1978

In the 1992 movie "Thunderheart," Val Kilmer plays an FBI agent of Sioux descent named Ray Levoi who is sent to investigate a murder on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. At one point Levoi pays a visit to a young, attractive schoolteacher named Maggie Eagle Bear (played by Sheila Tousey) and starts grilling her, growing more and more patronizing until she interrupts him: "You [jerk], I spent four years at Dartmouth before I came back to the reservation. I know my rights ... so hit the road, chief."

"Thunderheart" was a fictional movie, and Maggie Eagle Bear was based on a woman named Anna Mae Aquash, who did not go to Dartmouth. But as it happens, one of the researchers for the movie, along with director Michael Apted, had gotten to know Gemma Lockhart '79, a columnist and video producer in Rapid City. It seems likely that they were impressed by Gemma's story of "bringing Dartmouth home and trying to make a difference here" and slipped it into the script.

"It shows that someone was aware of the Native American Program," says ThereseOjibway. A freelance entertainment and promotional writer in Greenwich Village, she recently did research for the TV movie "500 Nations," produced by Kevin Costner. The movie focuses on early Native American history, especially before the arrival of Europeans. Therese is Ojibway, as you might assume. (Her grandfather put an apostrophe in his last name to pretend to be Irish; she and her family recently took it out again.) She is married to Tim Craig '79, an entertainment lawyer and a Cherokee. They have a two-and-a-half-year-old son named Clinton James Craig. One of Therese's sisters, Hilda, is married to N. Bruce Duthu '80, a professor of American Indian law at the University of Vermont Law School; another, Lenore (Harvard '83), now works in the development office at Dartmouth.

Our class project has been to set up an endowment fand that the Native American Program uses for peer tutoring and to fund internships. As of our reunion we had raised $10,000, and we are now kicking in $1,000 a year. This was the work, in part, of our class projects coordinator Jim Bullion, who got especially excited about Dartmouth's program when he was teaching Native American children in the evening hours after his banking job in Minneapolis. "One time I was wearing a Dartmouth T-shirt, and one of the tougher kids came up to me and said, 'Dartmouth—I know that place. They have a big pow wow there every year. I'd like to go there some day.'" Jim, Ellen, and their 3.5 kids she's expecting in March—now live in Millis, Mass.

Says Gail Dana Sockabasin, "When I read that our class was making a reunion gift to the Native American Program it made me feel very good." Gail is director of the health department of the Penobscot nation in Maine. She got her master's in public health from Loma Linda University in California. "Dartmouth made a difference for me," she says. "When I was there I often didn't feel a part of the community that we all talk about. I didn't really appreciate the opportunity at the time, but in retrospect I really do." Both Gail and her husband, Allen Sockabasin (and their year-and-a-half-old daughter, Kendra) are Passamaquoddy, a Maine tribe of which Allen is a former chief.

For those of you who have never seen it, I recommend that you get a hold of the 40-minute videotape "A Way of Learning," made in 1988 about Dartmouth's Native American Program at Dartmouth. The film was directed and co-produced by Alanis Obomsawin, an Abenaki from Canada who has a worldwide reputation for her documentaries about native peoples. (Greg Prince was the executive producer; Bruce Duthu was the other coproducer.) Near the conclusion of the film, Obomsawin says, "In its recommitment to recruit native students, Dartmouth has enriched its own internal life. These young students, nourished on ancient traditions and cultural values, have only recently been discovered and appreciated by the academic world."

5317 White Horse Road, Knoxville, TN 37919