Carla Vigue:
We have a group, they call themselves the Relatives and the Relative Collective. It started out with some aunties, and in Native culture, aunties are almost like your second mom. They're your mom. And the aunties are, generally speaking, staff who are student-focused. They help with student services, they work in areas like tutoring, mental health services. They plan activities for students, like outings, dinners. They help the student, they support the students in some of the activities that the students are planning, like powwows. There's the uncles — you know, similar role — and now we have cousins, so it's just a really supportive community. Just this past winter, the student organization Wunk Sheek planned a winter round dance and I was so proud of them. They planned this round dance — they had over 200 people show up to this winter round dance in December, and they had invited seven drums and 20 showed up. It was amazing, so you can see there's such strong support for Native students on this campus, and it's just so nice to see.