Just outside Schemitzun, the Annual Feast of Green Corn and Dance and one of the largest Native American pow wows in the country, two Penn recruiters have set up camp.
The sound of tribal music and drums and the glare from the late August sun overpower the women as they try to explain to passersby why they are there: to try to attract more Native-American students to join Penn's barely visible Native-American community.
An elderly woman approaches the table and asks if Penn has a Native-American studies program. When the recruiter is forced to say no, the woman backs away from the table and won't hear another word.
Valerie Hayes, director of the Office of Affirmative Action, says this tale is typical of the responses that she and Admissions Officer Laurel Williams received during their non-traditional recruiting visit. The visit was only part of Penn's recently accelerated efforts to increase its paltry Native-American population, which consists of 32 self-identifying Native-American students and only a handful of faculty and staff. Over the past year, the general sense that the University must address its conspicuous lack of Native-American students has become more widespread and urgent.
The fact is that for a growing pool of college-bound Native-American high school students, Penn just does not appear on their wish lists. And while the percentages of Native-American students at most Ivy League schools still hover well below the figure for national Native population, which has grown to 0.9 percent, Penn remains among the lowest.
Penn's Native-American student population has seen little growth in the five years since University President Judith Rodin's Agenda for Excellence called for the University to "strengthen and appreciate the diversity of its communities." The number of self-identifying Native-American students among this year's freshman class, for example, is no greater than that of 1996.
There are several factors working against the movement to increase Penn's population of Native Americans. Geographically, Penn is not as optimally located as other universities -- its urban setting and distance from centers of Native-American culture make it difficult for prospective students to see it as a top option. Historically, Penn has not made Native-American resources a top funding priority, leaving students without the cultural support that other minority groups rely on.
And, most disconcerting to groups like the United Minorities Council, as well as faculty and administrators who are interested in Native affairs, is the dwindling Native-American presence felt by the University community. Six Directions, the only Native-American student group on Penn's campus, has been defunct since 1997, and since then the voice of the Native-American population has been virtually silent.
"If they're here, they're invisible," Hayes said of Penn's Native-American students. "Essentially we're trying to create a presence out of air."
Not only is Penn's community small in numbers, but as many professors have noted, the University's atmosphere does not make Native-American students feel their culture is welcome. Namely, unlike its Ivy peers Dartmouth College and Cornell University, Penn has not committed funds to the creation of institutions like a Native-American studies program or a resource office for students for its Native-American population.
"As long as Native Americans are so poorly served in the United States' educational system, there is a need to do better than we have," Anthropology Professor Robert Preucel said. "It's a shame that here at Penn we've not made this a priority in our own history."
Penn is not the only University to find the effective recruitment of Native Americans an especially difficult task -- more difficult, even, than recruitment of other minority groups.
The reason for this, according to many, lies in the subtle difference between the cultures of Native Americans and that of other Americans.
For some Native-American students, whether or not they grew up on a reservation, having other students on campus who share their cultural background may be one reason to consider attending a school. Since the cultural differences between different Native-American nations are great, universities where many different nations are represented offer these students a better chance of finding a cultural connection.
Wharton sophomore Katherine Ali, who was born in Alaska as a Yu'pik Eskimo, said that she did not expect to find other students with her specific cultural background at Penn. But, she said, the school's diversity played a large role in where she decided to go to college.
"I wanted to go somewhere where diversity was a big issue," said Ali, whose family continued to perform traditional Yu'pik dancing, storytelling and culinary rituals even after moving to culturally diverse Los Angeles.
At Penn, institutions such as the Greenfield Intercultural Center work to celebrate and to reconcile the nuanced relationships between students of different cultures. But at a Fireside Chat conducted in February, a member of Mashantuckett-Pequot Tribal Nation, L. Buddy Gwin, pointed out a lack of sensitivity toward the cultural gap between Native Americans and other cultures on Penn's campus. One glaring example of this was a cigar-store Indian that stood in the Faculty Lounge for decades -- and greeted Gwin upon his visit there.
Subtle cultural differences may make it even more difficult for Native-American students coming from a reservation to make the transition to life in West Philadelphia. Michael Hanitchak, director of Dartmouth College's Native American Program, explained this phenomenon as students experiencing a wide range of cultural traumas and not having access to support structures.
"Something that seems as simple as homesickness is a larger issue for certain Native students," Hanitchak said.
"Say, if they come from a traditional village on a reservation, then they would be missing all the village activities that are important to the social structure of those people," he added. "It's a larger issue than just, `I miss mom's cooking.'"
Matt Liebmann, an anthropology graduate student who taught at a high school on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota before coming to Penn, added that the uniquely close-knit nature of many Native-American families, as well as the spiritual importance of physically being on native land for religious observances, makes the separation much tougher than that experienced by other college freshmen.
Resolving the issue, experts say, is not just a matter of recruiting.
Penn's Undergraduate Admissions Office has been in contact with students and counselors at Native-American reservations and high schools for several years, including Pine Ridge.
The effort to recruit Native students prompted the office to fly in six Pine Ridge students with promising academic records for a weekend in 1997. The visit was designed to show the students what Penn had to offer, and one student was so impressed that she entered as a freshman the next year.
But after several semesters the student abruptly left Penn. Liebmann, who had taught the student at Red Cloud High School, said he thought that her departure could be attributed to her sense of alienation at the University.
"I think there were a lot of separation issues for her, and there wasn't a Native community for her to tap into," Liebmann said.
The apparent failure of the office's effort to bring students to Penn supported the idea that the University can't just bring an isolated student to Penn and expect her to thrive in the face of vast cultural differences.
So when, at a 1999 University Council meeting, former United Minorities Council Chairman Jerome Byam urged University administrators to put more effort into creating a more supportive and welcoming environment for Penn's Native-American community, Hayes took it very seriously.
She brought Gwin to campus as a legal representative to help set a plan of action for Native-American admissions recruiting. Meeting with Undergraduate Admissions Dean Lee Stetson and other University administrators, Gwin outlined a set of focused directives for making Penn more attractive to Native students.
The following day, the President's Affirmative Action Council met and, per Gwin's advice, created a committee to draft a recommendation for a University-wide effort to attract Native students. Hayes submitted the recommendations to Rodin several weeks ago along with the Affirmative Action Council's year-end report. Rodin has not yet made public her decision over whether or not to approve the recommendations.
Aside from the geographic advantages schools such as Dartmouth and Cornell offer to Native-American students, what makes these schools attractive is their sense of community and cultural sensitivity.
Dartmouth's Native-American community, regarded as the most active among the Ivies with 117 students in a student body of around 5,400, benefits from the school's historic commitment to Native-American education dating back to its founding. Like Penn, Dartmouth is not geographically situated to draw from a specific Native tribal nation. Instead, its Native American Program takes great pains to create a surrogate community for its wide variety of Native students, and consequently attracts a large number of applicants each year.
But Dartmouth's Native-American community was not always so large. Hanitchak said the turning point for the Native-American community at Dartmouth occurred during a change of leadership in the 1970s. The new university president committed funds to the creation of a Native American Program.
The continued support -- both financial and otherwise -- of top administrators was what made the expansion of the Native community possible.
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Penn has far to go before it can be seen as a school that is welcoming to Native Americans. But on many levels, faculty and administrators have already begun to embrace a new level of commitment to making substantial changes.
Rodin has said that she is in favor of Preucel's recommendation to create a Native American advisory board composed of prominent Native Americans in higher education and other fields, as well as local Native-American representatives. The advisory board would lay out a comprehensive plan of action for the school.
Rodin has also said that the University is considering creating a scholarship fund named for Gladys Tantaquidgeon -- a 1929 Penn graduate and currently the tribal medicine woman for the Mohegan nation -- specifically for Native-American students.
And the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology continues to serve as Penn's most important resource to local Native Americans, with its vast collection of Native-American artifacts and community outreach programs.
Recruitment and retention of Native Americans continues to be a unique and intricate task for universities, where factors like geography and cultural sensitivity play a much larger role than among any other student population. At its core, many at the University said they believe the problem is one of monetary commitment. The solution, they say, involves spraying dollars in many different directions: to the admissions office, toward an advisory board, and toward the creation of resources and scholarships for students.
"It would have to be more than bringing one or two kids in," Liebmann said. "And that's going to be a significant financial investment."
