Proctor is not alone in her enthusiasm for recent changes.

"I feel like I'm part of a real historical moment," Egan says.

Egan and Noelani Crawford, who works with the collections in the Peabody Museum's Native Hall, attribute much of the credit for this momentum to Graham's vision and energy.

"Lorie is really active," says Crawford, who possesses Hawaiian, Potawatomi and Kaw ancestry. "She is trying to create more reasons for Natives to start coming here."

Graham is not the first to make such efforts.

The entire program stemmed from the Native American self-determination movement of the 1960s and '70s. The movement culminated in the 1975 Self-Determination Act, which Begay says allocated more funding for Native American students and made it the reservations' mandate for every youth to go to college.

The self-determination effort touched Harvard in 1970, when a first-year doctoral student at the GSE began the American Indian Program there. Eleven master's candidates registered that first year. Ten graduated with M.A.s, and one received a specialist's degree.

Pressed by rising enrollment, the program remade itself in 1990 as the broader HNAP, which welcomed Native American students from any part of the University. Students say the organization is now well-established, both as a Harvard institution and part of their own social circle.

"It's a space," Carpenter says. "There are things that are meaningful to us there."

From Background to Foreground

But students say Harvard still has a lot of catching up to do.

Other private schools, like Dartmouth and Stanford, and state universities in Arizona, California and New Mexico, have much larger Native American populations and recruit Native American students more actively, according to Soler.

Likewise, Linson says that the Medical School's Native American community has in fact shrunk over his four years there, with only one student in the current first-year class.

The financial burden still overwhelms most Native Americans' desire to attend a school like Harvard, especially for graduate study, according to Wilson.

And prevailing attitudes at Harvard and other schools can still be unfriendly and downright discriminatory towards Native Americans. Students express less confidence in their capacity to change popular perceptions of Native Americans than in their ability to improve conditions for their own relatives and communities.