From a Hogan to Harvard: The Inspiring Journey of Carmen Lopez, ED.M.'00
Carmen Lopez
by Amelia E. Lester
Carmen Lopez, Ed.M.'00, director of the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP) has a clever way of summarizing her rather extraordinary life story: "From hogan, to Harvard, to back again." It describes, in factual terms, Lopez's move from a dirt-floored hogan on an Indian reservation in rural Utah to her appointment as director of the burgeoning HUNAP. It is also a conceptual explanation of what has motivated this proud member of the Navajo nation: for Lopez, hers has been a story of "fulfilling the mission of what educational opportunity can provide."
Born into a family of educators--her father holds a Ph.D. in education and her mother is a bilingual Navajo teacher--Lopez's childhood spent on the reservation helped instill in her a strong sense of indigenous identity. Lopez lived with her parents and five siblings in the traditional one-room hogan structure, made of logs, sealed with mud, with a large stove in the middle for warmth. There was no running water or electricity.
Although Lopez says that her grandparents and many other family members are still on the reservation, her own parents decided to relocate their family midway through Lopez's schooling. The decision was based on education. "By fifth grade," Lopez explains, "my parents saw a difference in what I was learning [in school on the reservation] and what I was not learning."
In high school at Navajo Preparatory School in Farmington, New Mexico, Lopez maintained strong links to her Native American heritage. Navajo Prep was a tribal school, designed to meet the needs of college preparation but also, Lopez emphasizes, providing lessons in Navajo culture, history, and language.
Lopez's life trajectory would move in another education-driven direction when she accepted a basketball scholarship to Cushing Academy in Massachusetts, a coed boarding school that was in the process of developing a Native American program. For a young girl who had never been farther east than Nebraska, life at Cushing was a shock to the senses. "The trees were in my way," Lopez laughs. "I felt claustrophobic in the New England setting. It snowed in April!" Despite her initial misgivings, Lopez thrived academically and accepted an academic scholarship to Dartmouth College.
Lopez recalls the way she felt when she first arrived at college: "I remember thinking what a place of privilege it was, and what use I would make of that opportunity." Lopez found her answer not in her pre-med classes, as she had anticipated, but rather in the courses she took on education. "My first education class was on moral development, and I was blown away with how interesting this class was, and how I couldn't get enough of it," she says.
Upon graduating, Lopez was eager to enter the classroom. She had heard of many Native American students going on to Harvard Graduate School of Education and enrolled in the master's program. "I wanted classes that could really inform my pedagogy and my growth as a teacher, and I was able to balance that by taking the individualized program: teaching, learning, administration, planning, and social policy," Lopez says.
Outside the classrooms, Lopez found herself increasingly involved in grassroots political campaigning. "I was there when students of color were very active with admissions and petitioning the institution to do more outreach in recruitment," she says. "We wanted to make change in the wider world, but were challenged at Harvard and in our program to think, ‘why don't we make change in the community we are in right now?'"
After serving on the faculty of her alma mater, Cushing, as an American history teacher, Lopez found herself drawn back to Harvard, and to fulfilling the mandate of her master's degree in a different way. "Indian education had always been something I had been interested in, and I wanted to engage in it much more directly," Lopez explains. "I started to make the transition to…thinking about the school from the administrator's perspective, focusing directly on American Indian education."
Lopez was right on time: HUNAP was looking for a new executive director. Lopez's tenure has coincided with an exciting period of change for the program: after widening its role from an HGSE-exclusive body to a University-wide presence in the 1990s, the provost's office has now committed to HUNAP's core funding. Lopez oversees the operation of the University-wide interfaculty initiative, including interdisciplinary research projects in Native American studies, executive and professional development programs for Native leaders, event programming, and support services to Harvard's Native American students.
Lopez is characteristically modest about what she has achieved as leader of HUNAP. Always conscious of its legacy--answering a question about the history of HUNAP, she begins with the Harvard College charter of 1650, which calls for the education of English and Indian youth--Lopez credits the University's commitment to those who came before her. Recalling HUNAP's modest official beginnings in the 1970s, when HGSE helped to create the American Indian Program to educate future Indian tribal leaders, Lopez says she is honored to follow in the footsteps of "those students who came before, who were more than just students--they were fundraising, running the program, supporting one another. It's so important for us to remember those sacrifices and efforts."
While always aware of the past, Lopez also has her eyes fixed firmly on the future. "The most important thing is that we need trained and highly educated native people to help in economic development," she says. "We all have an obligation to contribute and to work toward advancing self-determination in tribal nations."
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
