BEMIDJI—It took a while, but Naomi Johnson is ready to graduate from Bemidji State University and head to graduate school.
Her first couple shots at college in the mid-2000s were thwarted by depression, and then she spent a few years in the Twin Cities, where she got married and had a child before heading back up to the Bemidji area for a degree at Northwest Technical College that she’s parlaying into a community health degree at BSU.
“It’s been a journey,” Johnson said wryly. She’s set to be one of more than 1,000 graduates at the university’s commencement ceremony this Friday at the Sanford Center. Johnson is one of the more than 50 Native American students in this year’s graduating class who will receive their degrees Friday, the most in a single year in the school’s nearly 100-year history, the school says.
Johnson serves on the school’s Council of Indian Students, is a McNair scholar and sits on the President’s Student Commission.
After she graduates, Johnson is set to study public and community health at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. She originally hoped to be a physician’s assistant but was drawn to community health because she could help swaths of people at a time.
“My plan is to use whatever it is that I can learn and gain from my graduate work to be able to give back to the Native American community and help in whatever way they need me to, so I want to be able to be an advocate at whatever agency I may end up working for,” Johnson said. “The truth is there’s a lot of work that needs to be done for Native American people on public health.”
That advocacy could mean running a tribal epidemiology center or an Indian Health Services office or working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It could also mean something more simple, like changing “no tobacco” signs to specify that they only ban commercial tobacco, which is distinct from ceremonial or traditional tobacco—a change that some American Indian leaders are already pushing for at BSU.
Johnson credits some of her success to her family and to the help she received from workers at BSU’s American Indian Resource Center, who pointed her toward scholarships such as the McNair one, which Johnson said changed the trajectory of her career. Resource center staff also regularly cooked food—”There were people here that literally had to remind me to eat,” Johnson said—or watched her daughter.
“To be able to have that kind of support is huge, and it really makes a difference for students, especially Native American students,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of us that come back to school when we have families. That kind of support makes a huge difference.”
If you go:
What: Bemidji State University graduation
When: 2 p.m. Friday, May 4
Where: Sanford Center, 1111 Event Center Dr., NE, Bemidji