Date of Graduation

5-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education in Higher Education (EdD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Counseling, Leadership, and Research Methods

Advisor/Mentor

Murry, John

Committee Member

Miller, Michael

Second Committee Member

McCray, Suzanne

Keywords

Higher Education Sovereignty; Indigenous Higher Education; Indigenous Sovereignty; Nation Building in Higher Education; Native American Higher Education; Native American Law Students

Abstract

The legal landscape for Native American people in the United States is ever evolving and highly nuanced, with its historical foundation anchored into the classical pilasters of American legal jurisprudence. Federal Indian law scholars place that historical foundation within the written opinions of Chief Justice Marshall dating back to the 1820s and 1830s (Fletcher, 2024). Although few law students will likely find themselves closely examining the unassigned readings of the Marshall Trilogy or contemporary federal Indian law, there is one small group of students in law school doing exactly that: Native American law students. American Indians and Alaska Natives are a growing population, accounting for 2.9% of the country’s population; however, their underrepresentation in the legal profession is disconcerting as they account for 0.5% of the 1.1 million licensed attorneys in the United States; the smallest of all racial or ethnic groups represented in the legal profession (ABA, 2020, U.S. Census Bureau, 2020a). The lack of representation for Native Americans in the law school setting has remained relatively unchanged over the last decade, and few pieces of scholarship have sought to understand the lived experiences of this group of students. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the experiences of underrepresented, successful Native American law students to further understand how this small group of students find themselves at law school and persist within its structure. The data for this study were collected through interviews with participants representing 11 different federally recognized tribes from a national pool of participants. Findings from this study suggest Native American law students are strongly motivated to pursue legal careers to defend tribal sovereigns and are largely supported by culturally relevant student groups such as the Native American Law Student Association (NALSA).

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