In 2015, a nineteen-year-old Navajo and Maidu student named Chiitaanibah Johnson sat in a history class at Sacramento State. The professor told the class he didn’t like the word “genocide” because it implied the decimation of American Indians was intentional. Johnson disagreed. The professor said she was hijacking his class. He dismissed the class early and told her she was disenrolled.
The university investigated. Found no wrongdoing by either party. Offered to create a genocide studies minor and add cultural sensitivity training. The kind of institutional response that uses the word “offered” the way a waiter uses it β here is the menu, the kitchen is closed.
Ten years later, on that same campus, thirty-four students from twenty-five tribal nations walked into a 6,000-square-foot room with a classroom, a conference room, a lounge, a kitchenette, a community fridge, and private bathrooms. The room has a name. Wileety. It’s a Plains Miwok word. It means “to bloom, to be bright, to shine.”
Sacramento State has 31,000 students. Roughly 100 are Native American. That’s 0.32 percent. In a state with over 700,000 Native residents β the largest Indigenous population of any state in the country.
The Wileety Native American College is the first of its kind in the California State University system. It opened September 24, 2025. Students can major in anything the university offers but must minor in Native American Studies with an emphasis on tribal leadership. They move through coursework as a cohort. They meet twice a week. Each staff member meets with four or five students biweekly.
The inaugural dean is Annette Reed, a Tolowa Dee-ni’ elder who joined Sacramento State in 1998. She cancelled her retirement to lead the college.
Think about that. She was done. Twenty-six years at the institution. She could have left. She un-retired because thirty-four students needed someone who understood what getting lost on a campus of 31,000 actually means.
“If you’re on a campus of 31,000 and only 100 are Native, you’ll get lost,” Reed told Sacramento State’s newsroom. “We created a place that felt like home.”
Home is a word that does a lot of work here. The United States government built boarding schools specifically to remove Native children from home β 417 institutions across 37 states, at least 3,104 children who never came back. Those schools were designed to erase language, clothing, hair, religion, family. The architecture of separation.
Wileety is the opposite architecture. Same institutional form β a college. Opposite direction. Inward instead of outward. Gathering instead of scattering.
Joaquin Tarango, the college’s tribal community relations advisor, said it plainly: “We had to fight our way to being here.”
The numbers tell the same story from a different angle. American Indian and Alaska Native students are 1 percent of U.S. undergraduate enrollment. In the California State University system, their four-year graduation rate is 29.1 percent, compared to 37.3 percent overall. In the community college system, 58 percent stay enrolled after the first year, compared to 68 percent. And California’s own data undercounts Native students by 89.8 percent.
A student named Breanna Lou-Neal Reyes, Eastern Band of Cherokee and Rosebud Sioux, a junior transfer, described the cohort model this way: “We have that sense of community kind of built in, so all you really have to do is start talking.”
That sentence sounds simple. It is not simple. “All you really have to do is start talking” describes a condition most Native students on most campuses do not have. You can’t start talking when there’s nobody in the room who knows what you mean. The room has to exist first.
So someone built the room.
Thomas Lozano, Enterprise Rancheria, Estom Yumeka Maidu, handles outreach and recruitment. He was an undergraduate at Sacramento State when there were only two Native faculty members. He sees the thirty-four as the start: “50 entering our class, 75 entering our class, 100 entering our class.”
Rose Soza War Soldier, Mountain Maidu, Cahuilla, and LuiseΓ±o, directs the Native American Studies program and serves on Wileety’s NAGPRA committee. She teaches required courses. She also sits with the weight of what the institution still hasn’t done. “The Federal NAGPRA law passed when I was in elementary school,” she said, “and I am an assistant professor now. How much longer do you want us to wait?”
Across the state, the California Indian Nations College β the only accredited tribal college in California, serving 151 students near Palm Desert β received its eight-year accreditation in February 2026. Two proposed bills would add tribal colleges to the state’s official definition of higher education and make credits transferable. The largest Native population in the country, and the legislature is still deciding whether tribal colleges count as colleges.
Meanwhile, federal tribal education funding faces an 83 percent proposed cut β from $183 million to $22 million.
That’s the architecture Wileety was built inside. Not beside. Inside. On a campus where a professor once told a Native student that “genocide” was the wrong word for what happened to her people. In a state that undercounts 90 percent of its Native students. Under a federal budget that’s trying to cut the remaining funding by five-sixths.
Dean Reed, who cancelled her retirement, who has been at this institution since 1998, who watched one Native student get told her history was wrong and decided to build a room where thirty-four students could learn it right, said this:
Three steps. Getting in. Getting through. Getting out into the world. Each one a place where the system loses people it was never designed to hold.
Wileety was designed to hold them.
Thirty-four students. Twenty-five nations. One room. A community fridge. A woman who un-retired.
The name means “to bloom.”
// NEON BLOOD
Sources: ICT News, Sacramento State Newsroom, News from Native California, CalMatters, Times of San Diego, The State Hornet
