photo by: Mike Yoder

Haskell Student of the Year Lolita Ceja will be a speaker Friday at Haskell Indian Nations University's commencement.

In some ways, a college degree is just a piece of paper. In other ways, it’s an access pass.

Lolita Ceja’s path to receiving hers — a somewhat zig-zagging path — started with a goal of getting that paper and became what she hopes will be a stepping stone to bigger things.

She’s heard the saying that an undergraduate degree gets you in the building, a master’s degree gets you in the room and a doctorate or professional degree gets you a seat at the table.

“I now know that I want to be at the table,” she said.

photo by: Mike Yoder

Haskell Student of the Year Lolita Ceja will be a speaker Friday at Haskell Indian Nations University's commencement.

Ceja is set to graduate this week with a bachelor’s degree in American Indian Studies from Haskell Indian Nations University. She’s this year’s Haskell Student of the Year and will be one of the featured speakers at Friday’s commencement ceremony on the Haskell campus.

Ceja, a Yakama tribe member, grew up on the Yakama reservation in Washington.

Ceja describes her own family, much like the 1.2 million acre reservation she comes from, as a cultural melting pot.

Her grandparents are white.

They adopted her mother — a Yakama Indian — as a 2-week-old baby. At the time, before the Indian Child Welfare Act, they were one of few white families adopting minority children, Ceja said.

Ceja’s father immigrated to the United States from Mexico. Her mother was 15 and he was 17 when they married, Ceja said, and she arrived soon after.

Ceja is the oldest of six siblings, and the first generation of her family to go to college.

She excelled in school, earned good grades, participated in extracurricular activities and was the captain of more than one sports team. But it was a couple years after high school before she decided to go to college.

“The expectation of post-secondary education was not a requirement,” she said. “It wasn’t about what you do; it was about who you are, your honor, your values.”

Ceja went to her first year of college in Alabama but moved home to Washington after her grandfather became sick, to help care for him. He died two years later, but Ceja stayed in Washington several more years.

She was working for one of the public school districts on the reservation, as a site director for the federal GEAR UP program, and was an assistant varsity basketball coach at one of the high schools.

She said others urged her to go back to school, but she’d gotten “sucked in” to her job. After several years, her salary had risen and she was living comfortably. At the same time, she said, she’d had to bypass a few other professional opportunities when the people contacting her realized she didn’t have a degree.

“I realized that no matter how hard I worked … when it comes down to it, mainstream society cares about one thing, and that’s a degree,” Ceja said.

“As much as they saw the hours I put in, they felt I was undeserving because I didn’t have that piece of paper.”

So she went back.

“I knew I had to do it,” she said.

At Haskell, where Ceja has been involved in numerous organizations and leadership roles, Ceja said she felt like everyone was “family” even though fellow students and employees come from tribes from coast to coast.

“No matter where you’re at in Indian Country,” she said, “a lot of our struggles are the same.”

Last summer Ceja interned with the U.S. Department of the Interior, and this summer she’ll be working at the American Indian Records Repository storage area in Lenexa.

Next, Ceja hopes to apply to the Kansas University School of Law and Oklahoma University’s master of legal studies program, with the eventual goal of learning skills she can use to help Indian Country, particularly back home in Washington where water rights issues are “huge.”

“I’m definitely passionate about water rights and environmental law,” she said. “I’d love to give back to my tribe.”