The Rebirth of D-Q University
Determined to keep the dream alive, interim president Arthur Apodaca seeks to re-energize California’s only two-year tribal college
By Patricia Valdata
The Phoenix is a traditional symbol of rebirth, but for D-Q University, a bolt cutter may be a more appropriate image. After more than 30 years as California’s only two-year tribal college, the school lost its accreditation in January 2005. The board of directors tried to keep the school open, but last summer they began packing up student records and chained and locked the doors. They even directed the California Department of Transportation to remove highway signs pointing visitors to D-Q.
But a small group of students simply refused to leave. They called upon some of the school’s activist founders for aid — the same ones who started the college in 1971 by climbing a fence and conducting a sit-in. One of those founders, a lawyer named Arthur Apodaca, took a set of bolt cutters and literally reopened the school last August.
How this unique and often troubled college finally collapsed is a complicated story. Its rebirth will be no easy task for the “D-Q Renaissance Team” led by Apodaca, who was appointed interim president by a reconstituted board of directors. He replaced Victor Gabriel, the previous interim president, who resigned last summer.
Founding a New Kind of College
D-Q was founded not long after members of the American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969. It was the dream of two American Indian scholars, David Risling Jr., known as the “father of Indian Education,” and Dr. Jack Forbes, professor emeritus and former chair of Native American studies at the University of California, Davis. Risling, the founder of the California Indian Education Association and a member of the Hoopa tribe, died last year at age 83. In the early 1970s, Risling taught agriculture at Modesto Junior College, and Forbes was a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Together, they created the Native American studies program that Forbes took to UC-Davis. Then they took the next step.
