The family guild

Educator and Native American advocate Janine Pease follows in her family’s footsteps of caring deeply and changing lives through teaching

By MSU Alumni Foundation

August 25^th, 2025

For more than 50 years, Janine Pease ’87 M, ’94 PhD, has been all in. She has dedicated her life to education.

Pease has served on several boards, consortia and councils at the local, state and federal levels, aiming to better educate and advocate for tribal students. Now 76 years old, she continues to teach as an adjunct professor at Little Big Horn College on the Crow Indian Reservation in Crow Agency, Montana.

According to Pease, education is not for the faint of heart. Either you are all in on the mission or you’re not.

“You have to be an activist, you have to care deeply about these things or you’re not going to do it,” said Pease, an enrolled member of the Crow Indian Tribe. “It’s not a profession for people who are laissez-faire. It means a great deal, and if you’re not ready to give it your all, then you need to step out of the kitchen.”

However, for someone as dedicated to her profession, education was not the path she envisioned for herself. She earned two bachelor’s degrees in anthropology and sociology with the intent to be a social worker. But as life would have it, Pease ended up just like other members of her family: a teacher.

“In a way, it’s the family guild,” Pease said.

Her mother, father, auntie and uncle were among the very first college-educated people in their tribal nation, and all became teachers. So it was very much a part of her upbringing.

“We grew up as a family in schools,” she said. “The people that we knew best in the little schools, we saw them as close as family.”

Pease’s father always said that his family and he would not have gotten anywhere without education and athletics, so a college education was the expectation for her. After earning undergraduate degrees from Central Washington University, Pease found herself among a surplus of graduates in the state attempting to be social workers. With that door closed, Pease began working as a tutor counselor in the special student services program at Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake, Washington.

It was there that the spark of teaching ignited for Pease. She recalled working with a student who was Mexican American, a mother of six studying to pass the GED test. During the nine-month academic year, the student earned her diploma, learning to read and write in English, as Spanish was her predominant language.

“When you see your hometown and its people are better off by education, that’s the whole point right there. Education can make a life."

“To me, that was an amazing feat, and I completely respected her ability to make such amazing progress,” Pease said. “But I also became impressed with the community college, the students who came into the learning lab and the teachers who worked with them. I never looked back on social work after that.”

As members of the Crow tribe, Pease and her family spent a lot of time in Montana and loved what she called her “home base.” While working at Big Bend Community College, a tribal councilman for Crow Nation reached out to Pease to recruit her to build higher education opportunities for tribal members. As just the 35th member of the Crow Nation to become a college graduate, Pease remembers the call as one she needed to answer.

While in Montana, Pease has played a crucial role in the state’s understanding of American Indian tribal colleges, Native American education and Native language restoration. After serving as the director of the Crow tribe’s Adult and Continuing Education Program, Pease founded Little Big Horn College, a public tribal community college on the Crow Indian Reservation in Crow Agency, Montana. She advocated for the college’s funding and served as the college’s first president from 1982-2000. Under her leadership, Little Big Horn College grew from a one-room school with 32 students into an accredited two-year community college with facilities across a campus that serves over 300 students per term.

When Little Big Horn College was looking for accreditation, it became apparent to Pease that having two bachelor’s degrees as a college president was not enough. She was personally encouraged by former Montana State University President Emeritus William Tietz to pursue graduate degrees in Bozeman. With scholarship access for people at tribal colleges, Pease joined a small cohort of about 20 tribal students working toward her master’s degree and an eventual doctorate. She completed her degrees while still maintaining her full-time job at Little Big Horn College and raising her children.

“Of course, we’re a tribal college, so we have tribal studies at the heart of every degree. And yet everything I learned at MSU from finance to instruction and assessments, all of that was essential. It really helped me as a leader, certainly as a leader of a higher education institution,” Pease said.

During the 1990s, Pease’s dedication to tribal higher education became more federally focused, as she tried to help secure funding for tribal colleges as part of several consortia and committees in Washington, D.C.

While president of Little Big Horn College, Pease served on the Board of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and the American Indian College Fund. U.S. Secretary of Education Lauro Cavazos appointed her to the Indian Nations At Risk Task Force from 1989-91. Her work earned her appointments from former President Bill Clinton to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education and the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities Advisory Council. Additionally, Pease was on the Museum of the American Indian Board of Directors.

Pease is the recipient of several prestigious awards and honors, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the ACLU Jeannette Rankin Award, as well as being chosen as the National Indian Educator of the Year in 1990. She was also named “one of the 100 Most Influential Montanans of the Century” by the Missoulian. She is the recipient of several honorary doctorates and was appointed to the Montana Board of Regents of Higher Education in 2006 by Governor Brian Schweitzer.

With 50 years of achievements to look back on, Pease finds meeting with early graduates of Little Big Horn College to be the most valuable aspect of her career. Going all in on her life in education has been rewarding in many ways, but it has also been life-changing for the hundreds of thousands of people who have been impacted by Pease’s work and that of her colleagues locally and nationally.

“When you see your hometown and its people are better off by education, that’s the whole point right there,” she said. “Education can make a life. You can see people having families, owning homes and being a part of the entire community. All of that to me is the reward, to know that my community, our tribal nation, is much better off on account of education.”