Native Intelligence:
A Profile of Jackie Old Coyote
Ed.M. AIE '04
by Scott Ruescher
After she graduated in 2004 from the HGSE Arts in Education Program with an Ed.M., Jackie Old Coyote wondered how she'd use her new expertise in the multidisciplinary application of the arts to fulfill her father's wish. A practitioner of traditional Crow lifeways in eastern Montana, her father, Barney Old Coyote, had told her he hoped she'd find a way to advocate for the educational health and well-being of her people at the national level, not just the local level. And he hoped she would do that not just for the Crow of eastern Montana (or, more particularly, the Whistle Water Clan in the Apsaalooke Nation of the Crow that her family belongs to) but for all Native Americans across a continent that they were the sole human inhabitants of until a few hundred years ago.
With a Steven J. Ross Arts in Education Scholarship to her credit, a Harvard course in Nation Building and a number of arts-related courses printed on her transcript and embedded in her consciousness, and a varied background that includes trips down the fashion runways of Milan, appearances on the cinematic sets of Hollywood, and some scriptwriting of her own (her radio drama, Round Ball, aired on National Public Radio), Old Coyote knew she might be able to cultivate some grassroots development in an aesthetic realm, perhaps by teaching writing at a tribal college or working in a museum. But she had already done a little of both. "The arts," she notes, "are always an integral part of every social activity in Native cultures anyway."--and she knew the chances of having a greater impact would be greater if she were to work from an influential administrative position. "My father is an incredibly wise man," she explains, "and he wants me to work on the national level. I trust his judgment, and I guess he's right that I should."
As it happens, Old Coyote didn't have to travel very far from the Appian Way campus to fulfill the wish of her father that was now her own wish. Now in her 40s, she felt herself embarking on a quest for the benefit and general welfare of others. During the summer of 2004, Old Coyote was one of eight people granted administrative fellowships for the ensuing academic year. While some found their way to the medical, law, and business schools at Harvard, Old Coyote went two blocks HGSE to University Place in Cambridge. There, in the first-floor headquarters of HUNAP--the Harvard University Native American Program--she spent the 2004–05 academic year helping with the planning of events for the numerous Native American students on the Harvard campus and with the recruitment of others. The job did have a national scope of sorts.
"I was in touch with people from all over the US," she says, "and got to know a lot about other Native tribes. It was great to serve as a resource and host for students. These are people who could go back to their tribes and sort of empower them with knowledge, yes--but just as importantly, with the contagious confidence that they can make something of themselves and their communities."
When the 2004–05 academic year came to an end, Old Coyote had been so successful in her position--her affability, industriousness, organizational aptitude, and leadership skills had held her in good stead--that HUNAP offered her a yearlong extension of her fellowship. "I was honored by the invitation," says Old Coyote--but she hoped to advance to the next stage in her career as the kind of nation builder her father had modeled for her. Fortunately for Cambridge, the Crow, and the widely diverse Native community across the continent, she didn't have to go far.
Down the hall in University Place, Old Coyote now occupies an office in Harvard's Project on American Indian Economic Development. As manager of the office's Honoring Nations project, she works to "identify, award, and celebrate," as she puts it, "innovative and effective programs in Indian country," and to see that they are funded with the bountiful annual donations from the Ford Foundation. This, in brief, is how it works--and what she does at work.
If a program affiliated with a tribe is having particular success in one or more of seven disciplines--culture, education, economic development, environment, health, social justice, and intergenerational relations--Old Coyote will track their progress for the Honoring Nations Project across a three-year period. During that time, she will study the programs intensively, writing case studies on the successful programs, publishing the studies as step-by-step curricula, and seeing to the visual documentation of a given project as it develops. At the end of the three-year period, the Honoring Nations office awards the programs according to merit, and then offers complete program models to tribal colleges and other schools for use by activists and community leaders for projects in other tribal communities. "It's a 21st century means of rebuilding the Native nations that are still trying to recover from those first contacts with European settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries," she notes. "It's worth noting that our program is currently sponsored by the Kennedy School of Government, and that it resembles its sister programs in Brazil, China, South Africa, and Mexico."
Relying on the narrative documentation of grassroots social action to make things happen elsewhere and spread the sense of well-being, Old Coyote helps the root system of grassroots movements to form a network across the plains--an analogy that works for the tribes of eastern Montana that have inhabited the grasslands, if not for the woodland tribes of the East. "At the time of the Crow's first contact with the white explorers," she explains, "the Crow were living in the fertile grasslands in the valley of the Big Horn Mountain valleys. We got to stay there after the treaties, too, on better land than many other tribes were able to inhabit. If we can claim to be a little better off than some tribes, and to have had a little more success in preserving our culture, that's probably why."
In the end, Honoring Nations celebrates the respective programs in a symposium on the Harvard campus, admittedly one of the seats of the European-American power that devastated the Native-American communities--even as it romanticized them. Jackie Old Coyote's managerial position in the project speaks well to the university's effort to honor some very old compromises that might have been made near here in Plymouth nearly 400 years ago. The Arts in Education Program is honored to have had her pass through on her way to the fulfillment of her wishes--and her father's.
