Vincent
Paiute
Haskell Indian Nations University

Leadership is in Vincent's student experience and his professional future. A senior business major from Bishop, California who is graduating from Haskell Indian Nations University this May, Vincent served on the student senate from 2006-07. But Vincent's leadership skills have also been spent outside of Haskell networking, learning, and growing in federal internship opportunities.

Vincent has worked with the Small Business Administration in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and NASA. At the USDA, Vincent says, "They are the oldest and largest agency, and I was hired to develop and assess their office for communications policies. No matter how the administration changes, we have to be able to achieve objectives for additional planning." At NASA, Vincent was responsible for team-building.

Back in Lawrence, Kansas this past semester, Vincent has been trying to promote leadership skills among his student successors for the up and coming classes. “The good thing about Haskell,” he says, “is that students come from all over the U.S. This way you get different points of view,” he says. And looking forward for his own future, he says he wants to go to law school, with an emphasis on Indian Law. He says that as a future leader of his own nation, he and others of his generation are learning the way things were, and they are “taking on the old ways of thinking to instill change, work with each other, and make things better.” This doesn’t mean that Native youth should abandon their culture, history, beliefs, and lifeways, he says. “When we don’t believe in our people, we lose our spirituality,” Vincent says.