The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions.
While I was at community college, I studied industrial design because I thought maybe I'd be an automotive designer - I grew up in Detroit - and I also studied, geology because I was interested in science, a little bit.
I worked at a movie theater in Tempe, Arizona, when I went to community college there. And I got fired because a sorority had rented out a theater to watch 'Titanic,' and they were being really rude to me while they were waiting for the movie. So as I tore their tickets, I told them the end of the movie.
I might say that in retrospect, looking at where the community college system is today, I think we may have gone too far. The community college system is so big, so broad, so consuming of tax money.
I was a teacher for a long time. I taught at a community college: voice, theory, humanities. And nowadays, music education is a dying thing. Funding is being cut more and more and more.
I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.
I was in school, but I wasn't into school. I wasn't doing what I wanted to be doing in school, which was film studies. That was what I intended on doing, but I didn't go away to a university because I wanted to stay in L.A. and audition while I took classes, so I elected to go to a community college and just take G.E. courses. It was terrible.
I wanted to race cars. I didn't like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college.
In addition to being a nurse, I'm also a small business owner and I taught at a local community college. I'm also a proud mother of three and grandmother of six - all of them wonderful.
I was dishwasher, then promoted to chef in a local kitchen in a restaurant in Seattle, and I was working on a building site as well, putting in insulation and painting houses, and then doing some classes at a community college nearby.