Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond by Tony Tekaroniake Evans

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond by Tony Tekaroniake Evans Sterling Fluharty (bio) Teaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bond by Tony Tekaroniake Evans Washington State University Press, 2021 in the early 1970s Isabel Bond became director of the Upward Bound program at the University of Idaho. The six-week summer program, born out of the War on Poverty, primarily served low-income and at-risk high school students from families whose members had never attended college. The university campus was in Moscow, Idaho, between the Coeur d’Alene and Nez Perce reservations. During the program’s initial decades, high school students had to live within two hundred miles of the campus to be eligible, which meant a high proportion of participants were tribal members. Over three decades, Bond worked tirelessly to get more than two thousand participants ready for college. Bond had deep roots in Idaho that intertwined with its Native residents. Her grandparents arrived in the state in the late 1800s to farm a homestead. Around the same time, Chief Joseph and his people lost their homelands in the Nez Perce War. Bond was born in 1932 to an accomplished mother who devoted her life to community service. Bond was also influenced by an uncle who made Native friends and picked up the tribal language while living and working on the Nez Perce reservation. Her uncle was good friends with Jackson Sundown, a nephew of Chief Joseph who won the World Saddle Bronc Championship at the 1916 Pendleton Round-Up. “Rodeo judges were not inclined to give credit to an Indian rider at the time,” a cousin of Bond’s recalled, “but the crowd went crazy at them when they tried to ignore his performance” (59). When Ed Madsen, a Nez Perce schoolteacher, launched Upward Bound at the University of Idaho, Native and white children in the area attended segregated schools. Otis Halfmoon was one of the first Nez Perce students to enroll in Madsen’s program. In those early days on campus, Halfmoon remembered, “Non-Indian kids would drive by whopping at us, yelling for us to go back to the reservation, but this only caused us to stick together, white students and Indian students. We were all Upward Bound students” (22). Madsen balanced academics and study skills with Indian culture and organized a powwow in the summer of 1969 that brought tribal families from [End Page 150] nearby reservations to the campus. “Pride was one of the main things he instilled in us,” Halfmoon recalled. “We learned that education is the answer. We had a choice: to either become educated and be equal to the white man or become his subject” (22). In early 1969, Madsen hired Bond to teach home economics to the Upward Bound students. Bond had moved back to Moscow the year before, when the university hired her husband as a geology professor. Bond taught the participants in Madsen’s program how to make vests, which they then wore as regalia during the powwow that summer. While working with the students, Bond traveled to their homes, became acquainted with their relatives, and witnessed the kinds of challenges they faced in their communities. This work rekindled memories of the Nez Perce individuals and culture her uncle had brought to her mother’s farm. “It just all started coming back when I started working these kids,” Bond recalled (30–31). After Madsen passed away in 1972, the dean of the education college appointed Bond director of Upward Bound the following year. Bill Picard was one of the Nez Perce students who attended Bond’s Upward Bound program in the 1970s. Before entering the program, he spent his summers working as a farm laborer. “One day, a teacher advised me to learn the job well, because Indians don’t go to college,” he recalled (45). When Picard enrolled in Upward Bound, he found a different attitude. “Isabel was the first person who ever told me that I was capable of achieving something,” he remembered. “Even now, she says I should go get a master’s degree. Isabel was more of an auntie than a teacher...