Four scholars, five years later

Story Jasa Santos
Photos by: Garett Smith

            Having $20,000 can mean a lot of things.   It can mean a new car, a down payment on a home — or close to the average debt of students graduating from college in Montana.
            To four adults on the Fort Belknap Reservation, $20,000 meant the chance at a four-year education, a chance to earn a degree, a chance to make things better for the 3,500 reservation residents back home.
            Fort Belknap is home to the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre, and lies along Montana’s northern tier, a part of the state that illustrates its nickname “Big Sky Country.” The horizon is a distant destination; the endless blue sky and sagebrush-dotted landscape never seem to meet.
            The roads winding past Fort Belknap College are littered with potholes, forcing drivers to either swerve negligently or tackle them head on, giving passengers a bone-jarring bounce in their seats.
            Just a few miles east of the reservation, all three right turns off Highway 2 into Dodson take the driver to the K-12 school.
            The playground is deserted on this sunny Tuesday, but the gym is bustling with students erecting science fair projects.
            At the center is Wendy Hopkins, Dodson’s 7th through 12th grade science teacher. As she directs students to hang oversized crossword puzzles and softly chastises them for saying “I seen,” it’s hard to imagine Hopkins as the painfully shy 17-year-old she once was.
            Back at the reservation, Suzanne Doney-Cochran is on her way from Fort Belknap Agency to Harlem. A public health nurse, her job today is to see Louise and Alvin Martin, an elderly couple suffering from high-blood pressure, a common ailment among the aging here.
            This is the land where Hopkins and Doney-Cochran began their education, and it’s the land they returned to after completing it.
            The women are two of four students at Fort Belknap College who earned $20,000 scholarships from the Packard Foundation in 2001.
Neil Rock and Dean Snow also won the scholarships. They are back now, too, but minus the degrees Doney-Cochran and Hopkins earned.
            Created in 1994 by David Packard, a founder of Hewlett-Packard, and Lucille Salter Packard, the Packard Foundation provides funding for a diverse array of science and technology projects and scholarships for promising students.
            From 1996 to 2001, 14 Fort Belknap students garnered the Packard’s tribal scholars award.
            Like the bumpy roads on the reservation, the lives of these four recipients have swerved around potholes and bounced over rough parts.
            As a teenage mother, Hopkins says she fought shyness and low self-esteem, forcing herself into classrooms at Montana State University-Northern, where she enrolled at 17.
            “I just didn’t feel like I fit in,” she recalls. “I wasn’t the traditional student.” She lasted but a year. After Northern, Hopkins spent two quarters at a community college in Glendive, before spending 10 years working for the postal service and caring for her daughter.
            By the time Hopkins, a Gros Ventre, enrolled at Fort Belknap College, she was 37, married, and had two boys in addition to her daughter. After graduation with an associate of science degree, she enrolled at MSU-Northern again. This fall, after completing a field internship, she will leave the college with a degree in biology and a teaching endorsement.

1 2 3

View the Fort Belknap Slideshow