Lauren Yates: ‘I don’t take no for an answer’

She was raised on a small section of land that was set-aside far away from people who hoped to get rid of her and her kind. The nearest McDonald’s was an hour away. Her grandmother spoke a language that her schoolteachers told her was wrong. Her family was given food rations and subsidies from a government that hoped to shut them up. Then she moved to a city, filled with people who talked different, looked different and had completely different values. She went to a school where kids laughed at her and told her she looked funny and talked funny. Then her teachers taught her that everything she learned the first 11 years of her life was wrong.

For Lauren Yates, a senior sociology major, this has been her life. She was born and raised in Utah on the Unitah and Ouray Reservation, whose residents are mostly Shoshone Utes. It’s the seventh-poorest American Indian reservation in the United States.

Yates moved off the reservation to Cleveland in 1989, starting school a week later.

She went home crying the first day and asked her mother where all the Indians were. She cried every day and didn’t know a lot of what people were talking about. When her teacher told the class they were going to write a paper, Yates remembers being confused about what writing a paper was.

When she graduated from high school, her dream was to move back home to the reservation. Her mother suggested attending college. Yates applied to a college about an hour from the reservation in Utah, but missed the deadline and was denied. She then ended up at Baldwin-Wallace College, which she paid for by selling her own beadwork.

While walking around the Baldwin-Wallace campus, she still wondered where all the Indians were. She knew they were there somewhere so she restarted a stagnant Native American Student Association that attracted about 13 regular members. Yates then transferred to Kent State in fall 2000 with a desire to do the same.

She obtained a list of 91 Native American students on Kent’s campus and began pushing to establish her own Native American Student Association, which was officially recognized in August 2001.

Yates wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to have a powwow, the American Indian social event involving dancing, food and music. She knew it could be done because the annual Ann Arbor powwow in Michigan (a nationally recognized powwow attracting American Indians from all over the states) was originally started on a college campus.

But Yates says she was given the run-around. She was told under no circumstances would she ever have a pow-wow in the Student Center, and she could not have it in the MAC Center for fear of crowding the basketball teams for space, and she could not have it in the Commons because, among other things, University Scheduling didn’t want the grass trampled or people climbing in trees.

But she told them “Hi, my name is Lauren Yates. I’m president of the Native American Student Association and I don’t take no for an answer.”

She was denied scheduling a powwow for December 2001 and denied again for February 2002. She then gave University Scheduling two possible weekends in March and they said no. As a last-ditch effort, she went to Cornel Morton, dean of student affairs, and he seemed enthusiastic. Morton called University Scheduling and discovered the last weekend in April was open in the Commons. The idea was then passed by Undergraduate Student Senate on February 4.

So, why all the trouble for one powwow?

“Personally,” says Yates, “a college that preaches they are diverse really didn’t impress me when they started telling me no. Considering you have 91 registered self-identified natives, I would consider it important. That’s their culture.”