‘Changed my whole orbit’
Over 80 IAIA students graduating with degrees ranging from studio arts to cultural administration
In the early throes of the coronavirus pandemic four years ago, then 29-year-old Jaime Herrell wanted a trajectory shift. A southern Colorado native with mixed Cherokee and European ancestry, she’d been in and out of school in the Denver area but ultimately dropped out of college.
Then she came across the Museum Studies program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe — where she could follow in the footsteps of her museum-frequenting father, a paleontologist, while pursuing her lifelong love of the arts.
“I was like, ‘Oh, bingo,’ ” Herrell said. “As soon as I got in, it was pedal to the metal.”
She found the life-changing experience she was looking for.
“For me, it’s just changed my whole orbit,” she said in a recent interview.
After Herrell receives her degree at the Institute of American Indian Arts’ commencement ceremony Saturday, she’ll head to Washington, D.C., for a threemonth internship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian — a dream position in her line of work.
“When I got the news, I just wept,” she said, smiling. “It’s kind of unbelievable, but I worked my [butt] off, too.”
Eighty other students, half undergrads and half master’s students, will receive their degrees Saturday in programs ranging from studio arts to cultural administration. The college’s spring 2024 graduation powwow will follow the ceremony; both are open to the public.
Santana Shorty,cq a 31-year-old creative writing graduate student, expects a deluge of emotions at graduation: Pride in herself and fellow students, sadness about their time at IAIA drawing to a close and apprehension over
forging her path ahead as a writer.
A member of the Navajo Nation, Shorty grew up in Abiquiú, attended Santa Fe Indian School and pursued a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in California. She’s always been a writer, mostly a poet, but also started writing a novel about three years ago.
“I realized then I knew absolutely nothing about writing a novel and was like, ‘Hmm, I probably should get educated,’ ” she recalled.
She kept her “day job” in banking technology in Albuquerque and enrolled in IAIA’s two-year, low-residency creative writing program, where students from “all walks of life” across the country or the globe meet in person twice per year but spend most of their time learning remotely, she said.
Shorty enrolled with the intention of finishing her novel, which had a 5,000-word start when she entered the program.
“That was my big, lofty, kind of crazy goal,” she said, “but I did it because this program is so damn good.”
Called Waiting for Water, her 285-page first draft, completed in February, follows the fictional story of a Northern New Mexico family in the late 1880s in which the mother is missing. After, hopefully, publishing the book, Shorty dreams of becoming a full-time writer and perhaps a creative writing professor.
“I’d like to get out of the tech world and be able to just be in this world consistently,” she said.
She called enrolling in IAIA “the best decision I’ve made in my life” because she found a “family” of nerdy, Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers alike who will support her long after graduation.
“Going to an Indigenous school that has and is ingrained with a lot of Indigenous values means that you don’t have to ever explain yourself,” she added. “You’re never at risk of being tokenized; you’re never at risk of being ‘the Native writer.’ You have people who just have inherent baseline understanding of who you are, and that leaves you so much room to be creative.”
Herrell echoed that, noting “something about IAIA is familial,” in contrast to the “competitive, difficult, tiring” culture of many Western academic campuses.
Herrell, who became a card-holding member of the Cherokee Nation only months ago, started reconnecting with her Indigenous roots during the pandemic.
Her studies at IAIA have changed the way she reads, observes and thinks about the world.
“For me, it’s presented a form of finding myself that I never knew was in me,” she said.
Especially regarding Indigenous history, “you have to question everything that you’re reading written by the Westernized white academic,” she continued. “We’ve all heard that before … but there’s a difference when you spend so much time unlearning, for example, research methods and then relearn the way we would use Indigenous research methods like oral histories.”
Over the past year, Herrell developed a 66-page thesis about the history and present of basketry among the Chumash, Indigenous people with ancestral homelands in the greater Los Angeles area, and created an on-campus museum exhibition on the subject.
She’d left a previous internship at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas “overwhelmingly disappointed” in Native representation at the museum and is nervous to see the inner workings of the Smithsonian, which has historically harmed Indigenous people, she said.
“But also, I’m so protected and lifted by what I’ve learned at IAIA,” she said, noting other IAIA graduates, including two other students in her class, have gone on to work at the Smithsonian. “I will be able to step up to the plate and confidently take a few swings.”
I will be able to step up to the plate and confidently take a few swings.”
Jamie Herrell, Institute of American Indian Arts graduate