Native American studies graduate students, with their feet planted in two seemingly incompatible worlds, are busy working out their own solutions to a typical grad school question: What is knowledge and how do you get at it?

The research, like their department, stretches across several disciplines, but these students' answers will not necessarily come from computer models or lab experiments. They may, however, find it by living with Indians in a Mexican village, studying modern storytelling or interpreting hand-written notes from an linguistics field researcher.

"We're trying to bring the indigenous world to the attention of the scientific world," says Professor Martha Macri, the graduate student adviser. "We want our students, who are already high achievers in the academic world, to foster an appreciation of indigenous knowledge. That's because we believe that one of our missions is protecting and keeping Native American communities aware of the traditional knowledge that they have."

Created in 1993, the UC Davis Department of Native American Studies remains one of only three such academic programs issuing graduate degrees in North America. The graduate program got off the ground six years ago and last fall placed its first doctoral graduate, Annie Ross, in a faculty position teaching art at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Today, the program's five men and 16 women are studying history, anthropology, linguistics, art, comparative literature and community development, taking advantage of a faculty with a wide diversity of scholarship and experiences, including Victor Montejo who is currently serving as the secretary of peace in Guatemala.

Rather than just focus on North American Indians, UC Davis also asks its graduate students to broaden their studies to the entire Western Hemisphere to recognize the relationships among native peoples.

From the first time they step into the Native American studies department, students are challenged to consider issues of cultural diversity, sovereignty and indigenous knowledge in preparation for living in a complex, changing world.

Given that they must continue to co-exist in a traditional Western university system that emphasizes scientific knowledge as the basis of academic competence, it becomes a balancing act for students and faculty alike.

The solution, according to department chair Stefano Varese, is to be respectful of both the Western knowledge — with its focus on technological advancement — and of more ancient forms of perceiving the world.

"It's an encounter," he says. "We want to maximize advantages that each culture offers and reconcile different knowledges and approaches to living in this world in a respectful way."

Ben Burgess, an enrolled Yankton Sioux from Minneapolis, says he chose UC Davis to pursue modern Native American literature specifically because of this departmental philosophy.

"In other programs across the country, you need a high level of justification for using native world views in approaching knowledge," Burgess says. "I came here because I knew I'd spend less time trying to justify what I was doing. Indigenous knowledge is at the core of my life and of my academic studies."

While half of the graduate students have some Native American heritage, including one from Bolivia, the remainder are non-native scholars from the United States, Japan and Italy. What the students plan to do with their doctoral degrees extends from the expected — teaching and scholarship — to far outside the ivory tower into community development, business consulting and cultural recovery.

Returning student Kerin Gould was inspired after living with an Otomí community in the state of Puebla, Mexico. She decided she would combine community development principles with her Native American studies to document exemplary organizing and planning strategies created by tribes throughout the Western hemisphere. Just recently, she organized a campus visit and discussion by a group of Native American women from Central and Latin America involved in community organizing.

Intrigued by the activities of such women, Gould wants to look into what makes for "success" in Native American communities. "My supposition is that communities who do things their own way, using their indigenous values as a foundation, are more successful in sustaining their quality of life over the long term," she says.

Another student, chocolate maker Michael Grofe, immersed himself in ancient Mayan writings about the beginnings of that gourmet art only to find himself fascinated by the Central American knowledge of astronomy and other sciences.

He was attracted to the program by the work of Macri, a linguistic anthropologist who studies ancient Mayan epigraphy as well as modern native languages, social anthropologist Varese and faculty member Montejo, a native Mayan who studies and writes literature. Grofe sees an academic career ahead as an linguistic anthropologist who can study ancient texts to explore indigenous knowledge about topics ranging from the stars to making chocolate.

For more than a decade, Macri has been heading a project to create a database for the J.P. Harrington papers. Since 2001, the National Science Foundation has been awarding grants to the effort, giving graduate students stipends to continue building the computerized library of information about Native American language, customs and families in California and Nevada.

One such graduate student, Lisa Woodard, hopes to use her five years immersed in entering nearly 7,000 pages to become a community historian for tribes, helping them recover language and history about their ancestors.

Perhaps the most inspiring graduate student, according to his peers, is retired political science instructor Frank Navarrette, who went back to graduate school at UC Davis after deciding to forego his dream of owning a Jaguar. He has become the revered elder in the program.

At age 73, Navarrette says he wanted to prove to younger generations in his Mescalero Apache family that they, too, could earn doctoral degrees and become intellectual leaders in this world. Navarrette, after being a lifelong scholar in Western notions of power, decided he wanted to challenge those ideas with the help of quantum mechanics and a Panamanian tribe, the Kuna, which has never ceded sovereignty.

Although he has been waylaid by cancer, Navarrette continues to dream of finishing his degree. "I've come to the conclusion that indigenous people have had the ability to make sense of a lot of life," he says. "Throughout Western history, there has been a separation of science and religion — remember that in the beginning there was superstition, out of superstition came myth, then came religion and then science emerged. Consequently we have these various separations throughout our history.

"Native Americans started with the idea that all is integrated. For Native Americans, God is in nature, and nature is in God."