Aaniiih Nakoda College celebrates 40 years of history Tuesday

Aaniiih Nakoda College will be marking its 40th anniversary as an institution Tuesday, with a celebration at 10 a.m. in front of the Ekib Tsah Ah Tsik Cultural Center.

The college, chartered in 1983, was originally known as Fort Belknap Community College, and has served the Aaniinen and Nakoda nations at Fort Belknap for decades as a public, non-profit college, offering degrees in the fields of business, sociology, education, science and health care.

Before receiving its charter from the tribes, the campus was Fort Belknap Resident Center of the College of Great Falls from 1980 to 1982, and then briefly a satellite campus for Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer for about a year.

For the first four years of its life as Fort Belknap Community College the institution operated as a branch of Salish Kootenai College in Pablo, Montana until it became a candidate for accreditation as its own entity.

Its founders envisioned a college that would address a century of subpar post-secondary education in the region, and, by extension, address generations of economic struggle in the region, and all that struggle brought with it.

“The mission of Aaniiih Nakoda College is to provide quality post-secondary education for the residents of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation and surrounding communities,” their mission statement says. “The college promotes individual and community development by maintaining and revitalizing the indigenous lifeways of the Aaniinen and Nakoda Tribes and by preparing students to succeed in an American technological society.”