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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact: Justin Harmon 609/258-5732 <jharmon@princeton.edu>
Date: December 12, 1997
Native American Becomes Princeton Trustee
PRINCETON, N.J. -- In his first days as a student at Princeton University, Regis Pecos felt like a displaced person. A Pueblo Indian whose parents never finished junior high school, whose grandparents spoke no English what was he doing on an Ivy League campus?
Two decades later, Pecos is executive director of the New Mexico Office of Indian Affairs and this year he was sworn in as a member of Princeton's board of trustees, one of four new trustees elected by alumni.
In this capacity he shares responsibility for a private educational institution with an annual budget of more than $550 million, an endowment close to five billion dollars, and nearly 5,000 employees providing for some 7,000 students.
He has taken his place on a roster that includes James Baker, Secretary of State and White House Chief of Staff in the Bush administration; Admiral William Crowe, U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain; Frank Biondi, CEO of Universal Studios; and Malcolm Forbes, head of Forbes Magazine and a 1996 presidential candidate.
Pecos is believed to be the first Native American to serve as a trustee not only at Princeton but in all the Ivy League, says Alfred Bush, Firestone Library's curator of Western Americana. Archivists at Harvard and Yale could report no American Indians having ever been appointed to the boards of governance at their universities. Even Dartmouth, which was founded for the education of Indians in 1769 and has been the most successful recruiter of Native American students in the Ivy League since the 1970s, knew of no equivalent appointment there.
Princeton has educated Native American students since a Delaware Indian matriculated in the Class of 1762, Bush notes. Though their numbers were few, they were a presence in the student body in both the 18th and 19th centuries. The participation of Indian students at Princeton throughout the 250 years of its existence is evidence of the ambiguous relationship toward Native Americans that has long characterized America.
No representatives of other racial minorities in this country were admitted to Princeton until after World War II.
Pecos was born in Cochiti Pueblo, where he served two terms as Lieutenant Governor. For the past 15 years he has directed the Office of Indian Affairs for the State of New Mexico, where he oversees the needs of 22 sovereign nations with tribal governments and justice systems independent of both New Mexico and the United States. His responsibility is to promote mutually beneficial relations not only between these sovereign entities and New Mexico, but with the federal government as well.
Pecos feels that the effectiveness of his office is based on the trust and confidence of the tribes and Indian people, he says. He believes that the foundation of this trust is fairness in evenhandedly serving all of his constituents and in representing the changing political outlooks of state governors.
Pecos's state responsibilities have frequently taken him to Washington, where he has worked with Congress on legislation dealing with land acquisition, protection of sacred sites, the restoration of Indian religious freedom, taxation, environmental protection, education and equitable appropriations to tribal governments. He has also been active in promoting federal support for American Indian education.
He says his greatest pleasure has been chairing the board of the Santa Fe Indian School, the first school in the country to be controlled by a tribe and the first Native American school to receive the Presidents Award for Excellence in Education.
Right after graduating from Princeton in 1977, Pecos apprenticed with Americans for Indian Opportunity in Albuquerque. In 1984 he took a leave of absence to aid his own reservation in the drafting of the successful Cochiti Land Bill, which returned control to the tribe of tribal land that had been leased for 99 years to a non-Indian community. He also worked in the Desegregation Assistance Center at the University of New Mexico and later served as acting director of the regional office of the university's Bilingual Education Center, where he administered 30 bilingual education projects in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.
Now pursuing graduate work on weekends and evenings with a cohort of other Pueblo leaders, Pecos looks forward to receiving his doctorate in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley next fall.
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