UW-Madison freshman Arianna Reiter is part Stockbridge-Munsee and part Menominee Native American. She grew up on the Stockbridge-Munsee reservation and later attended the Indian Community School in Milwaukee.
But despite her identity as a Native American, she’s 1/16th short of being eligible for enrollment in the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe, which means she is ineligible for UW-Madison’s tribal tuition promise program. The program, announced late last year, will cover all the costs of education for enrolled members of Wisconsin’s federally recognized tribes.
UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said that creating the program “felt like the right thing to do” for the state’s Native American students to improve the school’s relationship with the state’s 11 tribes. UW-Madison sits on traditional Ho-Chunk Nation land while the Universities of Wisconsin system earns approximately $1 million per year from a land trust made up of largely former Ojibwe land, the Examiner reported earlier this month.
While Reiter is missing out on thousands of dollars of savings, she says the announcement brought up feelings that have persisted since her childhood of “not being Native enough.”
“Some [people] look at you differently,” she says. “I’m just that tiny fraction short.”
The creation of the program has sparked a debate among Native communities in the state over the use of enrollment, the university’s effort to make up for the past with offers of money and how Native students are treated once they’re on campus. The program is also being launched as diversity, equity and inclusion programs have become a major issue for Wisconsin Republicans who see such efforts as malicious attempts to give certain groups more opportunity than white students.
Native American tribes across the country use a system known as “blood quantum” to determine enrollment eligibility. First instituted by the federal government, blood quantum tracks…
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — The keynote speaker at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ 
