A new book from Washington State University Press âTeaching Native Pride: Upward Bound and the Legacy of Isabel Bondâ is now available.
The book by Tony Tekaroniake Evans, of Ketchum, Idaho, provides first-hand accounts of Natives and non-Natives to tell the story of the Upward Bound program at the University of Idaho and Isabel Bondâs role in it.
The Upward Bound program began in Moscow in 1969. Bond was the director in the early 1970s and ran the program for more than three decades. Those enrolled in Upward Bound had to live in a 200-mile radius and be the first in their family to pursue a college degree. The program was part of Lyndon B. Johnsonâs War on Poverty and each summer those in the program lived on the UI campus receiving six weeks of instruction on subjects like math, science, literature and foreign languages.
I first saw Grand Coulee Dam as a 10-year old. My family and I were on our way to Spokane, Washington to attend Expo ’74, officially titled the “International Exposition on the Environment.” Expo ’74 was notable for being the first environmentally themed World’s Fair. It was also notable in that Spokane was, at the time, the smallest city to host a World’s Fair. It took temerity for a relatively unknown, provincial city to pull off the feat. In the end, it came down to imagination, a refusal to accede to common wisdom that they were dreaming too big, and the good timing to tap into the emerging environmental consciousness of the 1970s.