Education on Their Own Terms:

The Founding and Growth of Fort Peck Community College

Origins on the High Plains

The Fort Peck Indian Reservation occupies a vast and isolated stretch of northeastern Montana, running roughly 110 miles east to west and 40 miles north to south. Encompassing more than two million acres of rolling grassland and breaks above the Missouri River, it is the second-largest reservation in the state and home to two distinct Indigenous nations: the Assiniboine, whose bands include the Canoe Paddler and Red Bottom, and several divisions of the Sioux, including Sisseton/Wahpetons, Yanktonais, and Teton Hunkpapa. Together, the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes count approximately 10,000 enrolled members, of whom about 6,000 live on or near the reservation. Poplar, the administrative center, sits near the southern border along the Missouri; Wolf Point lies twenty-two miles to the west. The nearest metropolitan center, Billings, is more than three hundred miles away.

This geographic isolation has shaped almost every dimension of reservation life, and education has been no exception. For more than a century before Fort Peck Community College came into existence, the education available to tribal members was largely designed by and for others. Understanding why the college was founded requires understanding the history of that prior educational regime.

The federal government established the Fort Peck Agency in 1871 to serve the Assiniboine and Sioux, and within a decade it had erected a boarding school at the agency headquarters at Poplar Creek. According to archival records held at the Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections at Montana State University, the Fort Peck Indian Agency boarding school opened in 1881 with Reverend Samuel E. Snider of the Methodist Episcopal Church as its first superintendent. Originally built to accommodate fifty students in a log building with separate dormitories for males and females, the school followed the regimen prescribed nationally for all such institutions: academic subjects combined with farming instruction for boys, domestic arts training for girls, suppression of Native language and dress, and mandatory English. By the turn of the twentieth century, the school at Poplar had become the largest on-reservation Indian boarding school in Montana. It operated until the 1930s.

As the Library of Congress has documented through the Historic American Buildings Survey, the boarding school represented a deliberate attempt at cultural transformation. Children on Fort Peck, as on reservations across the country, were disciplined for speaking their languages and discouraged from practicing traditional customs. In the words of one contemporary observer of Indian education policy, the purpose was unmistakably assimilationist. The long-term consequences for tribal language and identity were severe. By the late twentieth century, the number of fluent Nakoda (Assiniboine) speakers had dwindled to a handful, while Dakota speakers on the reservation numbered only between twenty-five and thirty-five individuals.

The boarding school era gave way to a period of missionary and then public schooling, but the fundamental dynamic remained the same: educational decisions were made outside the community, and the curriculum reflected the priorities of the federal government and, eventually, the state of Montana rather than those of the tribes themselves. A 2014 State of Reservation Education Report commissioned by the Fort Peck Tribal Education Department observed bluntly that across more than 120 years of formal education on the reservation, the systems in place had failed the majority of Indian children, in part because Indian people had no meaningful ownership of their educational institutions.

The Self-Determination Era and the Road to a Tribal College

The political context that made Fort Peck Community College possible began to take shape during the 1960s and early 1970s, when federal Indian policy shifted away from decades of termination and assimilation toward a framework of tribal self-determination. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 guaranteed tribes the authority to contract with federal agencies and take over management of programs, including education. This legislation, combined with growing pan-Indian activism and a series of congressional studies documenting the failures of existing educational arrangements, created an opening for something genuinely new: colleges chartered and controlled by tribal governments themselves.

The first such institution, Navajo Community College (now Dine College), had been founded by the Navajo Nation in 1968. Its example inspired tribal leaders across the country. In October 1972, representatives of the small number of then-existing tribal colleges convened in Washington, D.C., forming what would become the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, officially incorporated in 1973. As the Tribal College Journal has documented, the consortium united institutions serving geographically isolated reservations and economically disadvantaged populations, helping them develop shared strategies for survival and growth. In Montana, tribal educator Janine Pease-Pretty on Top later recalled that the consortium's 1976 technical assistance seminar, which she attended as part of a statewide alliance of Indian educators, was pivotal: within a year or two, each Montana tribe had gone home to organize a charter before its tribal council. Today, each of the seven tribes in Montana has a college; Fort Peck's was among the earliest.

Higher education had arrived on the Fort Peck Reservation in a preliminary form as early as 1969, when Dawson Community College in Glendive began offering extension courses there. In 1977, the Fort Peck Tribal Executive Board entered into a cooperative agreement with Miles Community College in Miles City, which had received a Title III Grant for Developing Institutions and could thereby fund on-reservation coursework. That arrangement provided a modest base of academic programming, but it remained dependent on decisions made in Miles City and subject to the priorities of an external institution.

The decisive step came in 1977, when the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes established their own Tribal Education Department. This body served as the organizational foundation for what followed: in 1978, the Fort Peck Tribal Executive Board formally chartered Fort Peck Community College. The original charter established a six-member Board of Directors. In 1987, that board expanded to nine members, with the bylaws specifying that at least seven must be enrolled members of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes. The arrangement was a deliberate expression of tribal sovereignty: the college would be governed by the community it served, not by state agencies or federal bureaucracies. The relationship with Miles Community College continued until 1986, when it ended, by which time the tribal college had developed sufficient institutional capacity to stand on its own.

The same year the college was chartered, the United States Congress enacted the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act (Public Law 95-471), signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on October 17, 1978. As the Tribal College Journal has noted, the legislation established Washington's formal commitment to American Indian post-secondary education and became one of the self-determination era's first legislative landmarks. The act authorized grants from the Secretary of the Interior to tribally controlled colleges, with eligibility requirements specifying that such institutions be formally chartered by a tribal government, governed by a board with an Indian majority, and directed by goals aimed at meeting the needs of Indian students. The legislation provided operating funds that, however contested and irregularly appropriated in subsequent years, gave tribal colleges including Fort Peck a statutory basis for federal support.

Building an Institution

The early years of Fort Peck Community College were years of institutional construction in the most literal sense. The college occupied modest facilities in Poplar, operating with limited resources and a student body drawn almost entirely from the reservation and surrounding communities. Its first associate degree was not conferred until 1987, nine years after the charter was signed. That same year, the college was accepted for accreditation candidacy by the Northwest Association of Schools and Colleges, Commission on Colleges.

Full accreditation followed in December 1991, when the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities granted formal recognition. The significance of accreditation extended beyond institutional prestige. Without it, the college's credits were not transferable to four-year institutions, federal financial aid was unavailable to its students, and the institution itself could not access certain categories of grants. Accreditation was therefore not a bureaucratic milestone but a practical prerequisite for the college's ability to serve its students. The Northwest Commission subsequently reaffirmed accreditation following a 2001 interim report and site visit, and the college operates on a seven-year accreditation cycle. In 2009, Fort Peck Community College received an additional accreditation from the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium, a body specifically organized to evaluate tribal and Indigenous educational institutions on criteria reflecting their distinctive missions.

A second significant federal designation arrived in 1994, when Congress extended land-grant status to thirty-two tribal colleges under the Equity in Education Land Grant Status Act. The 1862 Morrill Act had created the original system of land-grant universities designed to provide practical education in agriculture and the mechanic arts; the 1994 legislation, sometimes called the second Morrill Act, applied that same framework to tribal colleges. For Fort Peck Community College, land-grant status opened access to United States Department of Agriculture programs and funding streams. The college subsequently developed agricultural research and extension programming, including a project focused on enabling American Indian farmers and ranchers on the Fort Peck Reservation to participate in the Conservation Reserve Program and sustain financially and environmentally viable operations. Agricultural research findings have been disseminated to producers across the Northern Great Plains through outreach bulletins and distance education.

By the mid-1990s, Fort Peck Community College had established the institutional infrastructure that would define its subsequent development: tribal governance, regional accreditation, land-grant resources, and a curriculum integrating academic, vocational, and cultural programming. The college served approximately four hundred students, roughly seventy-nine percent of them Native American, drawn from an economically disadvantaged rural region where the nearest city with a substantial array of educational options was Billings, more than three hundred miles to the west.

Mission, Curriculum, and Cultural Continuity

From the beginning, Fort Peck Community College has articulated a dual institutional mission: providing accessible, quality higher education while simultaneously preserving and transmitting the cultures of the Assiniboine and Sioux peoples. These two purposes are not treated as parallel tracks but as inseparable aspects of a single educational philosophy. College leadership has consistently maintained that student success is directly related to cultural awareness and identity, and the curriculum reflects that conviction.

The Native American Studies Department, established in the college's early years, began offering Nakoda and Dakota language courses in 1981, just three years after the charter was signed. These offerings have continued and expanded over the decades. The department provides instruction in both languages through daily and evening courses for students of all ages, and has pursued grants and community partnerships to extend language learning beyond the traditional classroom setting. In a noteworthy technical development, the college partnered with Native Teaching Aids to create a specialized keyboard layout compatible with both Nakoda and Dakota orthography, recognizing the nasal vowels, accent markers, glottal stops, and fricatives that standard keyboards cannot represent. The resulting resource has been made freely available for download.

The urgency behind language preservation is not abstract. University of Montana journalism students documenting conditions on Fort Peck in 2018 reported that Dakota speakers on the reservation numbered only between twenty-five and thirty-five fluent individuals; the situation for Nakoda (Assiniboine) was even more precarious, with perhaps five fluent speakers on the reservation and an estimated thirty worldwide. Against this backdrop, the college's language programs represent not merely cultural enrichment but an effort to prevent irreversible loss. The campus itself signals this commitment through its physical environment: building names are rendered in Nakoda rather than Dakota or English, a deliberate choice that foregrounds the Assiniboine presence in an institutional setting located on the Sioux side of the reservation.

Beyond language, the college integrates what it describes as Nakoda/Dakota culture into the full student experience. Students participate in activities and organizations connected to tribal traditions, and the college has positioned itself as a resource for the broader community's cultural and ceremonial life. This approach reflects a philosophy common across tribal colleges: the conviction that education disconnected from cultural grounding has not served Native students well, and that an institution built by and for the community must look different from institutions imported from outside it.

The academic and vocational programming at Fort Peck has grown considerably since the first associate degrees were conferred in 1987. The college currently offers twenty-five associate degree and certificate programs covering fields including liberal arts, business, criminal justice, early childhood education, and health sciences. Transfer agreements with Rocky Mountain College, Montana State University-Northern, and the University of Montana facilitate the movement of credits into four-year programs. The college also administers a Health and Wellness Division operating out of two facilities — one in Poplar and one in Wolf Point — providing diabetes education, exercise programming, and nutrition services to tribal members across the reservation.

The Wolf Point campus, which serves communities on the western end of the reservation, includes the FPCC Wolf Point College Center, established as part of ongoing efforts to bring educational services closer to students who might otherwise face prohibitive commutes. The satellite campus reflects an understanding that geographic access remains a defining constraint for many reservation residents.

Place, Purpose, and Continuing Challenges

Fort Peck Community College operates in one of the more economically challenged regions of the United States. The Fort Peck Reservation encompasses a population of approximately six thousand on-reservation residents among ten thousand enrolled tribal members. Major sources of reservation employment include farming, ranching, oil production, and tribal government work. Poverty rates are high by any measure, and the college's student population reflects the economic realities of the surrounding community. Federal financial aid, including Pell Grants, is therefore not a supplementary resource but a foundational one for most students. Proposed changes to Pell Grant eligibility in recent years have prompted significant advocacy from FPCC and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, with the college stressing the disproportionate impact of any reduction on tribal college students who have few alternative funding sources.

The college was the first tribal college established in Montana, a distinction it shares with the broader historical significance of the Fort Peck Tribes' decision to act in 1977 and 1978. As Helen Gournea, who served as FPCC's president, explained to reporters from Indian Country Today, tribal colleges were established specifically to eliminate the barriers that students faced in reaching institutions often located hundreds of miles from reservation communities. For the Fort Peck Reservation, that distance from Billings or any comparable urban center makes the local college not merely convenient but essential.

The history of formal education on the Fort Peck Reservation encompasses more than 140 years, from the boarding school opened at Poplar Creek in 1881 under the direction of a Methodist minister to the accredited land-grant institution operating today on the same reservation. The boarding school's purpose was assimilation; the tribal college's purpose is the opposite. Both institutions operated in the domain of education, but they represent fundamentally different answers to the question of who gets to define what an education is for. The founders of Fort Peck Community College — the tribal leaders who passed the 1977 resolution, drafted the 1978 charter, and built the institution through its difficult early years — chose to answer that question themselves.

The college's founding was part of a national movement, shaped by federal legislation and enabled by the advocacy of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, but it was also an act of local determination carried out by specific people on a specific reservation in the high plains of northeastern Montana. In that sense, it belongs to both the national history of tribal self-determination and to the particular history of the Assiniboine and Sioux peoples of Fort Peck, who have navigated more than a century of educational policy designed without their input and built, when given the opportunity, something designed with them at the center.

Works Cited

Fort Peck Community College. "About FPCC." Fort Peck Community College, www.fpcc.edu/about. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Fort Peck Community College. "Accreditation." Fort Peck Community College, www.fpcc.edu/about-fpcc/accreditation/. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Fort Peck Tribal Education Department. State of Reservation Education Report. Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, Jan. 2014, fortpecktribes.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Fort-Peck-Ed-Rpt-2014.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Historic American Buildings Survey, Creator. Fort Peck Indian Boarding School, Between US Highway 2 and Riverside Drive, Poplar, Roosevelt County, MT. Library of Congress, 1933, www.loc.gov/item/mt0155/. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Miller, David R., et al. The History of the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, 1800-2000. Montana Historical Society Press, 2008.

Montana State University Library, Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections. "Fort Peck Boarding School Roster, 1888-1892." Collection 2548, lib.montana.edu/archives/finding-aids/2548.html. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Shreve, Bradley G. "Our Golden Moment." Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education, vol. 34, no. 4, 2023, tribalcollegejournal.org/our-golden-moment/. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Stein, Wayne J. "Founding of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium." Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education, vol. 2, no. 1, 1990, pp. 18-22, tribalcollegejournal.org/founding-american-indian-higher-education-consortium/. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act, Pub. L. No. 95-471, 92 Stat. 1325 (1978). Congress.gov, www.congress.gov/bill/95th-congress/senate-bill/1215. Accessed 18 May 2026.

Windy Boy, Janine Pease, as quoted in Boyer, Paul. "Many Colleges, One Vision: A History of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium." Tribal College: Journal of American Indian Higher Education, vol. 9, no. 4, 1998, pp. 16-22, tribalcollegejournal.org/colleges-vision-history-american-indian-higher-education-consortium/. Accessed 18 May 2026.