Michael P. Tsosie '86 sat on the Phoenix-Boston flight answering the questions of a middle-aged woman about Harvard. Suddenly she turned towards him and said: "Are you Mexican?"

"No," replied Tsosie. "Are you Samoan?" "No," he said again. "Then what are you?" she let out in a high pitched voice. "I'm American Indian," he answered. "Oh" and she grew silent. Then she looked at him and said very slowly. "You-speak-Eng-lish-ve-ry-well."

"You speak English very well too," he snapped back.

American Indian students at Harvard have scores of similar tales of their trials and travails outside the reservation. At Harvard and elsewhere, Indian students say the are still fighting stereotypes that have relegated them to second-class citizen status.

Tsosie frowns at people who are disappointed when he says that he lives in a house, rather than in a tent. Rohana L. Fines '86, who is of white. Black, Seminole and Cherokee descent, but lives in Hawaii, says that matters have improved somewhat: "In the '50s. Westerns used painted Whites to play Indians, then in the '60s they used Mexicans. We're getting closer."

The 18 American Indians who currently attend Harvard are not very vocal, but they are discretely conscious of their roots. Tsosie is the president of the 10-year-old Harvard American Indian Association, which unlike the American Indian community at Dartmouth, has little Native American tradition to draw on.

Before recruitment efforts during the seventies brought in Native Americans, only two Indians had ever graduated from the College. This was despite recruitment efforts by the early Puritan Harvardians, who hoped to turn the Indians into missionaries to spread their beliefs

Caieb Cneesnante-aumuck in 1665, and Benjamin Larnell in 1716 were the only two who survived the rigors of University life and the diseases that swept the Harvard campus during the time, the Sunday Herald reported in 1908. Even the two graduates died of consumption shortly after graduation, and Harvard did not make further efforts to cultivate the Indian community.

But in the early 1970's, admissions officers launched a concerted effort to attract more minorities into the once Yankee-dominated enclave of Harvard, and Native Americans began to trickle into the yard.

Admissions officers continue to send Indian students to reservations around the country to convince fellow Native Americans to make the jump. One problem with recuiting on the reservation is that Indians must move from a position where they are in the majority to a place where they are a small minority, says Jennifer D. Carey '78, director of minority recuitment at the admissions office.

At the same time, Indian Americans show great reluctance to move off and into the mainstream because there is such resentment, says Tsosie, who goes on many such recuitment missions. Moreover, he says, many potential students are loathe to leave the secure environment of the reservation. "Life is comfortable back there, you can veg' out."

At Harvard, Indians say they face many of the same problems as other minorities on campus. John E. Murphy '87 says the University "cranks out" students and Tsosie calls Freshman week an indoctrination. Tsosie says the University conveniently forgot minorities' events in the 1982 Freshmen Week, which led to the Third World demonstrations on campus that following spring.

Indians at Harvard also say they must serve as role models for their peers. "There's great pressure to perform," says Tsosie. "If you fail it's indicative of everyone else." Student recruiters must convince other Indians that they can thrive at a prestigious college in the East. When Fines toured the country to recruit for Harvard, one school asked her to give a little speech. The teacher then turned to the class and told the students to grade Fines' enunciation.

Student recruiters must also combat a crisis of confidence among teenage Indians on the reservations. "People drop out because there is no support system, and because they are told they can't do things," Tsosie says.

Though Harvard and much of the East Coast appear to be far distant from Indian issues and concerns, only two-and-a-half hours away, at Dartmouth College, students, faculty, and alumni are embroiled in a raging controversy over the institution's Indian heritage.