As an Indigenous cisgender woman, going to college is a huge feat, going beyond that is astounding. According to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, in 2021, 24% of 18–24-year-old Native American students were enrolled in college compared to 41% of the overall U.S. population. Undergraduate enrollment among Native Americans also decreased from 128,600 in 2016–17 to 116,400 in 2019–2020, accordion to the institute.

Having graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor’s in communication, I wanted to go to grad school to both improve myself and benefit my community. For many Natives, social work is littered with the trauma of abuse, oppression and colonization. I wanted to change and take back the narrative of social work within Native communities. Social work is something that our people have been doing for years to resist and take back their cultural identity.

I decided to attend Augsburg University for graduate school because, at the time, they didn’t require the GRE to apply, and they offered a flexible schedule.

During my first semester, I realized how painful the next three years were going to be.

Other than resources that are given out periodically to seek outside help, which no working and full-time student has time for, there is little to no support for people of color. I realized that I was an island. In a school and program that lauds diversity, the assignments are directed toward white bodies. One assignment was a nine-to-12-page paper asking us to name our traumas and how we think they shaped us. A friend of mine asked if they could write about something different because they were uncomfortable with the process of taking such experiences to paper, all for a professor to return it with a numerical percentage of how well their traumas were described – his request was denied, even after meeting with the Master of Social Work program director.

More recently, a student of color was stopped by a campus security guard, while in a fob-access-only building, and asked to produce a student ID. The student didn’t have their ID with them, so the security guard walked the student to their classroom and asked the white professor if the student was indeed a student. Upset, the student left class. Remaining in the class, the rest of us proceeded to watch a TED Talk on microaggressions and race.

The issue is higher education is not made for people of color. The Institution of Education does not know how to teach students of color. Therefore, yet again, we suffer, we are left behind. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, says in her book, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, “I am grateful for all I learned from…the thousands of texts I studied… But I did not gain the perspective…from those professors or studies…This came from outside the academy.”

This is all to say that people of color have experiences that white bodies will never have to experience, and enduring classrooms and assignments that are not made for us or give us room to explore creates harm and enables the cycle of systematic colonization. Higher Education shouldn’t be led by grades or state standards, but rather by how well we show we know what we are doing out in the field. My people have been doing social work for years without formal education, from Standing Rock fighting for land sovereignty and the environment to people fighting the Roof Depot Demolition in favor of a community-centered space that actually addresses the community epidemic of houselessness.

For me, social work is sharing my experience, hoping it will add to the other voices calling for a change in academia. Our institutions need to be better equipped to teach diverse people from diverse backgrounds. Our institutions need to stop producing a one-size fits all education.

Amariah DeAmusategui is a graduate student at Augsburg University studying social work.