Dr. Janine Pease is a renowned American Indian educator
and advocate. Amongst other achievements, she was the founding president of the
Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency Montana, a past president of the American
Indian Higher Education Consortium (for two terms), a director of the American Indian
College Fund (for seven years), and was appointed by President Clinton to the National
Advisory Council on Indian Education (for eight years). She was also a trustee of
the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Janine Pease wrote the introduction for The
Essential Charles Eastman. Dr. Pease also wrote the "Foreword"
to The
Spirit of Indian Women. In addition, she contributed to the book Native Spirit: The
Sun Dance Way, and her videotaped comments and counsel were
included in Native Spirit and The Sun Dance Way , a 2-disc DVD set.
Janine Pease is a Crow and Hidatsa Indian, enrolled as a Crow.
Dr. Pease has been the recipient of several prestigious awards and honors: National
Indian Educator of the Year (1990), the MacArthur Fellowship Award (better known
as the “Genius Award”) and the ACLU Jeanette Rankin Award. She has been named one
of the “One Hundred Montanan’s of the Century” by the Missoulian Magazine, a “Montanans
To Remember” by Montana Magazine, and one of the fourteen most important
American Indians leaders of the twentieth century in New Warriors, by
R. David Edmunds (University of Nebraska Press). She is also the recipient of Honorary
Doctorate degrees from six different colleges and universities. Dr. Pease served
on the Montana Human Rights Commission, and was appointed to the Montana Board of
Regents of Higher Education in June, 2006 by Gov. Brian Schweitzer.
Pease was born on the Colville Indian Reservation in eastern Washington, where both
of her parents taught school. One of her paternal great-grandfathers was White-Man
Runs-Him, one of the Crow scouts who served with George Armstrong Custer. She holds
two bachelor's degrees from Central Washington University, and her fluent Spanish
and interest in Latino culture is, in part, the result of a semester studying in
Mexico. In 1987 she received her master’s degree from Montana State University,
and in 1994 she received a doctorate in adult and higher education from MSU.
She has worked for the Governor’s Commission on Youth Involvement, a division of
the state government in Washington and taught Native American Studies at Big Bend
Community College in Moses Lake, Washington, where the student body was 40% Hispanic.
She was also a counselor for women students at the Navajo Community College.
In 1975, Janine Pease served as the director of the Crow tribe’s Adult and Continuing
Education Program. She built the program to include fifty-one employees in eleven
centers, and she collaborated with the Crow Central Education Commission to establish
the first Crow Indian educational authority, which was designed to provide the education
of trial members, both on and off the Crow Reservation.
Dr. Pease has also worked as a counselor at Eastern Montana College (now Montana
State University in Billings). She then became executive director of the Little
Big Horn Tribal College, which was the one of the results of her earlier work with
the Crow Educational Authority. Under her guidance, the college grew out of its
dilapidated abandoned gymnasium with almost no funding into an accredited, financially
secure college with a modern campus. The college offers a divers academic curriculum
and, in addition, under Dr. Pease's leadership it championed efforts to preserve
the Crow language, traditional culture and spirituality. Her efforts established
the Crow Indian Archives, which is now the primary repository for “records, papers,
scrapbooks, family histories, and photographs of Crow individuals and tribal historians,
copies of federal government records; external studies and reports; and research
materials from historians, anthropologists, missionaries, attorneys, and others
who have studied Crow life.” Little Big Horn College continues as a fully accredited
two-year institution.
She is currently the Vice President for Academic Affairs at Fort Peck Community
College in Poplar, Montana. Before that, she held the position of Vice President
for American Indian Affairs at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana from
2003-2008. Dr. Pease has also owned her own consulting firm, specializing in tribal
colleges and universities program development and strategic planning.
Pease (then Janine Windy Boy) also was the leading plaintiff in voting rights litigation
against Big Horn County (Windy Boy v. Big Horn County), which resulted in
a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned a Montana state law which had discriminated
against the voting rights of American Indians.
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