Participant: Winona (Pseudonym) - Flexible Learning Environments: Minoritized College Students’ Experiences in HyFlex

Participant: Winona (Pseudonym)
The oldest of four siblings, Winona was an 18-year-old student born and raised in a
reservation in Arizona where she has lived her entire life until coming to college. Although she
currently lived on campus, the reservation where her parents live was home. Most of Winona’s
schooling took place in the reservation at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, later at a high school
just outside the reservation, and eventually at the public college where she is currently enrolled
and taking HyFlex courses. Winona was a member of the Diné people of the United States. She
explained the word Navajo was not how they preferred to call themselves. In fact, during our
interviews Winona never referred to herself, her people, or her language as Navajo. She asserted:
Do you know? Diné, in our language means people, but we would like to refer to it as
that because Navajo was a name given to us from Mexicans. So, we recently, you know,
discovered a way to finally identify our own selves as a tribe with, which is Diné.
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Winona seemed to be at a point in her life where she was trying to reconnect or strengthen her
Indigenous identity and was working to learn more about her culture and her native language.
When asked if she spoke Diné at home with her family she responded:
I’m not fluent. I can’t speak it. But I do understand very much of it, a large portion of it,
because I’m . . . my grandparents, they only speak Diné most of the time. And I got to
adapt. And I got to decipher what they are saying. I am on the road of learning my
language and becoming more familiar with it, because I feel strongly attached to it.
Becoming more connected to her Diné culture was a source of strength for Winona. As a Diné
woman living in the United States, Winona has experienced some of the common stressors
people of color experience living in the United States. Winona explained:
I think every person of color, you know, gets to a certain part of how people will look at
you differently just because of your skin color or the assumptions they make. When
people see me, they either assume I’m Asian, or I’m Mexican. And they seem to forget,
like, it feels like you are forgotten most of the time. And when you come out and tell
them that you’re Native American or Indigenous, it will become a surprise. And they’ll
come up with certain questions that are very offensive, because they’re mostly based on
the Caucasian stereotype of what a Native American is.
Winona looked toward her cultural heritage as a way to strengthen her self-identity and become
unaffected by the stereotypes about her people but shares that even in the tribe and in her own
family, there are some closed minds that sometimes go as far as stereotyping other groups. Even
though people often confused her for Asian or Mexican, intersectionally, Winona identified as an
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Indigenous pansexual woman who was open minded despite having grown up in a close-minded
household.
Winona credited her visits to the hospital for developing an interest to go to college. She
recalled:
I would go to is a hospital. And I would you know, observe everything around me
doctors, nurses, patients, people, other staff members that were there. And I would
observe how they treated us and you know, the differences and all that. And yes, it’s free
health care, but it isn’t the best health care. It’s what we’re able to adapt to and work
with.
As a result of these types of experiences in the healthcare system, Winona wanted to be a nurse
or a doctor to care for her people as she explained:
I want to come back and help my people, you know, with the hospitalization and all that
stuff and hope that that instead of, a white person coming to help, they, our people feel
very comfortable and easy. I know that because I feel the same way. And especially with
the elderly, they won’t be able to you know, really elaborate more on what they
understand about it. I feel like they’ll feel more comfortable with you know, their own
kind, in a way like a Native American helping them feel more at ease. And probably a
sense of proudness I would say because . . . you know stereotypically most of us are
supposed to be you know, drunks or an educated and stuff like that. I feel like beating the
stereotype, basically.
During my interviews with Winona it was clear she was connected to her Indigenous roots and
was a person driven to serve her community.
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This sample of participants was diverse and included representation of several
intersectionalities of relevance to the study. The sample included graduate and undergraduate
participants, and among them there was at least one person for each of the criteria of
minoritization stated in this study (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender, first language, and disability) as
previously demonstrated in Table 2.
In the next sections, I present the findings of the study and the themes that emerged from
coding the data and present a subsection detailing what I observed as manifestations of agency as
narrated by participants.
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