SHELLY C. LOWE glows with excitement from her seat as the new president of the nation’s most influential institution for Indigenous arts and higher education. A citizen of the Navajo Nation from Ganado, Arizona, Lowe began her role at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) this summer after decades of work spent advancing Native American voices in academia and ensuring Indigenous students thrive in higher education. “When I started college, I had a very difficult time transitioning,” recalls the University of Arizona graduate. Those early struggles have fueled a three-decade career that includes working with Native students at her alma mater, holding leadership roles at Harvard and Yale, and serving as the first Native American to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. Lowe, who replaces longtime president Robert Martin (Cherokee Nation), takes over at a pivotal time, as IAIA faces federal funding cuts. She brings a commitment to strengthening its global reputation for excellence and its mission of supporting Indigenous creativity, scholarship, and leadership.
My mother was a school librarian.
In eighth grade, I read Louise Erdrich’s book Tracks. It was the first time I read a book with an extremely strong Native female character.
One of the defining things about my childhood is that the College of Ganado was in my community on the Navajo reservation.
I had not been prepared to go to college when I graduated high school, but this idea of college was there ever since I was younger.
We were always encouraged to get our education, to go and gain skills outside of our communities, and bring them home.
It became my desire to understand my own experience, but also the experience of other Native students I was seeing on campus.
The data for Native students in higher education is not very positive—we have the highest dropout rates, the lowest graduation rates—and I wanted to understand why.
It’s not just about students. It’s also about ensuring there are Native faculty, Native staff, that Indigenous people at all levels feel welcomed, understood, and successful.
You are consistently explaining who you are—not just to students, but to staff, faculty, administrators, and even donors.
Indigeneity is global. Indigenous people from around the world come together in our institutions and realize their struggles are often the same.
We’ve seen attention to Native identity ebb and flow—sometimes it’s trendy, sometimes we’re “boutique.” But higher education has shown continual growth and every year there are more Native PhDs and faculty.
There’s a lot of pushback right now on how we're telling history and what kind of history we're telling. But I tell people, “We’ve already let the cat out of the bag. It's not going back in.”
When people learn something that makes them uncomfortable, that means we’re doing our job.
I want to make sure the institution remains an institute of excellence—nationally, within tribal communities, and globally.
There are so many new ways to share our stories, and it’s going to be our students who find them and create them.
Our students now are going to be the ones telling the stories—about how IAIA grew, how we handled the pandemic, how we handled a tumultuous political time.
SEE FOR YOURSELF
Learn more about the Institute of American Indian Arts at iaia.edu.