Tribal colleges were established by Native Americans on Indian reservations beginning in 1968 to provide for a culturally-attuned higher education. They offer native-based language and social studies, as well as courses in their food and agricultural sciences competencies of their local rural communities as a part of their curricula. Significant new endowment, grant, and academic program support was provided to tribal colleges and universities through the Equity in Education Land-Grant Status Act of 1994. This study examined the effect of this support in terms of the impact on food and agricultural science course offerings in relation to their native-knowledge-based curricula.

A prior cross-sectional study detailing land-grant courses and native-knowledge-based courses of five tribal colleges before the 1994 Land-Grant Act was expanded to a longitudinal 10-year study. The original study was replicated, and course frequency data taken from college catalogs for 1994 was compared to observed 2004 data to determine if changes in the course counts were significant and related to the legislative policy change.

The relative frequency proportion of the land-grant courses was nearly equal to the native-knowledge-based courses--a 49:51 ratio in 1994. The ratio changed to 54:46 favoring the land-grant courses in 2004, while the total count of courses in both categories grew by 25% at the five colleges combined.

Chi-square tests for relationship between land-grant and native-knowledge-based category frequencies over the 1995 and 2004 independent variable levels resulted in two statistically significant (p < .05) differences. Chief Dull Knife College and Oglala Lakota College had observed data in 2004 significantly greater than expected. Diné College, Little Big Horn College, and Salish-Kootenai College course frequencies were as expected, as were those for various groups of the colleges. Thus, no generalizable inference of a causal policy effect could be attributed to the 1994 Land-Grant Act.