Ya'at'eeh: Race-reimaged belongingness factors, academic outcomes, and goal pursuits among Indigenous community college students

For decades, students' sense of belonging has been conceptualized through colonial perspectives, assuming students are to assimilate to educational institutions in order to belong. To challenge these perspectives, we race-reimaged belongingness factors in an investigation of Indigenous students (n = 887) from 156 U.S. community colleges in a secondary dataset. We first used measurement invariance testing to examine how Indigenous students interpret belongingness items differently from their non-Indigenous counterparts. Second, we used multilevel modeling to assess the role of Native-specific sense of belonging, operationalized through Indigenous ways of knowing and being, on GPA and goal pursuits. Our findings suggest that both traditional conceptualizations of belongingness factors (i.e., student relationships to teachers and peers) and Native-specific constructions of belongingness factors via relationships to community, family, and cultural identity were salient. Native-specific factors were more consistently associated with Indigenous students' outcomes. Implications for best practices to foster belongingness and future directions for race-reimaging research will be discussed.