For more than a century, the relationship between the Blackfeet Nation and Glacier National Park was defined by exclusion. Under the congressional Agreement of 1896 — signed under severe economic and social coercion — the tribe ceded the eastern portion of the park, and the Continental Divide became a boundary line. Generations of Blackfeet citizens were restricted from lands that held their cultural and ecological knowledge. Mainstream academic institutions historically approached the region with a similar sense of entitlement. Outside researchers treated the reservation and the park as outdoor laboratories, gathering data and departing to publish papers that rarely returned tangible benefits to the local people.
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For more than a century, the relationship between the Blackfeet Nation and Glacier National Park was defined by exclusion. Under the congressional Agreement of 1896 — signed under severe economic and social coercion — the tribe ceded the eastern portion of the park, and the Continental Divide became a boundary line. Generations of Blackfeet citizens were restricted from lands that held their cultural and ecological knowledge. Mainstream academic institutions historically approached the region with a similar sense of entitlement. Outside researchers treated the reservation and the park as outdoor laboratories, gathering data and departing to publish papers that rarely returned tangible benefits to the local people.
Today, that dynamic is shifting. Through a Memorandum of Understanding between Blackfeet Community College (BCC) and Glacier National Park, the college operates as the primary source of community-based traditional ecological knowledge.
“When you think of tribal sovereignty, you think of a nation-to-nation relationship, and I think of tribal colleges as an extension of that fiduciary responsibility,” said BCC President Dr. Brad Hall. “The knowledge that tribes possess is scientific knowledge. It is through a lived framework experience, not through an academic discipline or foreign concepts to the landscape itself. In retrospect, the land misses us.”
The partnership in Montana forces a question on higher education: What does it mean for a university to actually be a “good community partner”? Traditionally, mainstream universities operate through an extractive, university-led model of outreach. The core objective is often protecting the institutional image by studying about subjects, measuring success through endowments and rankings, and retaining grant resources within the institution.
A sovereign, restructured approach operates differently. It relies on community-directed authority aimed at building local capacity and power. Instead of studying subjects, universities co-author research with them, measure success by community well-being, and equitably share grant resources and physical assets.
Stakeholder vs. Sovereign
For traditional higher education, community engagement is usually framed around “stakeholders”—a corporate term treating local residents as one of many groups to be consulted. For Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), the starting premise is that the community is the sovereign authority.
“For tribal colleges, their very creation is an act of sovereignty through the authority of Tribal Nations to act as sovereigns based in treaty and Indian law,” Dr. Cheryl Crazy Bull, President and CEO of the American Indian College Fund, told The EDU Ledger. “Choices made by tribally chartered institutions emerge from and are aligned with the goals and priorities of tribal government.”
This dynamic demands relationships rooted in reciprocity and representation; the college gives the community the primary voice in its mission, and the community supports the institution in return. It also requires a complete overhaul of how institutions measure success. TCUs measure success by student well-being, career stability, and the degree to which graduates give back to their homelands.
Data from a Gallup alumni survey shows 74 percent of employed College Fund scholar alumni work in positions that directly benefit Native causes or tribal lands. Furthermore, 65 percent of alumni reported thriving overall — outpacing national college graduate benchmarks in career, social, and community well-being.
Crazy Bull noted that higher education must serve as a restorative tool. “The purpose of a tribal college is to uphold, strengthen, and honor the identity and well-being of the people they serve in ways that balance the distribution of power and resources,” she said. “Higher education could do a better job of resource- and power-sharing in ways that are inclusive of often marginalized people.”
The Extractive Trap
Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) have historically operated under a predatory framework when interacting with surrounding neighborhoods. Dr. Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Trinity College, argues universities have abandoned their core mandates.
“Every university, public or private, comes into existence because of a state charter, which means they exist to serve the citizens of each state where they sit,” Baldwin said. “That provides a legal and policy foundation upon which these universities must serve the public good.”
Instead, universities favor symbolic engagement — such as food giveaways, soft-money research, and innovation corridors — while expanding their property tax exemptions and ignoring substantial outreach. Research institutions historically cultivated a posture of “disinterest,” viewing neighborhoods as data sets. This contrasts sharply with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and community colleges, which have maintained mutual reliance with their surrounding populations since their inception.
In Indian Country, mainstream universities repeat these extractive patterns. Hall pointed out that large research universities frequently reach out through cold emails, sending pre-signed articulation agreements without engaging in meaningful consultation. They often apply for federal funding by highlighting Native student populations or proposing research on tribal lands, only to vanish when the grant expires.
“As soon as the money runs out, they run,” Hall said. “When the money’s gone, those pathways close, people don’t work at those institutions anymore, and the partnerships are not sustained.”
Rewriting the Rules
To counter academic extraction, communities are establishing new mechanisms to enforce power-sharing. In Charlottesville, Virginia, the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR) created its own community-based Institutional Review Board (IRB). While university IRBs primarily exist to protect the institution from liability, PHAR’s board requires outside researchers to agree to mandatory co-authorship, data sharing, and an equitable distribution of grant money directly to the community.
“We are starting to see a proliferation of communities demanding such relationships,” Baldwin said. “They are making visible the inequitable economic, political, and social relationships that occur when they sit in the shadow of what we deem to be a school, but which has become the dominant economic engine in town.”.
The friction lies in the dual reality of the university footprint. Institutions proclaim themselves to be economic engines, world-class health systems, and drivers of the public good. Neighborhoods experience them differently. Local residents face property tax exemptions that inflate their rent, high healthcare costs at academic hospitals, and low wages for campus labor.
“Community engagement for them is the wages their aunties and uncles get when they work in the campus cafeteria,” Baldwin said. “Community engagement for them is the rising cost of their housing when the university moves into their neighborhood.”
Structural Shifts
Structural reform is beginning to reach university administration and faculty governance. Historically, academic promotion systems penalized scholars engaged in collaborative community work, treating it as secondary to peer-reviewed publishing. At Trinity College, Baldwin and colleagues lobbied successfully to update the faculty manual so that community-engaged research receives equal weight in promotion decisions.
“Community-based work takes longer, it’s more collaborative, and there are actual human beings who push back,” Baldwin explained. “It’s actually more rigorous. But the current academic model has to change to allow that kind of work to gain equal favor.”
Similar structural shifts are taking hold elsewhere. At Central Washington University, Dr. Zoë Higheagle Strong has worked to transition the university’s posture away from top-down outreach toward formal governance relationships grounded directly in Tribal authority.
The urgency to rethink community posture is driven by an economic crisis in higher education. Demographic shifts are reducing the pool of college-age students, and public scrutiny is intensifying. When critics attack higher education, working-class communities often offer little resistance because universities failed to build reciprocal relationships. In response, some institutions are making sudden concessions, such as offering full tuition to local high school graduates.
“They had decades to get out in front of this and do equitable community engagement investments,” Baldwin said. “Now they’re doing it because of the backlash to curry favor and clean up their brand — but hey, whatever it takes.”
This story originally ran in The EDU Ledger's November 5, 2026 edition. Subscribe here for full access.
