BOZEMAN – As Walter Fleming approaches the end of his long tenure at Montana State University, he tends to brush aside the praise and kudos paid him by others with characteristic good humor.

Whether rolling his eyes at a description of his generosity during a spring celebration in the College of Letters and Science or drolly fact-checking speakers during a public reception held in his honor, Fleming has steadfastly refused to take himself too seriously while preparing to retire later this summer.

At one gathering when the college’s dean, William Thomas, noted that Fleming has taught more than 12,000 students during his 46 years at MSU, Fleming quipped “I don’t know what they learned, but yeah, they were there."

Though his wit and genial nature are well known on campus, “Uncle Walter,” as he is known by Native students and his colleagues, has always taken his role as a professor and head of MSU’s Department of Native American Studies seriously. Along with the administrative responsibilities assigned to leaders of all academic departments, he has shouldered the duty to ensure that the unique needs of MSU’s Native students are met, providing them support to stay in school and finish their degrees.

“Even though we are an academic program, we serve Native students across the campus regardless of their major and now including Gallatin College,” said Fleming during a recent interview in American Indian Hall, the academic, ceremonial and collaborative home for the department and MSU’s Native student programs that opened in 2021. “Native parents tell students, ‘When you go to MSU, go see Native American Studies. They’ll help you.’ We’ve always had that responsibility of assisting students and retaining and graduating them.”

MSU President Waded Cruzado said Native American communities on campus and across Montana have been strengthened by Fleming’s dedication.

“For decades, Walter Fleming has been a guide both to Montana State University and, importantly, to the generations of Native American students who have attended here,” she said. “Many of those students are now professionals, scholars and leaders in their communities, thanks to his support and kindness.”

Fleming’s background and connections to Montana’s tribal communities positioned him optimally for career that has impacted generations of families. A member of the Kickapoo Tribe of Kansas, he was born in Crow Agency and grew up in Lame Deer on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. He graduated from Dawson Community College in Glendive and from MSU Billings, where he majored in English and history and earned his teaching credentials before going on to earn a master’s degree in public school counseling from MSU.

As a historian, Fleming fittingly began his career at a pivotal educational and cultural juncture for Montana. One day in 1977, he bumped into the Dawson Community College president, who recognized him from his student days and offered him a job on the spot. DCC was scrambling to help its teacher candidates comply with Montana’s 1974 Indian Studies Law, which required teachers in public schools located on or near reservations to earn six credits of what was then called Indian Studies education. At the time, Dawson was one of many Montana community colleges lacking such a curriculum.

It fell on Fleming to create a dozen Indian Studies courses for Dawson, which he spent the next year and a half teaching – not only there but also in several eastern Montana towns whose teachers needed the credits to comply with the new law.

“So, when I came to MSU, I’d already had some pretty good experience teaching Indian Studies, albeit not very long,” he said.

In 1979, Fleming accepted what was supposed to be a temporary teaching assignment in MSU’s Center for Native American Studies, the unit established five years earlier to teach the university’s Indian Studies courses and to offer counseling and advising to Native students. He has served on MSU’s Native American Studies faculty ever since, except for a year he spent at the University of Kansas completing coursework for his doctorate in American studies. He was appointed department head in 2002, two years before the center became an academic department after the Montana Board of Regents allowed it to begin offering a master’s degree in Native American studies.

Fleming said he has always recognized that it’s up to students to define where they want to go and his job to help them get there, even when their concept of success differs from others.

“Our Native students want to go home, which I think is an important difference between the Native and non-Native students,” he said. “Their dream isn’t to go to Portland or to go work for Boeing. Their dream is to go back to Fort Belknap or Fort Peck or wherever they come from and make a difference in their homes.”

For Fleming, helping them do that fulfills a portion of MSU’s land-grant mission.

“We came to realize that a part of that land-grant mission includes service to Native communities,” he said. “Native American Studies was fortunate to be positioned at a point to create liaisons with those communities and say, ‘What do you folks need from MSU?’”

Under Fleming’s leadership, that question was asked and then answered in the form of support for Native student education all over the state. It included offering graduate fellowship opportunities to tribal college faculty who wanted to study at MSU and forming dual-enrollment partnerships with tribal colleges so that their students would be eligible for financial aid. The department also recruited MSU faculty members to help tribal colleges establish new academic programs, especially in the sciences.

“Over time, we worked ourselves out of a job because of the relationships we negotiated,” Fleming said.

To illustrate how the Native student experience has changed in his nearly five decades at MSU, Fleming talks about the milestones he’s witnessed since 1979, starting with the “great increase” in Native enrollment in 1980 from 52 to 53 students. In those days, he said, the graduation of a single Native student was something to celebrate, “and now, we regularly graduate 100 or 120 students per year.

“When we reached 100 Native students, when we’ve reached 200, 300, those were events that we did recognize and celebrate because it meant that the students were beginning to come to MSU in greater numbers,” he said. “Today, 876 Native students attend MSU, and we still have the same mission – making sure that they succeed.”

According to those who work most closely with Fleming, it has been the relationships he cultivated within the department and among Native students that contributed to the rise across all metrics.

“He’s adapted his leadership style and his caring to a bigger role than just being a professor and faculty member or department head,” said Lisa Perry, director of MSU’s American Indian/Alaska Native Student Success Services. “The care and the love and the warmth go way past the classroom, and that’s what we’ve been able to model that really keeps our students on that path to success.”

Added Nicholas Ross-Dick, AIANSSS program manager, “He was very intentional about traveling to Native communities to connect with families and people and students. He didn’t take the route of, ‘I’m going to focus much more on research or on scholarship.’ His scholarship is the work that he does among generations that’s still impacting them.”

Fleming said he will have time for typical scholarly pursuits after he officially retires later this summer. He plans to write three histories: one on MSU’s American Indian Hall and how it came to be, from the perspective of someone who served on every related committee; another on the 50-year history of MSU’s Native American Studies program; and a third on MSU’s earliest Native students, from “the first kid to step off that bus and be a student,” to the first who earned a degree, to the one who started the first American Indian student club.

But more significant to Fleming than documenting history has been being part of it: attending, for example, the inaugural meeting of the university’s Council of Elders and serving on the committees for the first building on campus designed and built to serve Native students.

“I can’t wax more poetic than that,” he said, before deflecting yet another platitude about his “rewarding” career.

“Yeah, yeah, but it’s not necessarily my reward,” he said. “We have students who are tribal council presidents. We have students who are airline pilots, who are making their mark in industry. ... That becomes the satisfaction that one gets after looking back at 46 years and saying, ‘You know, I remember when they were that shy kid sitting in the back of the classroom, not saying a word.’ And now, look at that.”