An alumnus of the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion, Dr. Chance White Eyes leads tribal relations for OSU
Dr. Chance White Eyes
By Katie Livermore, CLA Student Writer - January 22, 2025
Spending summers at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Dr. Chance White Eyes experienced the multitude of struggles Native Americans face inside and outside their communities.
His father drove the ambulance near the reservation, so White Eyes, an enrolled member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, witnessed the worst moments of the reservation.
“He saw ugliness, you know, and my little brother and my little sister also lived on Pine Ridge,” White Eyes said. “My lens that I look at education through was informed by what I saw them having to live through. I knew they had it more rough than me.”
Now, White Eyes is the Director of Tribal Relations at Oregon State University in the Government Relations Office, a position created just last year. His goal is to remind the public that Native American identities are very much contemporary–they are not meant to be seen under glass at a museum.
As a young boy, White Eyes despised school. His mom “won the lottery” when he, his younger brother and sister were accepted into an affluent elementary school in Eugene, Oregon. It was a French immersion school and White Eyes, being Native American, felt he didn’t quite “belong” among the other kids.
“I knew it had something to do with money,” White Eyes said. “I knew it had something to do with the color of my skin, because that stood out. I knew it had something to do with culture, and I knew it had something to do with geographic location, where I physically lived…I was in elementary school thinking about those things.”
Though White Eyes was always getting into trouble at school, he found peace in the stacks of books. He was often the only kid in the book section and began reading full novels by first grade.
When he entered middle school, he began getting bullied by other students.
“At that time, I had long hair and long eyelashes and no facial hair, and everybody thought I was a girl,” White Eyes said. “French is a very gendered language, and I got teased a lot for looking feminine. I would try to express my masculinity in other ways, the way I walked, the way I talked, the way I dressed, but I still had long hair.”
He’d like to think he wasn’t a troublemaker, but White Eyes went to three different high schools, the last one in Corvallis.
“I would skip school,” White Eyes said. “I would go to the bowling alley and pool hall that is actually at Oregon State University, and the manager liked me. I kind of weaseled my way into getting a job there.”
Since he wasn’t a student at OSU, his manager told him he couldn’t keep working there the following year. So, his senior year of high school in Corvallis, he took a full load of classes and “got his act together” with good grades to get into college.
White Eyes loved cars, so he considered engineering as a degree to pursue. Despising math, he landed on philosophy at the College of Liberal Arts instead. Stumbling into an Eastern philosophy class in Buddhism, “everything fell into place.”
White Eyes found he loved the philosophy readings, debates in class and the overall thinking behind different philosophies. Many of his classroom ideals later in life were changed by his philosophy studies, such as discussion-based courses.
“It's a lot of writing, which I already like to do, and a lot of debating with people, which I also like,” White Eyes said. “I like to engage in critical conversation. Talking about things with people that don't agree with me actually helps me understand how I came to the conclusions that I've drawn.”
When engineering didn’t work out, White Eyes was on academic probation, taking 18 credits and working 20 hours a week at the bowling alley.
He thought he was going to fail out of college.
“I was sitting outside JavaStop with all my books and all my readings,” White Eyes said. “I wasn't even depressed about, ‘oh, I'm a failure.’ It was more like, ‘I'm gonna fail out of college and then I won't have access to these readings.’ I was frustrated.”
Instead, he read as much as he could, soaking up what he expected to be the last time he could access such a wealth of knowledge. From there, he had his best term.
Upon graduation from OSU in 2007, White Eyes was hired as the Native American recruiter at the University of Oregon’s Office of Admissions.
“I thought I was just going to be talking to high school students trying to get them to go to college,” White Eyes said. “I didn't realize that I was going to be expected to meet with tribal council, meet with elders, meet with children. And that shifted my perspective on the relationship dynamic between universities and Indigenous communities.”
When in his recruitment meetings, White Eyes discovered that many young Native people were running into issues that he thought were avoidable, if given the resources. It was frustrating.
“The conversations always came to the same end,” White Eyes said. “It was always just like, ‘Dang Chance. That sucks.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, and what are we going to do about it?’ It got to a point where I knew the conversations were just going to end, and there wasn't going to be substantial change.”
Several years prior to his employment, Native American students spoke up within the UO College of Education when they discovered what they were learning was not applicable to the Indigenous communities they wished to serve back home.
Afterward, the university created new programs that were aimed exactly at this.
White Eyes was accepted into one of the programs, a doctoral program called Critical and Socio Cultural Studies in Education.
White Eyes did a study with Native students, and questioned the notions of success closely tied to economic gain. However, these students weren’t playing the game of economic success, or escaping their lives on reservations.
He found they wanted to bring back what they learned.
“Not a single person alluded to the idea that they wanted to have economic gain. They all had a plan,” White Eyes said. “They all said, ‘Oh, I'm going to go back and teach language here. Oh, I actually do want to get my business degree, because our tribe, not me, but our tribe, has business interests, and I want to help with that aspect.’
After his studies, he moved to Southern Oregon University to further his journey in Native American ways of teaching post secondary education.
“I told them that I was not going to be housed in Native American studies because I've watched Native American studies programs get like, couched in history or anthropology, treating us like we're supposed to be under museum glass,” White Eyes said. “I'm over here, like, ‘My favorite food is pizza, and I like cars.’”
He was hired under the idea that Native American studies should be integrated in every department.
“I knew going into it that it was going to be a little weird,” White Eyes said. “I had to not only bring in Indigenous value systems into a non-Indigenous space, but also I had to meet the criteria for each discipline's mission and value systems for their department.”
White Eyes worked across campus for nearly five years, and he loved it. He taught classes in English, international studies, philosophy, women, gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies and more. Each class was based on the “rules of the canoe,” which meant that students needed to be invested in the physical, mental and emotional wellbeing of the person next to them; nobody was better than anybody else; and they relied on each other to arrive at their destination.
“It was like, ‘if you can, do this respectfully, this could be a constructive conversation.’ I love controversy, as long as it's respectful.”
When the job for the Director of Tribal Relations opened up at OSU, he had to apply. His wife, who is on tribal council for Chinook Indian Nation, traveled to Washington often, and she and their two kids lived in Eugene. Driving back and forth was a struggle.
“Given my background, my big pitch to the university was I have a background in both administration and faculty,” White Eyes said. “I know those lives, they're different lives, yeah, and not many people know how to navigate those two spaces. I've been doing that my whole life.”
He decided to just have some fun in the interview and meet new people, not expecting a call back from OSU.
Instead, he was offered the position.
“Oregon State University has too many resources and too much capacity to not be engaged in the prospect of empowering Indigenous communities,” White Eyes said. “We are benefiting from a frankly terrible history, and I'm raising my hand, too. I'm not Indigenous to here…my career literally has been built off of a history of people getting dispossessed from their lands, their culture, their resources.”
White Eyes said there are good people, Native and non-native who are trying to do the right thing. That makes him show up.
“I’m more engaged with either projects that are ongoing or in conversations with tribal communities on a spectrum that I didn't anticipate,” White Eyes said. “Sometimes it's heavy, sometimes it's emotional.”
He found there can be a residual mistrust at places like land grant universities and the overall history of educational institutions. Many Native students felt more supported in a group setting versus one-on-one with a stranger.
“You have to build trust. That's kind of what my position is built to do, is to help build that trust.”
Going forward, White Eyes hopes to address issues like this, connecting students with resources and help others understand the contemporary issues Native Americans face.
“If I can do something about it, then I'm going to do something about it,” White Eyes said. “At the end of the day, I want our Native students to have a better experience than I had, and especially our student leadership.