Northeastern’s Student Government Association officially recognized its first student-led Indigenous club on campus April 14, following the successful appeal process of an initially deferred decision.
The Native American, Tribal, and Indigenous Visibility in Education, or NATIVE, club is a dedicated space on campus for undergraduate Indigenous students and allies. Founded last April by Avery Nakata and Tamarron Austin, the group holds club meetings where a Indigenous students can find community, which many Indigenous students say is hard to find on campus organically.
“At the end of Tamarron and I’s first year, we had both been pretty unable to find any other resources for Indigenous students here at Northeastern,” said Nakata, a rising third-year business administration major and NATIVE’s president and co-founder. “We’ve been spending the year trying to recruit new members. It’s been really hard because there’s not that many Indigenous students at Northeastern.”
The Student Government Association, or SGA, which is partly responsible for authorizing new clubs, originally cited “longevity concerns” when it originally deferred NATIVE’s application, according to an April 14 memorandum overturning their original decision. In response, NATIVE appealed the decision April 3, and SGA approved the appeal April 14, establishing it as an official club.
“Whenever [Indigenous students] get together, and we see each other, we have unique backgrounds and experiences that most students don’t have, in terms of our cultures being different from a Western culture. It’s very comforting,” said Austin, a rising third-year computer science and economics combined major and NATIVE’s vice president and co-founder.
In an April 14 memorandum, the approvals board explained it initially deferred NATIVE to give the club more “time to build out their recruitment, outreach, and marketing strategy,” wrote Molly Cullot, Northeastern’s student body president, in a May 17 statement to The Huntington News. The original decision “relied on meeting attendance rather than total membership” and did not provide a clear enough criteria for re-application.
“Without a clearly articulated basis for rejecting the stated membership total, and without a clear explanation of what exactly NATIVE was being asked to improve in their deferral period and subsequent re-presentation, the Appeals Board found that the decision was arbitrary,” the April 14 memorandum sent to NATIVE reads.
To achieve full club recognition at Northeastern, students are required to go through a three-stage application process, which involves a one-semester preliminary period where the club gets approval from the Center for Student Involvement, or CSI, and writes a constitution, and a one-semester tentative recognition stage, where the organization can begin hosting meetings and have access to a limited budget. At the end of the process, which takes around one academic year, club leaders present to SGA’s Student Organization Approvals Board.
Full club recognition grants organizations access to booking spaces on campus, funding from the university and increased support from the CSI.
After remaining active for the required preliminary year of 2025, NATIVE scheduled an in-person recognition meeting with the SGA to complete the tentative stage for Feb. 4 where leaders presented their recognition request but were deferred weeks later.
“There was no other explanation of what that meant or what in our presentation had brought up that concern to them,” said Nakata of the deferral. “Our explanation as to why we weren’t granted full approval was quite literally two words long.”
With fewer than 31 students reporting as Indigenous in the fall 2024 enrollment, Nakata and Austin feel that Northeastern lacks visibility and resources for Indigenous students. In response to a request for comment, the university directed The News to an article about NATIVE published last October by Northeastern Global News, a university-run media outlet.
“The original deferral rested primarily on concerns about longevity, particularly the organization’s reported attendance of approximately 7-10 members at meetings and a perceived lack of sufficiently concrete recruitment plans,” the April 14 memorandum reads. “The Appeals Board agreed that many of the letters of support submitted spoke more to the importance and value of the organization on campus rather than refuting the specific rationale for the original decision that was being appealed.”
The April 14 memorandum noted that the original application did not include “certain letters of support, as well as recruitment-related plans” which the Appeals Board took into consideration upon overturning the deferral.
“The Appeals Board did acknowledge the practical challenges NATIVE may face in recruitment, especially given a smaller potential pool of students and the impossibility of predicting future incoming student identities. But that practical concern, by itself, did not justify upholding a deferral,” the April 14 SGA memorandum reads.
The club’s leaders are now calling on the university to create a dedicated space for Indigenous students on campus.
“We have centers for Latinx students, Asian students, LGBTQIA+ students and African American students. We want one for Indigenous students, especially considering that Northeastern is on indigenous land,” Austin said. (Northeastern’s Boston campus is located on the unceded ancestral territories of the Pawtucket and Massachusetts peoples. )
Nakata said that NATIVE hopes to work with some of the academic deans to establish an Indigenous Studies minor for Northeastern students. They hope to have it established by the 2027 or 2028 academic year and said they are actively working with the Office of Admissions and other Indigenous staff to increase the number of Indigenous students at Northeastern.
“There’s a lack of transparency, and not much support we’ve received from the university. When I look at other colleges, they have a lot more awareness for students like us. Northeastern doesn’t really do that, particularly for other minority groups, too,” Nakata said. “It seems like our situation is, in part, an overall situation with Northeastern.”
