November 2022
I would like to extend warm holiday greetings to you from Evergreen’s Master of Public Administration program as we look forward to the upcoming winter break. This fall we were excited to resume in-person core and electives courses with 36 new Olympia cohort students and 17 Tribal Governance cohort students. We are especially excited that students in this MPA Tribal Governance cohort will have more opportunities to take elective courses across the MPA curriculum than was the case in previous cohorts. Similar to students completing the Public Policy concentration, MPA students completing the Tribal Governance concentration will be required to take two concentration courses, taking their remaining credits in concentration and elective courses that they choose. This will better empower Tribal Governance students to take MPA courses that will best meet their needs and those of the nations and communities they serve.
I regret that I must share some sad news for our program: MPA faculty member emeritus Alan Parker passed away on August 5th. Alan was a citizen of the Chippewa Cree Tribe at the Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation in Montana and served as an Evergreen faculty member from 1997 until his retirement in 2012. As a faculty member, Alan was instrumental in the creation of the MPA Tribal Governance program, which began in 2002. He was appointed in 2012 as adjunct faculty to Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, to supervise the work of Tribal Ph.D. students enrolled at the Māori university. Prior to Evergreen, he worked for the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, including as Chief Counsel and Staff Executive Director. Some of Alan’s key published works include Asserting Native Resilience: Pacific Rim Indigenous Nations Face the Climate Crisis, co-edited with Zoltán Grossman, and Foreword by Billy Frank Jr. (Oregon State University Press, 2012), American Indian Identity, Citizenship, Membership and Blood, co-authored with Se-ah-dom Edmo and Jessie Young (Praeger, 2016), and Pathways to Indigenous Nation Sovereignty in the 21st Century (Michigan State University Press, 2018). The faculty and staff in the MPA program will miss Alan deeply.
I must also report that we have had to say farewell to MPA faculty member Cali Ellis. Cali made a decision to leave the College at the end of the 2021-2022 academic year to pursue opportunities outside of academia. At the same time, I am happy to be able to say that Dr. Wenhong Wang has joined the MPA faculty this year as a visiting faculty member. Wen has taught a number of MPA courses since 2020, and we feel fortunate for her to join us this year in an expanded full-time role. In addition, we have been fortunate to welcome Dr. Spencer Brien and Dr. Jeffrey Callen as visiting faculty members in the MPA program this year. Spencer is a former public administration faculty member at Arizona State University and at the Naval Postgraduate School, and brings practitioner experience as a former analyst with the Internal Revenue Service. Jeffrey joins us after serving as a public administration faculty member at Idaho State University and as a planner and administrator with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in eastern Idaho. We are enthusiastic about the academic expertise and professional experience that Wen, Spencer, and Jeffrey bring to our program this year.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the MPA Tribal Governance track. We are looking forward to recognizing this important occasion with a number of events, including a book talk that will take place on December 6th titled “Re-Indigenizing Ecological Consciousness and the Interconnectedness to Indigenous Identities and The Tribal Administration Handbook.” The talk focuses on the contributions of MPA faculty and alumni to the recently published Tribal Administration Handbook available through Michigan State University Press (https://msupress.org/9781938065156/tribal-administration-handbook/). Please also mark your calendars for Sunday, January 29th, when we will host Evergreen MPA faculty member emeritus Linda Moon-Stumpff at the Evergreen Longhouse for an address and roundtable discussion on the development and impact of the MPA Tribal Governance program. We hope to have more details of this forthcoming very soon.
We would also like to let you know that we are now accepting applications for our Fall 2023 MPA cohorts in both Olympia and Tacoma. Colleagues, friends, or others you know who are pursuing a career in public service can sign up for an information session at https://www.evergreen.edu/mpa/attend-information-session to learn more about our MPA program. Our priority admissions deadline is coming up on February 1st, 2023.
Sincerely,
Mike Craw
MPA Director