Cornell announced today that Daniel Usner, a highly regarded historian of American Indian-Colonial relations, will succeed Jane Mt. Pleasant as the director of the University's American Indian Program.

In addition, the American Indian Program unveiled a restructuring plan that includes adding three associate directors, setting a program mission and defining four major goals designed to recruit Native American students and retain those currently enrolled at the university.

Since 1983, the university's American Indian Program has assisted more than 1,500 Native American students in applying to Cornell, winning acceptance and graduating. Native American students are recruited nationally, and they are provided with extensive support services on campus to encourage their success. The program also strives to provide the university with a contemporary and historical understanding of Native American issues through curriculum, outreach, scholarship and research.

"The American Indian Program strives to maintain a cooperative relationship with American Indian communities in New York state," says Usner, who also is a Cornell professor of history. Mt. Pleasant, a member of the Tuscarora nation and a Cornell associate professor of soil and crop sciences, had been the program's director since January 1995. "The program began as a way to recruit students, to reach out for the best and the brightest. The program encourages students to go back and give back to their communities," she says.

With the restructuring, emphasis will be placed on recruitment and retention programs that enable Native American students to graduate from Cornell. The restructuring also provides a broad curriculum on the historical, social and contemporary portrayals of indigenous people. Mt. Pleasant says of Usner's appointment: "We felt that he was absolutely

the best-qualified person and that his scholarship and his reputation as an American Indian historian will absolutely bolster the program enormously. He has worked on the program since he came to campus, and people who have worked with him absolutely respect him."

Graduates of Cornell's American Indian Program develop leadership skills while having the opportunity to live at Akwe:kon, the residential program house on campus built on ground that is the homeland of the Cayuga Nation. Akwe:kon (pronounced "a-gway-gohn") means "all of us" in Mohawk and offers students multicultural living in an eye-catching, eagle-shaped structure. (The Cayuga, Mohawk and Tuscarora were three of the six nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.)

Cornell also has student groups directly related to Native American culture. One, the Native American Students at Cornell, is the native undergraduate student voice on campus. Others are the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, the Cornell Council of American Indian Graduate and Professional Students and the American Indian Law Student Association.

Usner came to Cornell as an assistant professor in 1980. He earned a bachelor's degree in 1975 from Johns Hopkins University. In 1976 he earned a master's degree, and in 1981 he earned a doctorate, both from Duke University. In the 1987-88 academic year, Usner conducted fellowship research at Cornell on society and politics among the American Indians of the Gulf Coast area, focusing on the period between 1783 and 1825. He has taught at the University of Munich in Germany as a Fulbright professor, and he received the Stephen and Margery Russell Distinguished Teaching Award last year at Cornell.

This fall, Usner was a guest curator of an exhibition, "Romance and Reality: American Indians in 19th Century New Orleans," at the Historic New Orleans Collection in New Orleans. The idea for the exhibit grew while he was working on his latest book, American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories. As one of the few academic experts on colonial Louisiana, Usner turned his doctoral thesis into his first book, Indians, Settlers and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. For that book, he was awarded the John H. Dunning Prize by the American Historical Society.

The program's previous directors were: Raymond Fougnier, currently a school principal in Syracuse; Charlotte Heth, currently with the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of the American Indian; Barbara Abrams, interim director, now the associate director of Cornell's student financial aid office; and the late Ron LaFrance.