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Keely Eagleshield was officially appointed to the Larson Family Endowed Director of Wokini and Tribal Relations at South Dakota State University on Dec. 8, 2025. 

The position is funded by the Dale and Pat Larson family in Brookings, who fund several endowed positions across campus.

Eagleshield, who is Hunkpapa Lakota and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, isn’t the first person to have this title, but she says there’s still a lot of room for growth.

“There isn’t much of an existing pathway, so I get to be an engineer, which is, ironically, my background,” she said.

An SDSU alumna

Eagleshield graduated with a B.S. in civil engineering from South Dakota State in 2020. She says the path from McLaughlin to Brookings was a long, winding road.

“College wasn’t a thought-out plan for me,” she said. “My choices were to go to school or stay in McLaughlin. I decided I wanted to come to a school.”

She ended up on campus through happenstance.

“It was truly just that someone dropped off a pamphlet at my high school,” Eagleshield said. “My counselor didn’t know me and just knew I was Native. They said, ‘Here’s a Native program. Maybe you can go there.’”

She participated in the Summer Bridge program, which is open to several groups who may experience a culture shock during the transition to higher education.

“That’s what really worked and got me on campus,” she said.

Even with the program, Eagleshield said she still faced several barriers to getting to and staying in college. They included financial barriers, as well as barriers like not understanding financial aid programs and feeling uncomfortable talking about money with a stranger.

Plus, she faced confidence issues and a general feeling of being uncomfortable and out of place on campus.

Now, she can tell current students that she gets it. And she’s here to help them through it.

A winding road to Wokini

Eagleshield runs BeadsxBeans, a Native beadwork online store that also provides cultural education on social media. She was invited back on campus a few years after graduating to lead a beading workshop.
It was then that she learned about the Wokini Initiative, a program that supports American Indian student success and Indigenous nation-building.

“I was immediately wrapped up in everything in a good way. I got excited about where the program was going,” she said.

She started as a short-term project coordinator and then became a grant and professional development specialist for Wokini. For the last year, she was the interim director of the program.

Her work now focuses on improving tribal relations between the university and the Indigenous nations of the region.

The typical approach is often goal-focused and short-term.

“Missions come in and want to do great things like paint houses and clean the highways, but they always go away. There’s no relationship, and what long-lasting impact can that have?”

Eagleshield’s position focuses on the long-term impacts, as well as listening to what the tribes need from a higher education institution, instead of doing what the institution thinks they need.

“A lot of times, the way people approach Indigenous nations is often misguided. This provides the guidance,” she said.

The Wokini Initiative is the perfect vehicle to do that.

“No other university does anything like the Wokini Initiative. I hope to develop a lot of guidance not only for the university but also for universities across the United States so they can look to us for an example,” she said.

A bright future

Eagleshield has an open-door policy for both students and faculty and staff on the SDSU campus.

“Come have a conversation with me,” she said.

It also applies to Native and non-Native individuals. If someone who is Native is asked a question or is dealing with a situation that they feel uncomfortable with, they can send someone to Eagleshield or come to her themselves. If someone who is non-Native has a question about Native issues or tribal relations, she encourages them to come to her. 

“Non-Native people always need to put in the legwork,” she said. “They might not know what resources are available or even what questions to ask, so this is the space for them.”

Eagleshield runs the Wokini Challenge Grant for research that addresses Indigenous issues. The grant is only for research projects that include opportunities for Native students, and researchers should discuss their proposal with Eagleshield before getting the grant.

She’s also now offering a Wokini professional development class for SDSU faculty called “South Dakota History and Its People.” It’s a one-hour-a-month, discussion-based class that broadly looks at Native history, culture and current affairs. It goes for six sessions — three in the fall and three in the spring.

“People are often so afraid of offending us that they don’t try to learn. You have to be brave and be comfortable and know that you’re not going to get it right,” she said.

The brave 53 people who signed up in its first year are 53 people who are willing to learn and to implement what they learn around the SDSU campus.

“Ideally, this should be offered to all of South Dakota. Honestly, the Wokini Initiative is something everyone should have in the Northern Plains or the Oceti Sakowin region,” she said.

Eagleshield’s office is in Morrill Hall Room 119.