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WEATHERFORD, Okla. – Most 75-year-olds have long since winded down their careers. However Dr. Henrietta Mann is not your average 75-year-old.

Dr. Mann came full circle last year when she became the first president of the Cheyenne Arapaho Tribal College. The school is on the campus of her alma mater, Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford. She received her degree there in 1956 and is a member of the school’s Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame.

Mann has returned to where it all started. “I grew up Cheyenne in a small town in western Oklahoma. What has happened is I’ve come home,” she said. After finishing college, Dr. Mann eventually headed to the University of California at Berkley to teach in one of the first Native American Studies programs at a mainstream institution. “That was quite an experience during the heyday of activism,” she said.

After deciding Northern California at that time probably wasn’t the best place to raise a family, Mann moved to the University of Montana. She was a professor there for the next 28 years with a leave of absence mixed in to try something new. “I took a leave of absence to go and experience the Boston area when I went to Harvard to be interm director of the American Indian program,” she said.

In 1983, Dr. Mann received the ultimate form of honor when she was named the Cheyenne Indian of the Year. “I think that came about the time I earned my Ph’d and had been teaching. For me it is a high honor to be recognized by the Cheyenne people as having achieved something worthy of celebration and honor. A feeling that I have done what is considered to be true and honorable among Cheyenne people is what gives me the emphatis to go on,” she said.

In 1987, she was once again bestowed with a very prestigious honor the National American Indian Woman of the Year. “That was after having served a year-long stint in the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the Director of the Office of Indian Education Programs. I left and it was my choice to leave and someone saw that and decided that she gave up a very high ranking job to go back to her classroom,” said Mann. She wanted to return to Montana to teach because she knew she could have more of an influence on youth in that capacity than being stuck in an office in Washington D.C..

Dr. Mann received a prestigious distinction in 1991 when Rolling Stone Magazine named her one of the ten leading professors in the country. “I couldn’t believe it.  I received a call from Rolling Stone and as they put it they were ‘looking for cutting edge professors,’” said Mann. Feeling a sense of accomplishment and that she had climbed to the top of the mountain so to speak, Mann started focusing on other challenges. “I decided there were other things to do. There were too many young people out there who still needed to learn about what it is to be an American Indian,” she said.

With so many honors and awards and distinctions during her lifetime Dr. Mann has worked hard but feels like she’s been lucky as well. “I’ve been blessed, those are blessings. I don’t know that I ever set out to achieve any of those honors. I just done my job to the best of my abilities and those things just sort of came,” she said.

One honor she received was unwanted but necessary due to the circumstances. Dr. Mann was asked to visit Ground Zero at the site of the World Trade Centers and ask the prayers and blessings for the land. “First I cried. I had never seen such devastation in my life. I was horrified by our treatment of one another. I tend to always be hopeful and optimistic about life, but that day was a reality. I’ve been taught that tears are the highest form of prayer, it was high for me that day,” she said.

Dr. Mann holds the Endowed Chair in Native American Studies at Montana State University and received the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Indian Education Association. She has also been a consultant on several movies and documentaries involving Native Americans and authored the history of Cheyenne-Arapaho Education, 1871-1982. “It was a wonderful feeling to have been on this incredible ride, this journey from Hammon, Oklahoma.,” she said.