Indigenous Cultural Development and Academic Achievement of Tribal Community College Students: Mediating Roles of Sense of Belonging and Support for Student Success

Understanding the college experiences of Indigenous students in the United States is critical to enhance their goals of educational attainment. Indigenous college students have been historically underserved by institutions they attend, which are often fraught with the uncertainty of belonging and feelings of isolation. A driving force behind this marginalization is the lack of proper valuation of cultural ways of knowing and being central to their identities. Thus, we sought to examine factors associated with tribal college students' academic achievement: the degree to which institutions support Indigenous students' cultural development and their other academic, social, and nonacademic needs in addition to perceptions of belongingness. With a secondary data sample of 1,393 self-identifying Indigenous students (65% women) across 22 institutions from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement as part of the Tribal Student Success and Completion Project, we situated our study in tribal community colleges, which by design, prioritize the preservation of Indigenous culture and can provide valuable lessons for all institutions to support the academic goals of Indigenous students. Our structural equation model suggested that perceiving institutional support of Indigenous cultural development did not directly impact students' grade point average (GPA) but rather indirectly via their sense of belonging and perceptions of support for student success. Our study sheds light on possible pathways through which respecting students' cultural assets can be linked with their academic performance. Implications for higher education and efforts to forefront Indigenous culture are discussed.