It looked like a typical luncheon at the Nittany Lion Inn on Saturday, but the sounds in the background told a different story.

While people filled plates from a buffet and took seats in a ballroom, voices rang out in song from an adjacent room. A circle of eight people played a traditional drum in unison as they sang.

Penn State's American Indian Leadership Program (AILP) was celebrating 30 years of continuous commitment to graduate work in education with a symposium and luncheon for alumni, faculty and friends of the program.

That night at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, the AILP held its first-ever traditional powwow as another part of the celebration.

The luncheon included commentary from College of Education staff as well as AILP alumni. Speakers discussed the history of American Indian and Alaska Native education, its present situation and what the future will hold.

Chair of Education Policy Studies Robert Hendrickson commented on the role of the university as a repository for tradition and heritage. "The way that culture is preserved is through education," he said.

Patrick Lynch, one of the founding professors of the AILP, now employed at the University of Texas, Pan American, spoke of the "revolution" that began with the start of the AILP at Penn State.

Lynch said that although the great change has occurred, it is still not enough because too few minorities are receiving graduate degrees.

"These islands of expertise as they exist right now, they are in peril," he said. "Educational administration is one of the few areas where American Indian and other minorities have entered the mainstream."

Lynch gave statistics on the number of American Indians and other minorities completing graduate study, citing the disparity between resident aliens and American minorities.

"More offshore non-citizens received those degrees than all minorities in the U.S.," he said, referring to engineering degrees earned in 1997.

Lynch wondered aloud why universities were not actively recruiting or welcoming American minorities as much as non-resident aliens.

"We absolutely must turn this around," he said.

The keynote speaker of the lunch, Gerald E. Gipp, was the first-ever Ph.D. graduate of the AILP and currently serves as the executive director of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.

Gipp began his address by recalling his first year in the AILP and how the program changed to meet the needs of students over the years. "It's important that we all try to remember where we've been," he said.

Gipp focused on the historical struggle of American Indians, commenting on how the spread of colonization stopped the development of many Indian cultures.

"I say these things not to blame or create guilt," he said. "Those are the realities we face as leaders."

Despite the "dismal statistics" that Lynch presented, Gipp said that progress has been made.

Gipp closed with a joke about political correctness and the way to refer to Native Americans, saying that people should know his tribal affiliation because that is where his heritage comes from.

"If you want to call me an American Indian, that's okay. That's what some guy (Christopher Columbus) called us when he was lost," he said. "The old Indian joke is, we're lucky he wasn't looking for Turkey."