Clatsop Community College has begun offering free tuition to members of the Chinook Indian Nation.

The opportunity had a soft rollout during the spring term and will be a permanent benefit, Chris Breitmeyer, the college president, said. A formal announcement is planned for the North Coast Inclusion Seminar at the college on Saturday.

“It’s really important because it gives them the opportunity — we’re all about access at community colleges in general,” Breitmeyer said. “This lowers another barrier for that population and allows them to come without having to worry about tuition or financial aid.

“ … It will open the door to an underrepresented segment of the population.”

Breitmeyer said the idea came from a conversation he had with a college staff member about the Chinook Indian Nation’s lack of federal recognition. The Chinook were briefly recognized two decades ago and continue to press the U.S. government for recognition.

“We just thought — hey, wouldn’t it be great for us to do something to recognize them in a way we could,” he recalled.

While the offering is only benefiting a handful of Chinook students this term, Breitmeyer and Rachel Cushman, the secretary and treasurer for the Chinook Indian Nation Council, believe the opportunity could bring more members of the tribe into classrooms.

“Native students are the least likely to succeed and get an education … We’ve seen at other institutions when it’s made more accessible that students thrive,” Cushman said. “This college is in the heartlands of our place and we want our people in our place to thrive and also not to have to seek a more expensive education elsewhere.”

Cushman, who serves as a graduate teaching fellow at the University of Oregon, said she was appreciative of the college’s gift of free tuition and the work the institution has done in its curriculum.

“They are where epistemic knowledge is produced and they have the ability to right wrongs and academia (and) college education has been used as a tool to colonize and they are working towards a decolonized education,” she used.

The Chinook Indian Nation includes the five western-most Chinook speaking tribes — Clatsop, Kathlamet, Wahkiakum, Lower Chinook and Willapa — at the mouth of the Columbia River, both in Oregon and Washington state.

“We wanted to honor them because of their ancestral history on this land — our college is on the land,” Breitmeyer said. “This is a small way that we can honor that.”