going.
In an informal survey I conducted for this article, I found that 97 percent of those who chose to answer said that they would take classes about Native American groups and issues if more were offered. This fall five are offered in three departments -- American studies, anthropology and history -- compared with one course in the anthropology department in 1978.
Of those who chose to answer, 79 percent said that they would attend lecture series featuring speakers and subjects surrounding Native Americans. Despite these encouraging statistics, only 25 percent of those who answered said they ever went to UNC's Powwow, which is a free event held every spring by the CIC.
Today the CIC's main goals are to assist Native Americans academically and socially, to bring about a stronger awareness and appreciation of Native Americans on campus and in the community and to aid the University in recruitment and retention of Native American students.
