Copyright © 1999 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

New Mexico's, Native American Preparatory School (NAPS), which educates gifted Native American students on the model of prestigious Eastern institutions, will graduate its first senior class in June, 1999 during a ceremony that the school's major benefactor did not live to see.

Richard Ettinger, son of a founder of Prentice-Hall publishing, himself a co-founder of Wadsworth Publishing Co., was fundamentally changed about 1970 as he read Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee." After reading the book, Ettinger made the establishment of educational programs for gifted Native Americans the main focus of his substantial philanthropic life. Ettinger first financed scholarships, then began a summer-enrichment program during the 1980s. This program enrolled 300 students a year in a three-week enrichment program by 1991.

With personal assets, Ettinger purchased the school's 1,600-acre campus, a former corporate retreat in the Pecos River Valley 30 miles northeast of Santa Fe. Ettinger died of lymphoma in April 1996.

Native American Prep is one attempt to raise low graduation rates among Native students in the United States, where only 3 per cent of Indian students who enroll in four-year colleges finish their degree programs.

The first class of 50 students, enrolled in 1995, got off to a rocky start with a near-riot shortly after classes opened. The disturbance seemed to have several causes: Some of the students didn't understand others' cultures; there were misunderstandings between students and some of the non-Native teachers; and some of the students were rebelling against the idea of doing homework, having attended schools where none was assigned. The problems were corrected quickly as more Native staff and faculty were added.

Ettinger family trusts still fund most of "NAPS'" expenses. All of the 74 students (from 32 different Native nations) attend on full or partial scholarships. The minimum required payment (which applies to two-thirds of the students) is $900 a year, which accounts for the estimated cost of a student's food, less than 5 per cent of the estimated $25,000 required to teach and house one student for a year. If a family cannot pay the $900, it may be waived. More than 90 per cent of the school's tuition expenses are subsidized by scholarships.

With a minimal endowment, how does NAPS raise the scholarship money? The school's creative answers to this question regularly fill the society pages of Santa Fe's daily newspaper, the New Mexican.

Artistic Santa Fe was set buzzing one day by the news that noted glass artist Dale Chihuly, founder of Seattle's Pilchuck Glass School, was donating a major work to be sold at auction to support the school. Chihuly also has donated book royalties. Wes Studi has been host to some of the school's auctions.

Auctions sometimes include the serving of Native cuisine: spiced buffalo tongue on acorn cakes, juniper-braised venison shanks with roasted root vegetables and wild possum, grape dumplings with maple or honey cream, as well as smoked salmon on wild rice and bannock bread with sage butter.

During June of 1998, Edison Eskeets, who is Navajo and the school's dean of students, provided the school with his version of a fund-raising jog: 208 miles, start to finish, from Flagstaff, Ariz., to Gallup, N.M., including assent of a 12,000-foot mountain that is sacred to the Navajos. Every dollar raised at such events is matched 200 per cent by donations from the Ettinger family's foundations.

The school provides a traditional prep-school curriculum in which traditional Anglo subjects have been integrated with Native American history and culture. The Iroquois Confederacy's political system is studied in history, for example. In shop, students may study traditional forms of silversmithing. According to one of its mission statements, NAPS "strives to blend the best features of Native American and Western education in ways that enhance the potential of each student."