About Us
RNASA is the Native American student association at Rice University. Our organization provides a support network for Native American/Alaskan Native students, promotes awareness of the cultures of America's indigenous people, and establishes a link between alumni and current students at Rice.
- Download our brochure (requires Adobe Acrobat).
- The Constitution of the Native American Student Association.
About Rice
Rice University is the smallest and most personal of the nation's best teaching and research universities, with 2,800 undergraduates and 1,900 graduate students. Rice combines the strengths of a liberal arts college—median class size of 11 and student-to-faculty ratio of 5 to 1—with the resources of a research university. Our residential college system creates even smaller communities of students and faculty within the university. Opened in 1912 and located a mere three miles from downtown Houston, Texas, our beautifully green and wooded campus is bordered by the 445-acre Hermann Park, the Houston Zoo, and the Texas Medical Center, and it is blocks from Houston's museum district.
About Houston
[Photo by Elaine Mesker-Garcia]
Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country, has a diverse population, including an active Native community. RNASA frequently collaborates with other Native American groups, and the area's many cultural offerings include powwows, programs and lectures, and exhibits about our culture. For example, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, located within walking distance of campus, has featured an exhibition of George Catlin and His Indian Gallery, which showcased artwork and Native American artifacts from one of the most important collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. And the Houston Museum of Natural Science holds an extensive collection of Native American objects. Texas has the fourth-largest Native population in the country—216,000 Indian people, according to the 2000 Census, behind only California, Oklahoma, and Arizona. Just 70 miles north of Houston is the reservation of the Alabama-Coushatta, one of three federally recognized tribes in the state.
