College counseling centers have spent the past decade trying to keep up with demand. In the 2024-25 Healthy Minds Study, the largest national survey of student mental health, 37% of students screened positive for moderate to severe depression and 32% for moderate to severe anxiety, and more than half reported high levels of loneliness. Most campuses have responded with more clinicians and telehealth contracts, treating distress as something that happens inside one person.
A growing number of educators and researchers say that view leaves a lot out. In many Indigenous nations, health has long been understood as something people hold in common. It depends on ties to family and land, on access to a heritage language, on ceremony, and on whether a people have the authority to make decisions about its own future. When someone dies, the whole community grieves, and recovery happens together.
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College counseling centers have spent the past decade trying to keep up with demand. In the 2024-25 Healthy Minds Study, the largest national survey of student mental health, 37% of students screened positive for moderate to severe depression and 32% for moderate to severe anxiety, and more than half reported high levels of loneliness. Most campuses have responded with more clinicians and telehealth contracts, treating distress as something that happens inside one person.
A growing number of educators and researchers say that view leaves a lot out. In many Indigenous nations, health has long been understood as something people hold in common. It depends on ties to family and land, on access to a heritage language, on ceremony, and on whether a people have the authority to make decisions about its own future. When someone dies, the whole community grieves, and recovery happens together.
Research supports some of those ideas. Psychologists Drs. Michael Chandler and Christopher Lalonde found that First Nations bands in British Columbia with more self-government and local control of schools and health care, had far lower youth suicide rates. A 2007 follow-up found that in bands where at least half of its members could hold a conversation in their Native language, youth suicide rates were low or absent.
If cultural connection and belonging protect students, then some higher education experts argue that the offices and staff who build them, belong in the same budget category as tutoring and academic advising.
A Retreat with Consequences
But many institutions are heading in the opposite direction. Since 2023, 34 state bills restricting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at public colleges have become law, and federal pressure in 2025 led many private campuses to rename or close similar units. Cultural centers have lost funding or been absorbed into general student-life offices.
Supporters of the changes say public dollars should serve all students the same way, and that separate programming can divide a campus. Critics argue the cuts pull support from the students already least likely to finish a degree.
Native students made up 0.6 percent of college enrollment in fall 2024, according to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute. Among Native freshmen who started that fall, 56.5 percent returned to the same institution a year later, the National Student Clearinghouse reports, compared with 69.1 percent of all students. When campus supports shrink, these students often feel it first.
A small private university in Washington State shows another path.
Heritage University sits in Toppenish, Wash., on the ancestral lands of the Yakama Nation and inside the present-day Yakama Reservation. It opened in 1982 as Heritage College, founded by two Yakama women, Martha Yallup and Violet Lumley Rau, and Sister Kathleen Ross of the Sisters of the Holy Names, its first president. Yallup and Lumley Rau, who had worked together in the Yakama Nation’s Head Start program, wanted Yakama children taught by degreed professionals.
“We were dreamed into existence in the middle of a hops field to ensure that Yakama children received the high-quality education they deserved, comparable to that received anywhere,” says Dr. Chris Gilmer, the university’s president.
Heritage is the only private university in the country federally designated as both a Native American-Serving Nontribal Institution and a Hispanic-Serving Institution. It enrolls more Yakama citizens than any other college, and Native students usually make up 15 percent or more of the student body.
Dr. Elese Washines, education director for the Yakama Nation and a former Heritage professor, says the university has earned its standing with Yakama families largely by word of mouth.
“One of the best recruiters for Yakama students to attend Heritage University are the students themselves,” she says. “They share their experiences with extended family, and we’ve seen our student enrollment at Heritage University triple in less than a decade.”
Heritage is one of very few places that teaches Ichishkíin, the Yakama language, to students and community members alike. A partnership with the Wapato School District and the Yakama Nation also lets high school students earn the Seal of Biliteracy, and Washines says expanding those dual-credit offerings is a high priority for the tribe “to support language and cultural preservation.”
The university’s environmental science program draws Native students headed for careers in wildlife, fisheries, and agriculture, fields Gilmer calls “part of supporting a culture that prides itself on preserving the fundamental commitment to nature of the first people who stewarded this land.”
The Full Circle Scholarship, created with the Yakama Nation, covers full tuition for enrolled members after federal, state, and tribal aid is applied, and tuition stays low for everyone else. This fall, 88 percent of Heritage’s returning students re-enrolled, a rate the university says is well above the national average.
Other Models
The nation’s tribal colleges and universities have organized their curricula around language, land and ceremony for decades, according to the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC), which operates more than 90 campuses and sites in 16 states.
Federal money for those schools has continued even as Washington presses other colleges to drop diversity programs. The Trump administration recently announced $61 million in fiscal 2026 funding for tribal colleges, which AIHEC called an acknowledgment of the federal government’s trust and treaty responsibilities to tribal.
“Tribal Colleges and Universities are higher education institutions chartered by tribal nations to serve the interests and priorities of the tribe,” says Cheryl Crazy Bull, president and CEO of the American Indian College Fund. “Our tribal colleges and students receive support from the federal government in fulfillment of treaty and trust obligations.”
Even so, she says, tribal colleges and Native students are losing diversity and equity funding, including support for student centers, along with partnerships built on shared federal programs.
“There are deeply held misunderstandings about the obligation of the federal government to tribal nations,” Crazy Bull says, “so tribal colleges must be vigilant and constantly assert the treaty commitments of the United States.”
Lessons for Student Affairs
Crazy Bull says research shows that tribal colleges, as place-based, mission-driven institutions, naturally give students a sense of belonging and a place where tribal identity is celebrated. At predominantly white institutions, she says, “students feel that they must create that sense of belonging through their own effort and that they must constantly draw attention to how they are represented, included, and supported.” Doing that while adjusting to college and coping with homesickness and isolation, she adds, “often means that students choose different educational paths because their institution of choice is not living up to its duty as a safe and welcoming place.”
A 2025 study by the College Fund, AISES and the Cobell Scholarship program, which surveyed more than 560 Native students at 184 institutions, found that institutional support was the strongest predictor of students’ sense of belonging, outweighing support from peers, their tribes or the broader campus climate.
That argues for funding language courses, cultural spaces and elder mentors as retention tools, next to tutoring and early alert systems, and for giving tribal leaders a real voice in planning, as Heritage does with the Yakama Nation Tribal Council.
Counseling centers may need to adjust as well. Students whose losses are shared across a family or tribe, and whose mourning involves ceremony or travel home, can run into policies built around individual appointments and fixed attendance rules.
At Heritage, Washines and colleague Apahnaki Buckley wrote a compassionate leave policy that lets a grieving student tell a trusted adviser, who sets in motion time away for ceremony and family, with support waiting on return.
“The result is a campus climate that recognizes the holistic educational needs of each student on a case-by-case basis,” Washines says.
She would like the partnership to go further by accommodating the seasonal rhythms of Yakama life. Many students spend spring and summer working in fisheries, wildlife and forestry for the tribe’s Department of Natural Resources, or gathering traditional foods.
“I hope that our relationship expands to support the seasonal cycle of the Yakama student,” she says.
More than four decades after its founders set out to train teachers for Yakama children, Gilmer sees the mission as unchanged.
“Heritage met that community need then,” he says, “and we proudly and humbly continue to meet it today.”
Washines wants the next decade to bring more focus on retention and on re-entry for students who step away.
“Yakama Nation sees each student as navigating their own journey,” she says, “and will support pauses in education when students need to take time off for family or work obligations.”
This story originally ran in The EDU Ledger's November 5, 2026 edition. Subscribe here for full access.
