When Dr. Elmer Guy first came to Crownpoint Institute of Technology in 1999 as dean of instruction, he could not have known that, 24 years later, he would oversee the institution’s renaming to Navajo Technical University (NTU). It became the first tribal college and university, or TCU, to offer a Ph.D. program — Diné (Navajo) Culture and Language Sustainability.
Dr. Elmer Guy
The program launched its first cohort this fall with three students on a four-year path to a Ph.D. For Guy, it is the realization of dreams a long-time coming. He has nurtured the faculty, programming, and pedagogy of his institution and has watched it grow from a two-year technical school into a research university.
The creation of this Ph.D. has put NTU on the map across the world. Indigenous studies programs and cultural researchers from Australia, Taiwan, Canada, and other countries are reaching out to NTU to learn how the program was made, connected to both the cultural teaching methods of its native nation and the high-level academic research that can be used to support new policies or best practices.
“When our students are done with this program, they’ll be well-trained to go into any position — a Tribal leader, a schoolteacher, a professor, an advocate, a nonprofit organizer — these are the kinds of things they learn,” says Dr. Franklin Sage, an assistant professor of Diné culture, language, and leadership at NTU and one of the program’s instructors.
“Students can design their own projects to get policies passed with data backing them up — data can help their communities and empower the nation,” says Sage. “The students will really be able to articulate things in Navajo — their own language.”
Building the discipline
