Link to Audio Podcast: https://www.bravevoices.fieldscenter.princeton.edu/native-indigenous-voices

Interview with Patrick Anderson '75

Hosted by Myra Ridhuan ‘27

Myra Ridhuan '27 (00:06)

To just get us started, the first question that we have for you is to introduce yourself with your name, class year, and concentration. Free to also share your tribal affiliation, your nation, your clan, or the tribal community that you come from. And if you wish to share this in your own Native or Indigenous, please do so.

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (00:25)

My name is Patrick Anderson. I am from the class of 1975, quite some time ago. I studied at the Wilson School, which of course has now been changed to the School of Public and International Affairs, with I think Princeton in front of it. I am from the Tlingit Nation. In my way, my tribal ways, we describe ourselves as members of our father's people as well. So I am a child of the Aleut. My clan among the Tlingit is with the Eagle Mwai'iti, the Shunkukedi or Thunderbird, which is pronounced [pronunciation in Native and/or Indigenous language]. I come from the community that was formerly located at Dry Bay, Alaska, which is on the North Pacific. It’s called Dry Bay because the Alsec River comes from the mountains up in Canada down past the Alsec Glacier and into an area where at low tide the bay is dry, so it's called Dry Bay.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (01:25)

That's amazing. Okay, and so for the interview, there is different sections, like there's a community and environment section, there is an identity section and so on. And so our first section is community and environment, basically about your community environment during your time at Princeton. The first question being, how did Princeton's environment compare to the environment you were raised or grew up in?

And some other questions to go along with that is, what was your experience like your first year at Princeton and how did you adjust to the transition at Princeton?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (01:58)

Very interesting question because the community I grew up in, at least through middle school and high school, was a housing project. My family was living with poverty. My mother was on a program called Aid to Families with Dependent Children. And we lived in this housing project, which was subsidized housing. It was not a fancy environment. I grew up with four sisters and a mother in the same household. We had a three bedroom, half of a duplex.

And so the environment at Princeton was completely, absolutely, irrevocably different than what I grew up in. Most of the school population that I attended consisted of about a half middle-class white Americans and then a number of minorities who were either middle-class or from poverty.

My entire housing project, which was pretty loud, had a lot of people and highly minority so most of our high school students went to the same high school, Chief Sealth.

Princeton on the other hand was interesting. I had my own bedroom at home when you grew up with five women as a boy you end up with your own bedroom.

I didn't have brothers, but when I got to Princeton, I had a roommate who happened to be from my same high school. It was quite a contrast and change in environment because of the eating halls. We were all required to eat at one of the eating halls, so I ate at Commons for my first two years. It was also regimented and unique but not like high school was so you become responsible for scheduling and attending your own classes. The huge difference was that my class was the second year where American Indians had been admitted. So the year before I showed up we had two American Indians. One of them raised quite traditionally, the other not so traditionally. My background was not traditional.

I was raised in one of my home communities until I was almost nine years old. And then we moved to the Seattle area. So the way I speak about it is that I was raised with the remnants of our Indigenous culture, our Tlingit worldview, but that shifted to an urban worldview. And it's difficult to describe to non-Indigenous people, but our Indigenous worldview is the universe, the system that we lived in. We're connected to everything. I did not learn that. At the time that I would have been learning that, I was shifted to a Western culture, so that may have helped me at Princeton. At Princeton, everyone that I met was goal-oriented. They had [targeted] Princeton as a place they wanted to go. They had worked and scheduled their classes, worked on their grades. They built their resume for going to an Ivy League school.

I didn't do that. I was called into my counselor's office in my junior year at the beginning at Chief Sealth High School. Mrs. Conrad told me that she had been promoted to head counselor and as a result she couldn't keep all of her students but she wanted to keep me. I responded, that's nice Mrs. Conrad because I didn't want to have to break in a new counselor. Then she said the words that changed the trajectory of my experience. She said, I think you could get into Princeton. And literally my first words to her after telling her, well that's nice too, What's Princeton?

Growing up in Seattle, in poverty, with no college graduates in my family that I was connected with, my aunt graduated from a college but I didn't have much time with her. I didn't have that experience. There weren't people living in the housing project who went to college and I was doubtful that I would even make it because living in poverty, you don't attend an expensive university like Princeton.

Well, Mrs. Conrad somehow or another worked with the university, discovered I had access to a Bureau of Indian Affairs scholarship. And next thing I know, I'm headed on an airplane to, I think I landed at JFK airport and traveling to Princeton. My first experience was not a great one. My flight leaving Seattle was late by about four hours. And that meant I arrived in JFK late. I had to follow the instructions, having never been on the East Coast. I remember them vividly because I memorized them in order for me to try to get to Princeton. I had to take a taxi to the Eastside Airline Terminal and then go to the Port Authority, find the bus to Princeton, board that bus, and then get off at a place that I'd never, ever visited before. That night was stormy, there was heavy rain, and as we pulled into New Jersey and going on the route into Princeton, I wasn't sure where it was, and I was one of the few people on the bus, and I asked the driver to let me off, and he let me off at the Nassau gate.

Well, it was midnight. I didn't know where my room was, I couldn't go to the housing office. The security guard that was out by the gate at the time, I explained my circumstances to him and fortunately he escorted me to my room at 125 Pyne Hall and thank God my roommate was already there. I knocked on the door and he let me in. I'm soaking wet, I've got all of my bags, I had to carry it from Nassau Gate down to Pyne Hall and I settled in for an experience that was completely outside of my world.

And that first year you'd ask about transition. I made it through. I scheduled my classes. They had recommendations. I don't even remember the name of the advisor I spoke to. It was kind of impersonal. It seemed like an assembly line despite the fact we only had a little over a thousand students admitted into that class. And a lot of them had shown up before I did. I wasn't able to make it there in time to attend the orientation that my three other American Indian classmates apparently went to. And so I was just kind of plopped out there to fend on my own. So my roommate and I, we worked through what we had to do in order to go and sign up for our classes and get our meal plans in place and go to the bookstore to pick up the books that we had. So I was fortunate that I had friends like my roommate and a couple of others that he had going there who were able to acquaint me with university processes and practices and the like.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (08:28)

That was wonderful. That was really descriptive.

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (08:31)

Well, Tlingit storytelling is very descriptive.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (08:35)

You nailed the question.

The next question being, what was your relationship like with your family and your tribal or Indigenous community while you're at Princeton, and did being at Princeton change that?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (08:46)

I didn't have any relationship with my Indigenous community. They were about 1300 miles away in the little village of Yakutat. My mother had kind of disconnected from the community. I was a member of the central tribe because of the unique relationships of Alaska natives that were different than the tribes in the lower 48. We didn't have reservations. A lot of my classmates came from reservations and actually grew up in their home Indigenous communities.

I did not. Like I said, I was in a housing project and so Princeton was very different for me and we only had one, two, three, four, five, six of us in the classes of 1974 and 1975. After my first semester, one of my classmates dropped out. Well, actually before the end of the first semester, only two of us were left at the end of 1972. The two from the prior class, they were there for that first year, and then they left and graduated later than I did. So I had no connection with our Indigenous community, with my family. 3000 miles away. I couldn't even afford to go home for Christmas. And so it was fortunate that the one Native faculty member at Princeton, Dr. Alfonso Ortiz and his colleague, Alfred Bush, had put together in preparation for Indigenous students who were attending Princeton a fund to send them back for important ceremonies. So that fund, since there were so few Indians at Princeton, was what they used to take me down to New Mexico. Dr. Ortiz was on sabbatical from Princeton and teaching at the University of New Mexico, so I had a chance to meet him. And then afterwards, we traveled from his home in Santa Fe to the Hopi Reservation, which is where one of my classmates, Victor Masayesva, had been from.

And I was able to attend one of their festivals called Shalako. And afterwards, they sent me up to Seattle where I got to visit with my family and then back to Princeton after the Christmas and intercession break had ended. So that was pretty much the only connection I had with family. I know it's difficult for young people to understand, but we only had dial telephones. And when you called long distance for someone in poverty, they were expensive. My mother and I would talk occasionally, but she wouldn't call until the rates fell down after 11 p.m. Seattle time, which was 3 p.m. at Princeton. So my roommates were pretty irritated when she called. And that wasn't all that frequently. And my sisters were rapidly leaving the home.

When some families grow up in poverty, we end up with teen pregnancies. And two of my sisters during that period, while I was, three actually while I was at Princeton, got pregnant. They were all younger than I was. And so they were busy just trying to survive. So I didn't have much of a relationship with my sisters except for going back for summertime.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (11:52)

Thank you for sharing that. You briefly mentioned your other Native classmates and faculty. And so the next question is, did you find a community at Princeton? And if so, you recall the first time that you felt this way?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (12:06)

First time I felt this way. I didn't know who the other Native students were at Princeton when I arrived. Shortly after I settled into my room, I was walking up to Commons for lunch and I saw this man walk by, kind of ruddy complexed, red hair in his 30s. I said hi to him, like I say hello to everybody. He looked like he was on a purpose. He didn't look like a student. And I kept walking up towards Commons and then a few minutes later, I hear footsteps behind me. I turn around and it's that same man. That turned out to be Alfred Bush.

He was the curator of Western Americana at the Firestone Library, a good friend of Dr. Ortiz's. And they had pushed for Princeton to search out Native American students to attend. My understanding is that in about 1968 there was a Native Convocation at Princeton that was quite well attended. It was scholars from all over the country. And at that point, I think Dr. Ortiz was on the faculty at Princeton and he and Alfred began recruiting students. So in 1970, two of them showed up.

Victor and Lily Shangro and then the three of us afterwards. So wasn't much of a community to find, but Alfred connected me with them very quickly. We also had a number of graduate students that were coming in approximately the same time. One of them was a woman in the Anthropology department. Another was in the School of Public and International Affairs along with me. And so I gradually became acquainted with that small group. But like I said, there were only four of us at the end of my first semester there. We didn't hang out very much. Lorene Rayano was the one woman who stayed and graduated with me. We were the first two Native American graduates in decades, according to research done by Alfred. Lorene was the first Native American woman to graduate from the undergraduate program. And unfortunately, she passed away in 2009. Or I’m sure she would be interviewed as well. So that small community grew.

I was asked in my freshman year by Lattie Sanford, who was with the admissions office, recruiting office, if I would be willing to go on a recruiting trip up to some other schools in the Northeast, which I did. On that trip, we attracted a number more Native Americans. They had gone to prep schools under a special program called A Better Chance. One of them, I guess, had a parent who was well off, but I don't know if his parents paid for him to go to a prep school. So I went up on the Northeast and we brought a number of folk back. I met them. So in my second year, I probably had a better connection. Dr. Ortiz was back.

Things like Wounded Knee, which some people are familiar with because Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of murder as a part of what went on at Wounded Knee was just released after a pardon by Joe Biden. And interestingly enough, we happened to find some other Native people outside of Princeton. So during my tenure there, a Tlingit man from Haines was living in New Jersey and going to Livingston College. I met him and then another woman had married a psychiatrist who practiced there. She was, I think, from one of the Five Civilized Tribes. And so we met her plus another couple of other Tlingit people. So I connected with the community gradually. It didn't happen all at once. It wasn't well identified. And eventually we formed the first group of Native Americans at Princeton as we got more students in the years after that.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (15:45)

That was wonderful. So going on to the next question. Were there any moments when your identity as Native or Indigenous made you feel marginalized from the greater Princeton community? And if so, could you describe this moment?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (15:58)

That’s a tough question to answer. I was unique and people liked to talk to me, but I'm not so sure it was as much my Native background as it was my Alaska background. Not a whole heck of a lot of people go to Princeton from Alaska. And although I came through Seattle, my background was Alaska. I had done one summer of fishing up there. It's where my family predominantly was from. And so a lot of people were real [interested], particularly as the Alaska pipeline was being built, with the discovery of oil on the North slope. So a lot of professors in the School of Public and International Affairs and politics and others were interested in what was going on in Alaska. So, I didn't feel marginalized when I went through Bicker in my junior year. It was fascinating again when I had interviews with members of the clubs. They were all interested in someone who was Native and who came from Alaska through Seattle. I was accepted I think at all but one of the clubs that I Bickered at.

Problem was is that I couldn't afford any of them. I did try for a year. Later on I found that Ivy had offered scholarships to Natives who attended after I did. So that was a possibility that I wasn't able to explore and I hadn't shared that information with Alfred so he wasn't able to guide me. I felt like it made me miss out on an experience at Princeton of interacting and connecting and making deeper friendships. One of the byproducts of being poor and Princeton's policies were we didn't get any tuition breaks is that I had to work extensively.

So I probably worked between 20 and 30 hours a week while I was there. I also tried during my first year and second year to row on the crew team and I tried out for the choir because I had been a singer in high school. And I had to drop all of that because I wouldn't have been able to stay at Princeton without the income that I earned by working. So I guess by circumstances, being a kid from poverty and having no way out of that, except for the jobs I had during the summer, I missed out on a lot. So I think maybe poverty marginalized me more than my Indigenous tribal identity did. I just missed out on a whole heck of a lot. And I really didn't get to know my classmates as well either because I'd get up, I'd rush to class, I'd have to go to a job. And then at nighttime, I was a security guard. I did security at a lot of the concerts and plays and the like. So I ended up really missing a lot.

Today, I really applaud the scholarships for people who make under a certain income. It wouldn't have made a whole lot of difference. I still managed to graduate with a decent GPA, but I had to miss a lot of studying with what I did because I wasn't able to go sit down with my books and emulate what my peers were doing.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (18:53)

Yeah, I think Princeton definitely has improved in terms of like providing financial aid for their students. So it was great hearing like the difference in stories, of how it was back then and how it is now. So yeah, thank you for sharing that.

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (19:05)

Oh yeah, I probably wouldn't have been able to afford a cell phone if this current circumstances existed.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (19:14)

We’re going to move on to the next section, which is identity. The first question being, you kind of touched upon this earlier, but if you want to elaborate further, feel free to. But the first question is, did being at Princeton change the way you perceive yourself as Native or Indigenous?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (19:29)

I don't think it changed the way. As I mentioned earlier, Western society is very lineal and goal-oriented. And I adopted that. One thing I didn't want to do is to continue living in poverty. It sucks. And so when I got admitted to Princeton and found that I could actually go there because the funding was available, I had this mentality that was different. Later on when I taught at the University of Alaska Southeast, I had a colleague, Dr. Gary Anders, who was a Notre Dame PhD in economics and also had an Indigenous background. I asked Gary one time, I said, how did you become as successful as you are? And he told me the story. He said, Patrick, I'm kind of like a Russian Cossack, which is how I think of myself.

You put me on a horse, you give me a sword and I just keep going. That's a Western mindset. And I kept going. So I finished my first year. I had to rush back and find summer jobs so I could make the income to be able to afford the next year. I came back the next year and I just put my nose to the grindstone. I was Western in my concepts, which was happening in Indian country all over during that period of time.

When I got to my senior year and was graduating, I said, next goal. I told my mom I wanted to go to law school. So I had to be very goal oriented about going to law school. And I managed to get into law school afterwards. But I was thinking Western. I was thinking selfishly. It was very non-Indigenous. The one thing that did help me was my connection with other people who grew up in their home communities. And what my mother told me, she said, you really should go back and help your people. It was a mantra among elders, come back and help your people. So it's what I decided to do. I returned to Alaska immediately afterwards. What I can say is that going to the School of Public and International Affairs gave me my first introduction to a systemic approach. It was not widespread, but the curriculum covered a lot of different areas. So they weren't siloed. I wasn't in political science. I wasn't in biology. I wasn't in psychology. Not that those are bad things to be in, but it's a very siloed education. The first two years are great. You get the liberal arts exposure. So I didn't start really coming back to searching for my Indigenous identity until probably 2003 when I began changing my career from law to working with tribal organizations. And at that point the model of the Wilson School came back to me and I began to understand very quickly, we as Indigenous people didn't live in a siloed community. We lived in a place that we call space.

It's everything we come into contact with plus more. It's the universe, if you look at physicists. It goes down to the molecules that are around. It's the spirits that surround us, if you look at religion. It's just a holistic point of view that I gradually started to become acquainted with.

I began understanding and studying and researching more of the history of my Tlingit people, but even more so the activities that I engaged in when I got back to Alaska put me in touch with elders who actually retained a percentage of what we had been like. It wasn't totally what we had been like. It was changing because of two centuries of suppression of our culture. And when I mean suppression, it was vivid, it was active. Churches were discouraging anyone in the Native community from observing ceremony or cultural practices, from engaging in our arts, our dance, using our language. There was a policy of kidnapping kids and taking them to boarding schools. And my dad was essentially taken from his family and sent to boarding school. My mom was raised by a white man who sent her to a Catholic boarding school and thought it was a great opportunity for her. So my pathway back to being Indigenous didn't start until about a little over 20 years ago, but it was facilitated at Princeton by one of the jobs I had in the Western Americana collection, by my conversations and introduction to the Native community and then working with them for over 40 years began to show me the pathway back to what being a person who lives in a non-siloed world, who's trying to live in the present, who understands that caring for nature, caring for the world involves not your own personal pursuits, but looking generations ahead and trying to figure out what you do today that will benefit your descendants five, six, seven generations from now.

Princeton didn't change it. It probably intensified the Western mindset in me. Law school did the same thing. Practicing law did the same thing. I had to find my way back. If I could give any advice to younger people, it is to begin to understand that mindset. Not only in the Indigenous community, but in all of Western society. I think the siloed world, the goal-oriented, the linear processes are just so destructive on every culture that adopts them.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (24:52)

Thank you for sharing that. So we're going to move on to our next section, which is about administration. The first question being, if there is one change that the Princeton leadership could make to improve experiences for Native and Indigenous students on campus, what would that be?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (25:09)

I tried and failed. Yes, there is one practice.

In 2008, I became aware of the progression of the historical trauma that Native people experienced at the hands of Western suppression and the impact that it had on creating an intergenerational transfer of trauma to not only Native people, but to white people, to Black people, to Asian cultures. To Latin, Hispanic, Spanish cultures. It was embodied in a study called the Adverse Childhood Experience Study. Very scientific, done by the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente. And one of the things that struck me based on an experience at Princeton. I remember vividly reading it in the Daily Prince. One of my classmates, class of 1975, committed suicide by jumping off a building.

I had not been exposed to suicide. No one in my family had attempted or completed a suicide. And it happened again and again and again at Princeton, most recently a young woman on a drug overdose. So the Daily Prince ran an article talking about mental health at Princeton. I wrote an op-ed piece and I was encouraging the president, Eisgruber, to pay attention to this and to look into the impact of childhood acquired trauma on students who attend Princeton. Now, suicide is the absolute last impact. If you're successful in completing a suicide, you don't have any other behaviors.

But what I noticed is that there are behaviors that people have that are traumatizing in their own life. So I saw a lot of alcohol abuse at Princeton. There was a lot of drug abuse at Princeton. There was a great deal of violence. What the Adverse Childhood Experience study did was to link what happened to you as a child to things that are happening to you as adults, including health issues. And so, as my classmates started passing on, it became obvious to me that Princeton is a part of the general curve of people who are traumatized by things that their parents perpetrated on them as children and that we could learn a lot from it. Early on as I began working in anti-poverty programs, I became aware of the Princeton-Columbia collaboration called the Fragile Family Study.

Multiple years, lots of funding going into it. And I thought, gosh, this should be a welcoming environment because when you're dealing with poverty, one of the root causes of poverty is your exposure to childhood acquired trauma and the behaviors you adopt as defensive mechanisms. And so I actually had a chance to go back to Princeton with my class. I'm an elected officer. And we had a dinner with President Eisgruber. I wanted to follow up on trying to see if the university would prioritize mental health and perhaps dedicate a few resources to understanding innovative practices that could help students who are experiencing the after effects of childhood acquired trauma. So I failed miserably on that. I didn't find Princeton faculty to be very open or creative.

I did a presentation on a healing process that I've been working on based on my own experience. It was attended but not well attended. So if I could say anything is that look into what happens because in the original study, these outcomes that they studied didn't happen until middle age. 80% of the population was white and the rest of the 20% were different races, different ethnic groups. And the only difference was the reactions were the same in your brain, but the prevalence was not. So that's the one thing I would urge anyone in the psychology department, sociology department, and administration, is to take a look into this whole concept of adverse childhood experiences, because it really doesn't express itself in negative behaviors until later in life.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (29:22)

That was amazing. I actually read the Princeton Alumni Weekly and I read your article about adverse childhood experiences and such. So yeah, that was great to hear about. For the next question, do you believe that any efforts made by the University to acknowledge Native and Indigenous presence were genuine or are genuine right now?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (29:44)

I don't think they're genuine. There are certain things that go on in the white community that I've seen happen. One is land acknowledgement. And with the East Coast, land is pretty much gone from most areas. There are very few reservations around. A lot of the Indigenous populations have disappeared.

And the university, I think, has a very shallow observation. We don't self-proclaim our tribal membership. When I went to law school, I began to understand that everything that is applied to Native Americans in the United States is based on the U.S. Constitution and on treaties.

We are allowed as tribes to identify our populations, but the university accepts a self designation. I'm an enrolled member of a tribe. I can show you my membership card. We have individuals who talk about blood quantum. Blood quantum is a Western suppression concept. Because we are allowed to make our own decisions, a number of our tribes are accepting blood quantums of less than one quarter, which was the federal definition of being Indian. Self-proclaiming that you're Indian doesn't work. If we are, we have tribal memberships. And so as a result, I think the university says that it has lots and lots and lots of American Indians. They don't. There are so few of us. The same thing with tribes. In order to be a tribe, you have to satisfy an historical connection to your original tribe. And the tribes that Princeton acknowledges, I don't think have done that. In my work as a parliamentarian and a member of the National Congress of American Indians, we work real hard to assure that our identities are preserved through legislative actions through judicial challenges and the like. And that's one of them that we stick to. There are states that recognize tribes and they're recognized within Indian country, but there are some are not. But Princeton isn't well connected. I don't think they have any Indigenous Native American people that I am aware of working for them or on the faculty

in any way, shape, form connected or advisory other than the two of my fellow alums who served on the Board of Trustees. I'm not sure that they're able to make much of an impact either.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (31:57)

Thank you for sharing that. That does conclude our administration section and we will now be moving on to the campus life section, with the first question being very general. What was the campus climate like for you during your time at Princeton?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (32:11)

It was fascinating. I was in the first class where women were admitted as a part of the enrollment acceptance process. There had been a couple of classes before me and for some reason I was placed into dorm 120, The Pyne first entrance was co-ed.

And so I met a number of just incredible women. One of my classmates was a Rhodes Scholar, and she also happened to be from Alaska. And another one was a long time tennis coach at Princeton and coached women's hockey. There were just some incredible people. Cynthia Lake was on the swim team, which you know, when you have very few women, it's hard to put together a team. And they were just amazing. And then the Native people that I connected with, they went on to do great things. Victor and Lily were, I mean, Lily has an Emmy for a production that she had done. Victor is well known for the work that he does in filmmaking and video.

There were just some amazing people. With campus life, I found that in my sophomore, junior years, I really enjoyed a lot of what happened to me. I was able to go to various Native American events. For example, I met the leadership of the American Indian Movement because one of my classmates in the School of Public Administration, Bob McLaughlin. He was connected to the American Indian Movement and he brought two of us to a meeting in New York City and the New York City happened to be in the home of Harry Belafonte. Now not many people today know who Harry Belafonte is but he was a Black actor and singer. He did the banana song, Day-o, Day-o. And he was a contemporary of almost every artist in New York City who was Black at the time. I got to go to a Puerto Rican solidarity day at Madison Square Garden. I was able to have dinner with Richard Erdoes who wrote a great book called, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. I had five minutes to, listen to mostly, but talk a little bit with Bette Davis. A lot of people don't know Bette Davis, but she was one of the outstanding female actors, actresses of her day. And she was doing a retrospective at McCarter Theatre. So I had a lot of things that were exciting. On the crew team, I got to go to various regattas. So I visited Annapolis and rode on the Thames or not the Severn River.

I went up to Boston and rode on the Charles. I was at Cornell and rode on their canal. Went down to Florida for intercession for two weeks and rode at the opening of Disney World. So, there are a lot of great things that I was exposed to while being at Princeton. It was a place that opened up opportunities for me, but it wasn't really an Indigenous campus after Dr. Ortiz left in my junior year. We didn't have any Native faculty. So, some of the things that he brought to us just disappeared. He was able to engage us in protests for Wounded Knee. There's a picture in the Prince of Laureen in Trenton. We went to Trenton to protest. There's a picture of a number of my colleagues. So, you know, that that was kind of the campus environment that I was introduced to. And I had some things from Western culture that I really enjoyed. I got to see different plays at McCarter Theatre, although I was working, I got to go to concerts. I love orchestral music, actually music of all kinds. I got to work with Dr. Walter Ulmer for one year with the choir and unfortunately, like I said, I had to let that go because I couldn't afford the time as I, I had to spend more time working.

Myra Ridhuan '27 (35:53)

That was wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. We are running a little short on time, so we're going to jump down to the final question, which is, what is your advice for current students and what is your hope for future Native and Indigenous students at Princeton?

Patrick M. Anderson '75 (36:10)

I worked as a CEO of a number of organizations. And what I wanted was to see people happy at what they're doing, people excited to go to work every day, completely the opposite of what I felt going to work, of what I saw with my employees. So I adopted a process of employee engagement. And then I discovered that most of us are siloed into what we do and we're heavily resistant to change. So this may sound strange, but our education system in the US stifles innovative thinking and creative thinking. And it does that in a very measured specific way called providing a convergent education.

Education that uses grades that responds to your thinking immediately with, well, that didn't work or I don't think it will work. Almost everyone's been in that kind of conversation. We're all excited as children about what we observe and our parents will tell us that, that's wonderful, honey. When we get to school, all of a sudden you come up with an idea and you're excited about it. You blurt it out and then you're regimented

and your creativity is suppressed by this convergent education. I would say look at the work of Dr. George Land and the creative studies that he did for NASA and afterwards with Head Start. And then I would look at the work of Sir Kenneth Robinson. And interestingly enough, the work from the Imaginarium, I think that's what they called it, at Disney.

They were working on innovative and creative thinking a long time ago. What I find with Princeton professors and faculty and staff is that they're locked into that lack of innovative or creative thinking that if President Eisgruber hadn't shut me down right away, I would probably be trying to find a faculty member or two who might be interested. And I've reached out to a number. I don't get responses back.

But be creative. There is a whole world out there that can be formed based on creative thinking. Artificial intelligence is going to change the way we do things. It's the fourth iteration of an industrial revolution. So prepare for change. Prepare for thinking creatively and innovatively. It took me decades to get to that point, and I should have had that coming out of Princeton.

The George Land studies were done in the early 1960s. By the time I got there, a lot of his testing of Head Start and kindergartners had already happened. And the Disney and Kenneth Robinson information has been around for decades, and yet it's still not showing up at Princeton. We're siloed into a place where we follow a Western, this is the goal I want. I got to graduate. I got to get into law school or med school or no. Medicine is going to change. AI may

do away with medical school and doctors in large part. And so we have to be prepared for change. It's coming.

I didn't just come to my Indigenous connection overnight. What happened is that I was involved with my community. I learned a lot. And then I went intensively back and began studying my ancestry, my family's background, comparing and contrasting with the suppression period. I'll never be able to learn the language, which carries a lot of our wisdom and knowledge. But coming back to an Indigenous mindset can do so much for this country.