Jim Sam

When you look at Jim Sam, you don't know he is an American Indian. But he knows it, and he never forgets it.

"When I was here for the first time, in 1967, I was the only Indian student," he says. "The next year, I think they got an Eskimo. But you have no one you feel comfortable associating with, no one you have anything in common with."

He speaks softly, almost apologetically, raising his wide, arching eyebrows. But in his quiet way, he is forceful and deliberate. He knows what he wants to say and he knows where he wants to go.

He got to Harvard by something of a fluke. A Yale-sponsored program called the Transitional Year, designed to channel minority students into Ivy League schools, contacted him when he was in high school. Sam has never been able to figure out how they got his name, but since they did--and, he jokes, since his high school principal advised him against it--he decided to make the big trip to the alien East, while most of his friends went off to find jobs or fight in Vietnam.

After spending a year in New Haven and discovering he didn't like it, he decided to try Cambridge. But he found it wasn't much better here, and in 1970 he went back home to his tribe, the Choctaw in Oklahoma.

"Frankly, I was fed up with this place," he says, half-smiling. "I had lost interest in going back to school--I didn't see what it was doing for me. And there were a lot of things going on back home at that time--the new law had been passed giving us the right to have tribal elections. I felt cut off from all that, so I went back home."

For four years he worked in the Oklahoma Indian community, a loosely organized group of about 23,000 spread over ten counties in the southeastern part of the state, which has no Indian reservations. Then, last January, he returned to Harvard, having acquired a wife, Emma, a hyperactive four-year-old daughter, Angie, and a specific goal--law school.

Sam knows what lies ahead of him, what kinds of things he's going to work for. "First you have to do two things," he says, counting them out on two of his fingers. "One, you have to solve the problem of who has the power on the reservation, the Indian or the white man--and it seems to me to be the white man. And two, you have to stabilize the land base, the reservations."

Sam also knows what has to be done for Indians at Harvard. First, you have to bring more of them here--there are still only 11 undergraduates--and you have to make sure they're the right kind of Indian. Most Indian students who manage to get here come from urban areas rather than reservations. Because they are used to "straddling the fence," as Sam puts its, they have little or no trouble adjusting to Harvard, but--for the same reason--they are less likely to make a direct contribution to Indian society once they get out of here.

"The type of people that are coming here, you can't rely on as leaders for the Indian people," Sam says. "They don't come from the reservation, so they don't have that experience factor to draw on." The reservation, he says, gives Indians a sense of identity, "something you can point to and say, if you destroy this, you destroy us--something to rally behind, to show to other people."

American Indians at Harvard, the group that Sam chairs, has taken up as its main project a recruitment program aimed at Indian students on reservations. The four five active members of AIH have been flying around the country, their fares paid by the admissions offices, speaking to entire school bodies and to small groups, trying to get people to consider applying to a place as unfamiliar as Harvard.

It isn't easy. Indian students who consider college at all are more likely to think of state schools, where there are special programs for them. Sam says that, being realistic, he doesn't expect a very high proportion of the students AIH has contacted actually to apply "because of the distance from home, the strangeness of the place."

He adds: "Indian people tend to believe that unless someone they know has been to a place, they shouldn't go there."

But is Harvard really a good place for Indians to go to? "Well, I think it's potentially a good place for them," Sam says quickly. "You can get a good education here, you can make contacts, you get a lot more exposure to things than you would back home."