The August heat in Choctaw, Mississippi, has parents and children ducking in and out of Pearl River Head Start quickly.
Inside, Tina Hickman, the center’s facilities coordinator and secretary, says it’ll be getting even busier soon with the start of the school year.
When Hickman, 41, started community college after graduating high school in 2003, she was originally interested in accounting. Instead, she fell in love with teaching while at the center, where she’s served in a couple of different roles since 2008.
In 2024, she started working toward her bachelor’s in early childhood education.
“I only took one class at first, but after that I started taking three classes: that determination just kind of came over me,” Hickman said. “And then my kids, they were about to graduate high school. I was like, I need to do this for them, to show them it can be done, no matter what age.”
Hickman’s earlier undergraduate classes were at East Central and Meridian community colleges. To get her teaching degree, however, she decided to attend Bay Mills Community College, a tribal college in Michigan.
Hickman said the choice to attend Bay Mills wasn’t just a chance to finish her bachelor’s, but also to gain a new perspective on her Indigenous heritage. Like with her favorite class, Native American Contributions to Society.
“Taking that class, it just made me feel proud to be Native,” Hickman said. ”Classes like that aren't offered at East Central…it's not taught in high school, even tribal.”
But Bay Mills is in Brimley, Michigan — more than 1,000 miles from Choctaw — making online classes the only way for Hickman to realistically attend a tribal institution for her specific degree.
There are 34 tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) in the country — higher education institutions chartered by Native American tribes. But there isn’t a single one in the Gulf South, where there are six federally recognized tribes and over a dozen state-recognized tribes.
The closest institution is in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, at the College of the Muscogee Nation, but the college only offers two-year degrees.
The closest institution with a bachelor’s program is at Haskell Indian Nations University, in Lawrence, Kansas — over 500 miles from Shreveport, Louisiana — and a much farther trip coming from other parts of the Gulf South.
For a master’s degree, the closest option is the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Students can often get financial assistance for college from their home tribes. But TCUs themselves are funded through the tribes that charter them, which in turn receive federal funding — which means that finances can be precarious.
This year, the Department of Interior proposed eliminating TCU funding, though that move was shot down by the Senate. Similar cuts had been proposed the previous financial year as well.
Financial assistance was part of how Hickman decided to go to Bay Mills. The college has a program specifically meant to help tribal Head Start teachers and staff, with MBCI being one of the current tribes they partner with.
“They pay for two classes for free for early childhood education,” said Hickman. “It was just kind of something to kind of get our teachers…to pursue their education.”
Hickman would love to see a TCU in the Gulf South not just for location, but to also keep the Mississippi Choctaw community close together.
“Here in the South, they already feel like they don't belong,” Hickman said, explaining that a local TCU would provide indigenous-centric education without asking local tribal members to step far out of their comfort zone.
Cultural, academic barriers
It’s not just cultural belonging that plays a role in the value of TCUs for Indigenous students. The lack of local, tribal options limits the perspectives Indigenous students get in a variety of academic disciplines.
Rachel Billiot, a member of the United Houma Nation — a state-recognized tribe in Louisiana — had very little awareness of TCUs when she started college, like Hickman.
As an undergraduate at the University of New Orleans, she actively looked for opportunities to get out of the state and learn about indigenous life outside of Louisiana.
She studied abroad in Costa Rica and did an exchange program in Hawaii, where she learned about indigenous languages and history. Then, she went to Northern Arizona University for a semester.
“That's the one that put schools with a big indigenous focus on my radar because it was so nice, actually going to a school with a significant native population and clubs and everything like that,” said Billiot. “They're the one who had different information on other opportunities.”
She then learned of Haskell — the university in Kansas — through social media and attended the school for an environmental research internship in 2019.
Now, she wants to go to a TCU to continue her studies in graduate school.
“There are different things to be added to the conversation: talks about responsibilities, talks about the rights of nature, talks about what the land means to us on a whole different level when it comes to those things,” Billiot said. “Traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge… you will never hear about in a non-native school or a school that does not have any of that working knowledge with Indigenous populations.”
But there are only a few graduate-level higher-ed options and none of them are in the South, where she’d like to stay.
“If I want to work with plants and I want to work in my landscape, I have to focus in the Southeast because the only place you're going to get working knowledge is by working within the landscape itself,” said Billiot. “Usually, the things that are offering work with Indigenous populations from an indigenous perspective are either in the Southwest or in the Midwest, where you have larger reservations that can focus on those kinds of things.
“There's just none that I know of in the Southeast.”
The options close to home
Melinda Ben, who directs the tribal scholarship office for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, said wanting to stay near family and things like athletics do keep a lot of younger students at in-state universities.
But when she speaks to them, many are in the same boat as Hickman and Billoit and simply don’t know that TCUs are an option when they’re leaving high school.
The tribe is hosting a college and career fair on September 9th — an opportunity for students to learn about next steps in their education.
“I have sent the information out to the TCUs but haven't really gotten a response,” Ben said. “It's definitely worth them coming to reach out to our students because I feel like if they don't hear from us or if somebody there doesn't talk to them about it, they won't know about it.”
One of those students is Lexi Alaysia Flint, who’s part of the Oklahoma Redwater community of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw and the tribe’s Indian Princess for 2026-27.
The 20-year-old is studying nursing at the University of Mississippi.
“I knew that I wanted to stay in Mississippi; I wanted to remain close to my tribe and my people,” Flint said, adding that it also allowed her to compete in the pageant to be the Choctaw Indian Princess.
TCUs weren’t on her radar for that reason, but she was still searching for cultural belonging in Oxford. So, she helped revive the Native American and Indigenous Student Association at the university last spring.
“We allowed not only Choctaw people but all Indigenous students at the University of Mississippi to attend our events,” Flint said. “We just established this group, this area where other Indigenous people can come in and get that sense of community that they might not find in the other organizations.”
It’s one way to bridge the gap without a local TCU. Ben said academically, there are ways for other non-native universities in Mississippi to do the same.
She’d love for Mississippi State University, where many of their tribal members attend, to develop a similar curriculum to the University of Oklahoma — another non-TCU with a large Indigenous population.
“OU actually has that...we've had a couple of students to graduate with a Native American Studies degree,” said Ben. “They even offer Native American Law degree as a masters.”
Ultimately, Ben said, funding and exposure would be a huge help in getting a TCU in the Gulf South.
But Hickman — with her own degree from a TCU — said what she wants to see most of all is connection with her people and tribal educational institutions.
“I would like to see them more engaged: come out here, come see these students, come talk to them,” said Hickman. “If we had a TCU here, I think a lot of people — a lot of the kids — would love that because what we do here, we support each other.”
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
