PINE RIDGE, S.D. (AP) - He picked up the hitchhiker near Pine Ridge after school. It was something he wasn’t supposed to do, according to his parents, who warned him about murderers and muggers disguised as people just seeking a ride.
Dusk had begun to fall over the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and the hitchhiker was drunk. Red Cloud Indian School student Jacob Rosales gave him a ride anyway.
Through slightly slurred speech, the hitchhiker pointed out landmarks and sacred sites until Rosales dropped him off in Kyle. Before leaving, the hitchhiker asked Rosales if he planned to go to college. Yes, Rosales said. The man smiled, said a prayer for him and gave him a feather.
Rosales handed him $10 for food and drove home.
In June 2017, one month after graduating from high school, the hitchhiker’s feather is still with Rosales in Maryland, where he works as an intern for the National Institutes of Health. In the fall, that feather will follow Rosales to Yale University, one of seven Ivy League schools to which the Red Cloud graduate was accepted.
Rosales was born in Filderstadt, Germany, the son of a German woman who fell in love with an Oglala Lakota man during gardening classes at Oglala Lakota College.
Rosales’ mother, Gabriele, shuffled him back and forth between Germany and the U.S. for the first years of his life. Six months here. Six months there. A year at Martin Grade School. Some time in classes at Interior School. Eventually, his mother received permanent residency and his family settled near Kyle until his parents divorced when he was 6.
Gabriele had heard about Red Cloud Indian School and wanted her son to have the same opportunities, so Rosales went to Red Cloud High School, about 50 miles from Kyle. Gabriele rented him a room near Wounded Knee, where he lived with a classmate and her mother. He caught the bus to and from school during the week and drove home on the weekends.
For the first few years, Rosales plowed through classes and exams to make his mother happy. But his motivation grew from making his mother proud to making his family proud to eventually representing the Lakota culture he now saw as his own.
Rosales’ initial career goals were to become a marine biologist - an unusual choice coming from landlocked South Dakota. He wanted to go to Brown University in Rhode Island, an Ivy League school with an acceptance rate of only 9.3 percent. With the help of Red Cloud student mentor Dominique Fenton, Rosales sent in applications to several Ivy League schools in the hope of getting good financial aid. Rosales also sent in an early application to Yale, which has a 6.3 percent acceptance rate.
While on Christmas break in December, Rosales was lying on his bed browsing the web on his iPod when he got an email from Yale saying his status portal had been updated. Nervously, Rosales logged into his Yale account. A congratulations video began to play with the Yale fight song.
“I just felt this huge sense of relief,” Rosales told the Rapid City Journal (https://bit.ly/2u9pu1c ).
But the acceptance letters didn’t stop coming. In March, he received a phone call during class from someone at Harvard University, telling him he’d been accepted two weeks prior. Then Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Dartmouth College and Cornell University, all of which have acceptance rates lower than 15 percent.
Although there are no hard cut-offs for test scores, the most recent freshman class at Yale had ACT scores of 32-35. Rosales scored a 28.
Rosales doesn’t credit his acceptance to each of the seven schools to his academics; he credits his success to the essays he had to write for his application, many of which focused on kindness. Rosales wrote about the hitchhiker.
“Aside from being a good student, I want to become a good person,” Rosales said.
Fenton thinks Rosales is being humble for not crediting his academic success.
“He’s such a naturally gifted kid,” Fenton said. “His essays, he wrote them and they were perfect, pretty much.”
Red Cloud School Principal Clare Huerter taught Rosales in English when he was a freshman. She admired his desire to learn - not just get good grades - which she thinks is the backbone of his journey to Yale.
“He’s somebody who’s intellectually competent but also very grounded,” Huerter said.
Red Cloud serves about 220 high school students annually, and two of this year’s 52 graduates are going to Ivy League schools. Huerter noted that three 2016 graduates went to Ivy League schools as well, which she attributes both to the attractiveness of multicultural resources at these schools as well as the schools’ attempts to diversify.
Rosales ultimately chose Yale after visiting the Native American Cultural Center on campus and decided to pursue pre-medicine in hopes of becoming a general practitioner and returning to his community.
Rosales’ grandmother, who spoke fluent Lakota, died before she could teach him. Rosales plans to build on the Lakota he knows at Yale, which offers Lakota language classes.
This summer, Rosales is examining proteins at the National Institutes of Health and preparing for his first semester at Yale. He stays motivated by all he hears from people back on the reservation, such as messages from people he’s never met, praising him for the example he’s setting.
“I mean in simplest terms, I guess, I am who I am right now because I’ve had all these opportunities to meet these other people,” Rosales said.
He also holds on to the hitchhiker’s feather.
“When I first found out I got in, it was a huge mixture of relief,” Rosales said. “I was obviously super happy . and then there was just hope.”
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Information from: Rapid City Journal, https://www.rapidcityjournal.com
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