“Sometimes when you get everything ripped out from under,” says Faith Smith, “you have to take a look at where do you want to spend your time and what’s going to be meaningful.” She’s talking about the early 1970s, when she became part of “a very ugly battle” that raged within Chicago’s American Indian Center on Wilson Avenue.
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At that point Smith was five years out of college, five years spent working with fellow Indians on the streets of Uptown; she had just become acting director of the center, which she and others believed should focus on poverty and the problems of Indians on the streets. And when the smoke cleared, that’s just where they found themselves–on the street, fired from the center’s staff.
It’s a small yet scattered school. With four different campuses–besides Chicago, they’re located in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, and at the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana–NAES typically enrolls 100 to 120 students, with 30 to 40 of them at the Chicago campus. Almost all the students are involved in community work of some kind. Those coming from reservations may be involved in the nitty-gritty of governance and economic development. Then there’s the 66-year-old recent graduate who spent some of his life as an “active participant” among the alcoholics of skid row. For his senior project he did what Smith describes as “a wonderful paper on the beginnings of the Indian community as such on skid row.”
