Red Lake Nation College has opened a location in downtown Minneapolis.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that the new building has dedicated classrooms, a kitchen space, stations for setting up laptops, and technology designed to accommodate classes both in-person and online.
The Red Lake Band of Chippewa Indians opened the two-year tribal college on its reservation in 2001 in hopes of providing a convenient option for tribal members who wanted to take classes.
Today, nearly half the tribe's 16,000 members live off the reservation, and most of them live in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, said College President Dan King, one of the tribe's hereditary chiefs.
"That's what brought us here," King said. "We were just serving our own members."
College leaders plan to rent out a rooftop event space in hopes of bringing in extra revenue. The project cost just over $16 million, about $3 million of which was provided by the state.
Tribal colleges "serve a unique market niche that nobody else serves," King said. The average age of a student at Red Lake Nation College is 29 years old. About 80% of the students are the first in their families to go to college, and many of the students are women who have children and juggle jobs as well.
