Rory Tendore

For the Star-Tribune

Rory Tendore is thrilled to open the door to her o ce at Central Wyoming College’s Inter-tribal Education Community Center.

The o ce and her title, she’s the school’s first tribal student coordinator, demonstrate how far she’s come. But the distance traveled isn’t in miles.

Tendore works close to where she grew up as a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe on the Wind River Reservation. She took a winding path to becoming the successful professional that she is now. But she never gave up. And she uses what she learned along the way to help tribal students find their own success.

She describes, for example, helping a couple decide how they should invest in the husband completing a technical training program while his wife worked to support them. Tendore gave “a seed of encouragement” for their plan and was thrilled to hear the husband say that after the technical training, he may get an academic degree so he can start his own business.

Planting seeds of hope is a big part of her job, which once included putting her printer on her home’s entryway during the coronavirus lockdown so a student could print a needed document for funding. With classes resuming in person, she starts each day leaving her house at 7 a.m. to pick up a handful of students. And a major e ort of hers is to provide educational opportunities and improve internet access on the Wind River Reservation.

They may seem like simple ways to help, but they add up to keeping students in school.

Tendore encountered plenty of obstacles on the road to earning a college degree when she was 36. The path was marked by changes, postponed starts and always, a lack of resources.

Because the community of Fort Washakie didn’t have the population for a public high school at the time, Tendore attended the Flandreau Indian School in South Dakota for her freshman year. She returned home her senior year to graduate from Wyoming Indian High School. For college, she chose United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota to study o ce technology, which she thought would give her the best chance to get a job then she went back home. But after one year she concluded that “maybe school was not for me” and went back to the Wind River Reservation.

For the next 12 years, she worked in var-

Rory Tendore became Coordinator of American Indian Student Service at Central Wyoming College in 2020.

ious jobs at Fort Washakie School, first as a tutor and then planning grant-supported programs for students.

Teachers and community members encouraged her to apply for funding through her tribe to attend Idaho State in Pocatello. There she found a “positive environment” and was inspired by meeting other native students born from a “generation of people who have invested in education.” A roommate’s mother had worked hard to finish college, and Tendore was able to see how her hard work transitioned into a profession, not only a job. Another roommate from Africa introduced her to a community on campus where students supported each other by celebrating their regional cultures so many miles from home.

But after two years, she felt she had gaps in her education, particularly with math, and didn’t know how to adapt her learning. Plus, money remained an issue. She couldn’t keep her apartment and made the hard choice to leave college and return home. After working a summer internship, she was hired by the Shoshone Business Council and learned first hand about tribal government and business procedure, which has become a major interest for her future.

At this point, Tendore had attended two di erent colleges and earned local credits through BOCES and online classes, but she felt no closer to receiving a degree. Then Wind River Tribal College stepped in with a program to help non-traditional college students finish their education for teaching certification. An Indian Education grant covered tuition, fees and books to help Tendore finally finish a degree from home at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

The university sent professors to work on the reservation. Two advisers helped Tendore put together all the credits she had already earned with a program she could finish from Wyoming, and in 2015 she earned a college degree.

“I realized I had invested about 20 years of my life getting an education, bits and pieces when I could a ord it.” Finally at the age of 36, she became the first in her family of seven children to graduate from a four-year college. Her youngest brother would follow a year later with a degree in Native American Studies from the University of Wyoming.

The degree opened up opportunities, and Tendore was asked to consider applying for a tribal juvenile probation position, for which she was chosen. She took probation to a level of awareness for young o enders, helping them realize that “they could make proactive adjustments in their actions and build relationships in the community and the tribe.” Tendore became the first Wyoming resident in 30 years to be honored with the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award for work with young tribal members.

When the position of American Indian student services coordinator at Central Wyoming College was created in 2020, Tendore was hired. She says it’s an exciting time to be in education for American Indian people, “knowing that we have a place on campus built with us in mind.” She describes the pride students in the dental hygiene program felt when they got their first set of scrubs. A pre-engineering student, also the first in his family to attend college, told her how excited he was to meet other students who appreciate science and math as much as he does.

Her long journey to becoming the person who o ers resources and encouragement to tribal students has become a “dream come true.” And Tendore isn’t finished improving herself. She wants to earn a master’s degree in public administration, with a focus on tribal governments. For now, she is helping ensure that other tribal students have a smoother path than her own.