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Updated: January 24, 2025 @ 6:13 am
The Associated Students of the University of Washington (ASUW) office, located in the HUB, on January 20, 2025. (Carlos Salinas/The Daily)
The Associated Students of the University of Washington (ASUW) office, located in the HUB, on January 20, 2025. (Carlos Salinas/The Daily)
ASUW passed a bill Jan. 7, calling on UW and the Washington State Legislature to establish a program to provide full tuition to Native American and Alaskan Native students that are citizens and descendants of federally recognized tribes.
Henry Hess, director of the American Indian Student Commission at ASUW and member of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, wrote and proposed Bill 5.09.
“This is a way to help correct wrongs, historic wrongs that have been placed and put on my people specifically through things like lack of access to education,” Hess said. “I describe it personally as reparations, in a sense.”
The bill is not the first of its kind, with a larger movement of tuition waivers and scholarships being offered for Indigenous students across the nation.
“There’s examples in California, in Colorado, and Hawaii,” Hess said. “We’re seeing larger numbers of Native American and Alaskan Native enrollment and acceptance stemming off of large, sweeping tuition waiver programs.”
Andal Sridhar is the Student Senate Speaker for ASUW. With oversight of over 110 student senators, she helps formulate official student opinion on matters like this bill.
“This is supposed to be one of the pioneering programs in the country,” Sridhar said. “[Other programs] aren’t really comparable to UW in terms of size of the college.”
UW has a larger student body than the schools that Bill 5.09 references, which are the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Washington State University also has scholarship programs in place for Native American students, Hess said.
Many programs like these are for specific situations, like students with tribal ties to the land the universities sit on. Bill 5.09 calls for scholarships for all Native American students of federally recognized tribes, both in-state and out-of-state.
In comparison to other programs, feasibility of the scope of this program was brought up during the senate meeting, Sridhar said.
A main reason for introducing Bill 5.09 and the scholarship program is that new Native American and Alaskan Native student enrollment at UW in 2015 stood at 131 undergraduate students and decreased steadily since, to 91 undergraduate students in 2023. Additionally, many of those new students do not continue attending UW after one quarter.
“The Federal Government and the State of Washington have a trust and treaty obligation to the Tribes, Nations, and peoples that reside in Washington to provide for and facilitate access to education,” Bill 5.09 states as support of the scholarship program.
According to Hess, years of work have led up to a bill like 5.09 to be passed. Earlier this year, ASUW passed both Bill R-28-10 which addressed Native American student attendance rates and Resolution R-31-3, one that Hess wrote and pushed for..
“[Resolution R-31-3] was more to lay the groundwork for future advocacy by outlining the problems facing Native American students,” Sridhar said.
Next, Hess will take the bill to the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI), a non-profit organization started in 1953, with representation of over sixty Native American tribes across 6 states, Hess said.
“I’m not a citizen from a tribe in the Pacific Northwest, so I feel an obligation to ensure that I am accurately representing the tribes and the citizens around here,” Hess said.
Hess will ask for widespread tribal approval of the bill Jan. 27-29 at the annual ATNI convention. If approval is received, UW administration will then start conversations around addressing the bill.
Reach reporter Annika Hauer at news@dailyuw.com. X: @annika_hauer
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