Long way from home

Adae Romero '02 spent much of her first semester on campus in tears. While her classmates chatted excitedly, eager to make new friends, she found comfort in the soft voices of her relatives thousands of miles away. Long after her hallmates had settled in — mounting posters and draping orange and black "Princeton 2002" banners on their walls — her clothes remained neatly folded in her suitcase.

She didn't want to unpack because she wasn't sure she was going to stay.

Alone in her single room, she longed for the close-knit community of the New Mexico pueblo she had left behind.

"It was terrible," she recalled, drawing out the word "terrible" as her eyes widened, picturing the difficult semester. "It was such an intense loneliness. I missed my grandmother, my grandfather, hearing people talk to me in my language. I actually hated it. I didn't think I was going to make it here."

She almost didn't.

When she arrived at Princeton, Romero had spent her entire life on a Cochiti pueblo in New Mexico. It was a quiet village of 500, and Romero's role in the community was, after 18 years, comfortably familiar. She attended traditional hunts, helped prepare chili for pueblo-wide feasts and took her elderly grandmother to the eye doctor. The entire village knew who she was. And Cochiti was all she had known.

Now she found herself in unfamiliar Princeton. There were arch sings and weekends at the 'Street,' and the food in the residential colleges hardly resembled the Southwestern staples she was accustomed to eating. On a campus teeming with thousands of students, faculty and staff, a familiar face was hard to find.

"I felt so unlike everybody," she said in her characteristically soft tone. "It was really difficult to find people who were patient enough with me to explain the significance of all these social things. I spent the whole year looking for friends who I could relate with."

At a university with so few Native-American students — Romero estimates there are between 45 and 50 but that as few as 10 identify themselves as part of the Native community — finding someone to whom she could relate proved difficult. She felt that many students previously had attended school together and had long since cemented their friendships. And those who hadn't just didn't seem to understand her — their life experiences were too different, their ideas of a good time too unusual.

It was another world altogether.

But it was a world in which Romero — whose mother is Cochiti and father is Kiowa — had longed to take part. During phone calls home, her family reminded her that Princeton was where she belonged. The heartfelt words of her grandparents echoed in her ears and encouraged her to keep going.

"We told her no matter where she's at, how she's doing, there's always someone here who cares about her and cares what she's doing," recalled Romero's grandfather, Joe. "To think about the good things that she remembers. We never forget her. She's always in our prayers day and night."

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Alone in an unfamiliar world, Romero sought friends in unconventional places. And as her first year at Princeton wore sluggishly on, it was two dining services employees and a professor who quelled her loneliness and made her believe that perhaps she might make it at Princeton after all.

Romero smiles thoughtfully when recalling her first friends on campus.

"There was this Jamaican woman [who swiped meal cards in Wilson] who always gave me a hug when I came in," she said, a wide grin brightening her face. "And Ray, the chef at Wilcox [dining hall]."

Romero remembers the evening Ray brought his wife and children to Wilcox for dinner. He came over to where she was sitting and said he wanted her to meet his family. She was touched. Though she has since graduated from the residential college system, she still goes back to Wilcox to visit Ray.

"[The staff] just seemed most friendly," she explained. "They asked me how my day was, what I was doing for the weekend. Not too many other Princeton students did that. I opened up to them more because I felt they cared about what I was doing. It was a blessing."

Romero signed up for WRI 151: Finding Voice: Perspectives on Race and Class, taught by professor Kathryn Watterson.

"She noticed my ability to write and felt connected with my stories," Romero said of Watterson, who, like Romero, spent many years of her life among the snow-capped mountains and pastel-colored skies of the Southwest.

"I grew up in the Southwest and Adae sensed that in me," Watterson explained. "I remember early in the course Adae wrote about the cornfields and her grandfather speaking the language. [The class] was an opportunity for her to explore her roots. It's a privilege to teach someone who's that connected as a writer."

As the semester progressed, Watterson became a trusted mentor and friend to Romero. The two went out for coffee and to poetry readings, and Romero soon met Watterson's husband and son.

"At first I was reluctant to talk to her," Romero recalled, smiling at her first impression of Watterson, whom she now considers her "Mom away from home."

"I thought professors and students should keep this professional relationship, but she didn't really care about traditional rules and that just filtered to me," she said. "She helped me so much."

While Watterson's class provided Romero the chance to explore her Native-American roots and to share her experiences with non-Native students, not every course at Princeton proved as welcoming.

Stereotypes about Native Americans seem to find their way into the classroom. During one of her precepts last semester, Romero felt that a discussion on federal Indian policy took a prejudiced turn for the worse.

"This one boy said it was right to kill the Indians because they would have killed themselves anyway," she said. "I could just imagine him saying that to my grandfather or to someone in my community."

And sometimes it's not what people say that leaves Romero feeling uncomfortable. It's what they don't say.

Last year she was assigned to read an article on cannibalism in pueblo communities as part of a course on politics and race. She remembers sitting in class and wondering why no one inquired as to whether the practice occurred on the Cochiti pueblo. (It didn't.)

"No one bothered to ask me when I was actually a living, breathing person from one of these communities," she said. "It's just weird."

At times, the trials of being a Native American at Princeton extend beyond the University's gates and spill into the surrounding community.

Last year, Romero was sitting at a bus stop just outside campus when two young white boys came up to her and asked if she was an Indian. Good-natured, Romero simply said, "Yes," and watched as the boys hurried off to tell their mother.

A few moments later, the boys' mother approached Romero and politely inquired if her sons — who had never seen a real Indian before — could touch her long, flowing hair. It was as if Romero were a celebrity, but the unexpected attention was hardly flattering.

"I felt like I was in a wax museum," she said. "I felt so fake."

Rachel Gutwein '04 has also found herself in awkward situations simply because she's a Native American.

This fall, the South Dakota-born Gutwein was enjoying a run across campus, savoring the crisp autumn air, when another student approached her and asked her to explain the significance of the beaded elastic that held her waist-length hair in place. The girl's question flustered Gutwein, whose family moved off its reservation when she was six years old and has since lived in a mostly white Pennsylvania suburb.

"It's just a hair tie," she responded innocently.

But the student, who was apparently looking for a different answer, wasn't satisfied.

"You know, you shouldn't wear something if you don't know what it means," she scolded Gutwein, whose father is of German and Czechoslovakian descent and whose mother is Mexican and Lakota Indian.

At the other end of the spectrum, Gutwein said, some people seem afraid of mislabeling her background and avoid alluding to her Native roots.

When the tan-skinned Gutwein mentions she's from South Dakota — she still considers the reservation where she spends each summer her home — people hesitate to ask if she is Native American, though she senses that is what they are thinking.

"They say, 'Oh, so are you . . . ' and I have to fill in the sentence, 'Yes, I'm a Native,' " she explained.

But Gutwein insists that, for her, being a Native at Princeton is not much different from being anyone else. The potential art history major attended a diverse boarding school and is used to answering questions about her race. Besides, her friends come from a variety of different backgrounds.

Discussions about classes, the latest movies and what happened at the 'Street' are much more common than dialogues on race. Even her boyfriend, whom she met in high school, is non-Native — he's Indian and his family is from Bombay.

Still, at a time when so few Native students attend college and an even smaller number enroll at Princeton, being a member of an under-represented minority on campus can be trying.

Gutwein recalls that another student once smugly told her that the only reason she was accepted to Princeton was because of her race.

"On my application I didn't just say 'I'm an Indian, let me in,' " she said, raising her voice slightly while walking to Chapel Choir rehearsal on a quiet afternoon. "I took a lot of classes in high school. I did a lot."

At times like these, Gutwein said it helps to know that other Native students on campus are coping with similar experiences. Though they come from different parts of the country, speak different languages and practice different traditions, the simple fact that they are all Native is enough to bind them into a cohesive group.

It's hard to explain, Gutwein said, but from the moment they meet, Native students form close bonds based on a common identity. They feel comfortable together. They understand each other. It's just a feeling.

Romero, who is active in the Native Americans at Princeton club, voiced a similar opinion. While her family has emphasized that she should never shun anyone simply because the person is non-Native, she said Native students nonetheless tend to "gravitate toward each other."

"Native life is almost nonexistent because there are so few of us [at Princeton]," she explained. "But of the few of us here, we're very close. [The club] doesn't have many gatherings. We do eat dinner together, we have meetings and fry-bread study breaks. It's more of a supportive environment than anything else."

Even as a junior, Romero said she does not feel fully comfortable in Princeton's social scene. She is not in an eating club and rarely goes out to the 'Street.'

"It's just not my thing," she said.

And her closest student friends at Princeton are Native.

During freshman orientation, Romero became fast friends with Erin Greybull '02, whom she approached and started talking to because she "looked very Native." Greybull did not grow up on a reservation, but has learned about her heritage from her father, who is Dakota Sioux. She empathized with Romero's difficulties in adjusting to life at Princeton.

"Because we're both Natives, we can understand things," Greybull said. "It's hard to explain. It has to do with our beliefs and the way we feel about little things in life that we see differently because of our culture. I can understand why Adae does the things she does, why she is the way she is."

And for Romero, finding someone on campus who could relate to what she was going through provided her with the inspiration she needed to begin to make Princeton feel like her second home.

As the richly colored leaves began to flutter to the ground, marking the passage of her first fall on campus, Romero slowly began to shed fewer tears.

Deciding to explore her Native roots at Princeton, Romero began working in the rare books department of Firestone library under Alfred Bush, the curator of the Princeton collection of Western Americana, whose adopted son is Hopi. Here she sorted the University's "amazing collection" of Native American periodicals and photographs and soon developed a close friendship with Monte White '99, a Navajo Indian who also worked for Bush.

"If it weren't for Monte, I wouldn't have made it here," Romero recalled. "I spent so many nights just talking in his dorm room, going to New York City. He told me 'You're gonna be uncomfortable here. It depends how you deal with it and that will determine if you're going to be successful or not.' "

For Romero, finding success at Princeton has been no small task. Though she felt prepared academically — she had taken college-level courses her last two years in high school — she felt behind in her writing skills.

"My freshman seminar professor told me I was a really bad writer," chuckled Romero, who is now writing a junior paper on bilingual education for her Wilson School task force. "He got one of the students in my class to help me. She read every single one of my papers."

Watterson, too, encouraged Romero to express her feelings through writing. She suggested that Romero should keep a journal of the emotions she had trouble sharing with others. Romero took Watterson's advice and soon found her poetry on being a Native at Princeton published in the alumni publication Princeton: With One Accord.

Some of her poetry also appeared in a collection of Native poetry published by the Smithsonian. Later, Romero was asked to speak at the Third World Center's women's conference. Then she was invited to speak at a freshman week program on diversity at Princeton.

"It was wonderful having people come up to me afterwards and say how they related to my story," Romero recalled. "I didn't feel so isolated from people. I felt like people were willing to listen to me, to hear what I had to say and were very open. It made me feel more welcome."

"Adae had the motivation to [succeed at Princeton] and I just always told her she had the strength to do [it]," Watterson said. "I told her she was going to learn great things from doing this."

And Romero doesn't seek success at Princeton only for herself. It's for her family and her community as well.

Days before she boarded a plane to New Jersey to begin her Princeton career, her grandfather sat her down and instilled in her a powerful idea she carries with her in everything she does.

"He told me, 'Remember when you're out there, that you're not just there for you. You're there for all of us,' " she said.

"We try to tell the kids they've always got to remember we expect, or hope, that whatever they major in, they'll come back and try to help the people and the tribe," Romero's grandfather explained. "Whatever Adae accomplishes is going to benefit her and she in turn is going to benefit others with her education."

Romero, too, hopes that what she learns at Princeton ultimately will allow her to help her community. She recalls how upset she was when the Army came into her community to build the Cochiti Lake Dam and, in the process, destroyed sacred sites and farming lands. Since most of the people on the reservation had not received formal schooling, they were unskilled in knowing how to fight back.

"My people had no choice," Romero said, her voice more sad than angry. "They threw their education in the face of my people. Now I'm learning the game and the different rules not everyone has the chance to learn."

Romero's coursework at the University reflects this goal. For her senior thesis, she hopes to research federal policies and laws pertaining to Native Americans.

"I chose the Woodrow Wilson School because I wanted to gain more of an understanding of Native people today," she said.

While Romero knows that for now Princeton is her home, her heart will always remain in New Mexico. She dreams of the sun rising in the mountains, the sweet smell of fry bread baking in the oven and the colorful portrait of her family dancing in their traditional Native attire. Romero knows that some day, diploma in hand, she will return.

"I'm not Adae without Cochiti," she said. "I never really think of myself as separate from it. Temporarily displaced, but not separate. My body, my soul and my mind all reside there. That's where my people are — where everything I know is. I want to go to graduate school, but after that I'm going home to Cochiti."