Alpha Pi Omega is the country’s oldest Indigenous Greek letter organization. The sorority was founded in the 1990s, and has over 14 chapters on college campuses around the country, with about 900 sisters representing at least 130 tribes.
Alexis Wray, a reporting fellow for The 19th, wrote a piece last month about the organization, whose future is suddenly uncertain. Wray joined The Show to discuss her conversations with current members of Alpha Pi Omega.
Full conversation
ALEXIS WRAY: One of the things that they really drove home to me was the motto of the organization, my sister as myself, and oftentimes the sisters on campus are participating in powwows together, participating in smudging by using sage, being a part of the MMIW movement.
SAM DINGMAN: And can you tell us what the MMIW movement is?
WRAY: Absolutely, the MMIW movement stands for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
DINGMAN: OK.
WRAY: And these are also some of the ways that they support each other, and, and find and maintain sisterhood.
DINGMAN: Got it. And Pembroke in particular, is a fascinating place to look at Alpha Pi Omega because of the racial makeup of the campus. Give us some context there.
WRAY: So the Pembroke area, which is in Robeson County, is known by many North Carolinians for two things, you know, the campus of UNC Pembroke and being the home of the largest tribal community east of the Mississippi River, which is the Lumbee tribe, they're a state and federally recognized tribe but without federal benefits.
And the campus of UNC Pembroke is really unique because it, it sits in this marshland area, and it has one of the largest Native American student populations on its campus. And so Alpha Pi Omega being on their campus is like this unique intersection where, where students are not only finding like community but can find this hyper-specific community within this sorority, they can find this sisterhood.
DINGMAN: And you were talking about some of the specifically Indigenous initiatives that Alpha Pi Omega undertakes with its members. But in your piece you also write about some of the benefits that the sorority offers to the Pembroke campus more broadly. What are some of those?
WRAY: Absolutely. So some of those look like support systems that the sisters of Alpha Pi Omega have built to mentor other women on campus. Alpha Pi Omega is not exclusive to who is allowed to join their sorority. They have four principles, and those are spirituality, traditionalism, contemporary issues and education. So they really try to lean into all four principles to uplift their sorority.
DINGMAN: And so obviously having a chapter of Alpha Pi Omega on a campus like Pembroke, where the Indigenous population is, I believe, something like 14%. That's very different than at a place like say ASU right here in our backyard, where there's only a 1% Native population at last check.
Can you talk a little bit about the significance of a sorority like Alpha Pi Omega in a place where there are so few other Indigenous students?
WRAY: I feel like campuses that might have a smaller population of Native American students, like ASU for example, sometimes the environment can feel more isolating. It might become more challenging to find belonging and even connect to the larger student body.
And for example, all three of the students that I interviewed for this story previously went to other universities and colleges within North Carolina. And after being at those other colleges and universities for, you know, one or two years, they were having a difficult time finding belonging, finding people that they could connect with.
DINGMAN: That is really interesting and it also casts some significance on one of the other things that you're writing about in your piece, which is that Alpha Pi Omega is at risk of being shut down. Tell us why that is.
WRAY: So right now, there are more than 17 anti-DEI executive orders from the Trump administration. And a lot of them are directly impacting higher education and schools in general, and a lot of these anti-DEI executive orders aren't just attacking curriculum or what's taught in the classroom, but they're also impacting how students can gather, what groups can, you know, have a web page, if these groups can still meet in a general classroom building for their monthly meeting.
And a really interesting conversation that I had with LaDonna Richardson, which is the sorority grand president and elected leader. It was about the ways in which down the years, she was saying that we'll be able to see, you know, a decrease in enrollment of, you know, Indigenous students.
DINGMAN: So, that's very significant because I have some numbers here from 2022 saying that only 26% of 18 to 24 year old Native American students were at that time enrolled in college, which was much less than the overall U.S. population.
So it sounds like what LaDonna was saying to you is that Native American enrollment, which is already much lower than the rest of the population, could suffer even more if organizations like Alpha Pi Omega weren't allowed to exist under these executive orders.
WRAY: Absolutely, and groups like Alpha Pi Omega is what people don't understand about them is that it not only fosters a sense of belonging and support for mental health, but it keeps students enrolled in colleges, and without kind of this presence of groups like Alpha Pi Omega on college campuses, you know, that could increase dropout rates.
DINGMAN: Well, last question for you, Alexis. I wonder if you could characterize in the conversations you had with the current members of Alpha Pi Omega, obviously not asking you to speak for them, but did you get a sense from them of what this membership means to them and, and whether or not they seemed worried or or nervous about what the future might hold?
WRAY: A few things that the students really kept going back to is that their sorority is a place of healing for them.
DINGMAN: Healing, you said?
WRAY: Healing and, you know, just discussing some of the attacks on DEI and how it could impact, you know, their sorority.
They, they would say things to me like, you know, this isn't the, the first time that someone has tried to attack Indigenous communities and that the sisterhood is strong and prepared for anything.
