Tom Stritikus won over a rural Colorado college with a dark past

Tom Stritikus, a white guy from out of state who talks a mile a minute, in the summer of 2018 took the helm of a rural southern Colorado college with a significant Native American student body and an institutional history of Indigenous oppression and cultural genocide.

It was a nuanced task, with the potential for distrust and risk of amplifying a more palatable, revisionist history of Fort Lewis College’s past as an Indian boarding school. But Indigenous tribal leaders, students and staff say Stritikus chose a different path.

Under Stritikus’s leadership, Durango’s Fort Lewis College confronted its brutal past and welcomed a future of healing and reconciliation that wasn’t always easy, but was honest.

“He wasn’t shying away from it even though it was such a dark history,” said Ernest House, a Ute Mountain Ute Tribe member who sits on Fort Lewis’s Board of Trustees. “He wanted to be sure to get it right.”

Now, after nearly six years as Fort Lewis College’s president, Stritikus is heading west, where he’ll serve as the head of Occidental College, a four-year liberal arts school in Los Angeles.

Stritikus, 54, leaves behind a transformed higher education institution with people and policies in place to ensure the commitment to acknowledging old wounds while working toward a thriving future continues.

“The reconciliation work we have done is the most profound and important work I’ve done in my professional career,” Stritikus said in an interview with The Denver Post last week. “This was us as an institution having an obligation to tell the truth and figure out what that truth meant for our history going forward.”

“He genuinely cares”

Stritikus, the son of Greek immigrants, grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. He was a first-generation college student who finished high school just as his father earned a GED.

The importance of education was always drilled into him, Stritikus said.

“It’s sort of that immigrant thing,” he said.

Stritikus earned his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley in language, literacy and culture. His scholarly work examined the impact of bilingual education policy and teacher practice on the academic lives of Latino and Asian immigrants.

Early in his career, Stritikus became an educator with Teach For America in Baltimore. That experience had the young teacher ruminating about how schools met the needs of students of color.

“I developed a sense of what happens when schools don’t rise to the tremendous set of resources that students should have,” Stritikus said. “It put a fire in my belly of trying to do the right thing by students and having a lot of drive to do so because the consequences of getting that wrong are pretty grave.”

Stritikus took what he saw as a teacher and, from 2014 to 2018, applied it to his work as deputy director of education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he helped build a strategy to improve education in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Around that time, House served on the search committee for Fort Lewis’s new president and remembers combing through more than a hundred applicants. He wondered whether this guy from Seattle would fit well in Durango. When he met Stritikus in person, House was impressed by his interest in the Indigenous roots of the college.

“What I did know coming in was it felt like Fort Lewis was a very important national story that the world didn’t know about,” Stritikus said.

Before starting as president in 2018, Stritikus visited the nearby Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes to ask how Fort Lewis could be a better partner.

“I said, ‘Hey, I get you’ve seen this movie before,’” Stritikus said. “‘Fast-talking white guy comes in, and this movie doesn’t turn out very well for you. But I’m going to come back.’”

Stritikus turned to House and other Indigenous leaders on campus for advice on how best to engage with the tribes.

“He moves at one speed, and that’s 100-plus miles an hour,” House said. “What I was always a little bit concerned about was, are we going to be able to slow him down a bit?”

House, who previously served as the executive director for the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs, advised Stritikus to be present for meetings with tribal leaders without sneaking glances at phones or watches.

“With some great advice from (Dr. Heather Shotten, the school’s vice president for diversity affairs) and Ernest House, I was able to show up in those relationships in a way that was authentic and hear what they had to say,” Stritikus said. “This can’t be a one-and-done thing. If I were giving advice to a white leader… you have to keep going back and building authentic relationships.”

Stritikus worked on projects to benefit the Native community, including a program to tackle the shortage of Indigenous nurses while bolstering rural health care in the Four Corners region. He abolished administrative parking spots, so when students complained about having to park far away, he could join them in outrage. He made it a requirement to have a Native American tribal member on the college’s Board of Trustees.

Delving into Fort Lewis’s dark past

Stritikus felt distrust among the administration and faculty at the beginning of his tenure. The new president sat down with the faculty and asked for honest feedback.

A Fort Lewis alum-turned-chemistry-professor, Joslynn Lee, sent Stritikus an email about what it meant to be an Indigenous student on campus and walk past a commemoration to the college’s Indian boarding school that glossed over the atrocities and inaccurately portrayed the former boarding school as a “happy” place.

Lee was the nudge the campus needed, Stritikus said, to form a committee to work on examining the history of the college and move toward reconciliation. The exhibit came down in 2021 in a powerful ceremony. Reconciliation work continues.

Not long after, 215 unmarked graves were discovered by Canada’s Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nation at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, sparking a search among North American tribes and researchers for marked or unmarked gravesites holding the remains of Indigenous children.

That 2021 discovery prompted U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native cabinet member in American history, to launch a full review of this country’s own legacy of Native American boarding schools, which forcefully assimilated Indigenous children and stripped them of their culture.

Fort Lewis, under Stritikus’s leadership, was all in on reviewing its own legacy.

In October, the college was included in a 139-page report by State Archaeologist Holly Norton and History Colorado that illustrated the experiences of Native children who at times were kidnapped and coerced into schools like the former Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School and woefully mistreated.

The research, which focused on the years 1880 to 1920, identified 31 Native students who died at the Fort Lewis Indian Boarding School. A bygone cemetery at the former Fort Lewis site in Hesperus is believed to have nearly 50 children buried in it, according to an archaeological investigation, with another 30 to 100 burials, or more, potentially associated with students at the boarding school.

Stritikus said he had a high-level understanding of the history of the boarding school when he started working at Fort Lewis, but only after talking to the community did he learn how decades of intergenerational trauma have impacted the Native students and staff on his campus.

The report, he said, was a painful but necessary read.

Watching the now-thriving Native American population on Fort Lewis’s campus — accounting for nearly 30% of the student body — absorb the heaviness of that report, Stritikus said, was among the hardest parts of its release. He and other campus leaders made sure there were resources for students processing their ancestors’ trauma.

Stritikus kept showing up — and inviting others in.

Manuel Heart, chairman of the Ute Mountain Ute tribe, said Stritikus always invited him to big events on campus and reached out to partner on different initiatives. Heart has been to Stritikus’s house and met his family.

“He’s really open,” Heart said. “He’s honest. We built a good relationship, and I consider him a good friend of mine.”

Brittany Bitsilly, who is Diné from the Navajo Nation, is the student body president at Fort Lewis College.

“I know for a fact he genuinely cares,” Bitsilly said.

How does she know? Well, Stritikus has cooked Greek food for Bitsilly and other student government leaders in his home with his family. He shows up to their student government meetings to listen and pops up at events all around campus. Just last weekend, Stritikus and Bitsilly ran a campus 5K to honor the lives of children lost in the Indian boarding school era.

“He’s everywhere,” Bitsilly said. “It’s refreshing to see the leader of a campus who cares this much. It means the world.”

“This is a great job”

When tribal leaders felt comfortable enough to tease him, Stritikus said, he knew he’d made it.

Not everything was jokes and public appearances, though. When dealing with such painful topics, conversations between Stritikus and Indigenous leaders, students and staff have inevitably turned somber and, at times, critical.

It’s important to Stritikus to listen to critiques without jumping to defensiveness. “You realize that no matter if it stung or not, there’s probably a good deal of truth to it,” he said.