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A Front Row Seat
to Life,  Barbara
Pinto ’86, ABC News

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Asking the Important Questions

Eva Garroutte '85 and her father are members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, so you may wonder how she came to Houghton College. It wasn't her first choice. When she visited Houghton, though, she was impressed by the people she met. "They discussed intellectual components. They talked about their faith."

Garroutte majored in sociology and involved herself in service organizations, graduating magna cum laude. "My professors shaped me intellectually. I could never repay them for all they gave to me. Passionate about learning, they passed that joy on to me."

After earning a master's degree in sociology from SUNY Buffalo she completed a second master's and a PhD at Princeton University, then accepted a sociology position at the University of Tulsa. This position allowed her to return to where her father was raised and her relatives remain.

Garroutte served as Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the greater Tulsa area, did volunteer programming for Indian Health Services and related agencies, and was deacon and elder in an Indian church. For the better part of a decade, she learned the Cherokee language and taught Cherokee elders to read and write the Cherokee syllabary. She wrote a book: Real Indians: Identity, Community, and the Survival of Native America. At the university, she helped administer a new Native American High School Summer Program, preparing Native American youth to succeed in college.

     After Tulsa, Garoutte became assistant professor of sociology at Boston College. "I'm going to keep learning for the rest of my life what it means to be Cherokee and Christian," she says, "My professors gave me a framework for asking the important questions. If I can teach the way they taught me, I will have truly succeeded."