WWU's Frank Miedema always working to stay connected to his culture

Frank Miedema is a third-year student on the WWU men’s soccer team majoring in critical Indigenous studies and environmental policy, with a minor in audio technology and engineering through Western's Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies. Miedema, who grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, is a member of the Blackfeet Nation whose family is originally from Browning, Montana. In this conversation, Frank talks about his connection to his culture and his experience as a student-athlete at WWU.

This is the first of three profiles of Indigenous student-athletes written by Brandon Joseph in support of honoring Native American Heritage Month at Western. Joseph is the director of Student Resilience for Counseling, Health, and Wellness and the NCAA Diversity and Inclusion Designee for Athletics at WWU. As a Koyukon Athabascan and Muscogee Creek scholar and practitioner, one of Brandon’s focus areas is the historical aspects of Indigeneity and sport, particularly in lacrosse, as well as the experiences of contemporary collegiate Native athletes, and sport as a way to facilitate culture and wellbeing.

Brandon: Why did you choose to major in Critical Indigenous Studies?

Frank: I knew that I wanted to go into federal Indian law, long term. Having that goal, I learned there wasn't really anything on main campus with that emphasis. So, I switched over to Fairhaven College so I could direct my own study. I'm somebody that is self-driven in that way. So, I felt confident that I could make that work. And I want to be able to either work for my tribe or other tribes. I'm really interested about land-use law and how federal Indian law and federal law kind of interact with each other to affect people and affect land use.

What interests you about Federal Indian law or excites you about going into that field?

My culture, obviously. And I've always been a politically driven person, and I know that law is a big thing to get your foot in the door with politics. Academically, federal Indian law is interesting because there is a whole different set of laws that are affecting a huge amount of land and people in this country. And so regardless of the cultural importance of it, the fact that there's these laws that are different than the other set of laws that are affecting my people, I think that's super interesting. You know, even outside of the fact that it's affecting my family and me.

When do you first remember falling in love with soccer?

My first memory of soccer was probably the 2010 World Cup final. My dad is Dutch and Native. So his dad is an immigrant from the Netherlands and his mom is Blackfeet. Soccer was a big deal in his life because his dad coached him all throughout his life and my dad coached me throughout my life. The 2010 World Cup final, if you know anything about it, it was the Netherlands and Spain. I remember being at my grandparents’ house and you could hear all these crazy horns coming from the stadium. Super, super loud and you could barely hear the commentators. I had my grandpa's big orange polo on. It was the only thing I had that was orange. It was just a crazy game, totally a heartbreaker and the Netherlands ended up losing in the last 2 minutes or something. So, I guess my first memory of soccer was kind of heartbreaking a little bit, but I just remember being so excited and I had just started playing.

What are your early memories of youth soccer?

My first memory of playing soccer was rec league and I remember my dad coaching me. There's no goalies when you're that young and we were so bad. We were terrible. We didn't win a single game that year and I don't even know if we scored a single goal. There was this one game where I was so fed up with how bad we were doing that I took the ball and scored on our own net because I just wanted to score. I didn’t even care.

I started to get serious in probably 7th grade or so. I started playing in a local club team and I started getting moved up an age group. And then I did this thing at the Regional Training Center, you would basically play for your county and then you move up and play for your state team. My first year in 7th grade, I made it into the RTC pool. That was the first time I really had to do like tryouts and everything. So that first year I made the state team which was cool. That's when it started to get kind of serious. I started playing with guys who were better than me and it was hard trainings, coaches were serious about it. And then from there I went into my freshman year at Corvallis High School, made it to varsity, and it kind of just took off from there. We won the state championship my freshman year.

You were able to play soccer in Barcelona, Spain for some time…How did that opportunity come about? What was the experience like for you?

My 8th grade year, I took a trip to Europe and got to be in a soccer camp. It was just a camp to have fun but there ended up being some recruiting out of that camp and that's how I ended up playing in Spain my sophomore year. I was in Barcelona for Club Captiva. It was different. It was crazy. I was 16. I was really excited. I knew it was the thing that I wanted. I've been wanting and dreaming about it forever, going to Europe and playing in an academy. It wasn't a super high-level academy. But, it was amazing. I spoke Spanish before but my Spanish got way better. I became totally fluent and made some lifelong friends. I also played a completely different position. I moved from striker to center back. I played center back the whole time I was there and I was dead set on becoming center back for the rest of my career. And then that ended up not being the case at all (laughing). But just the whole culture and experience, it was so fun.

At what point did you realize soccer could get you to college?

Interestingly enough, when I was in Spain I realized I don't want to be a professional soccer player. I had that realization. It was more so an education thing. I knew a lot of really good players, guys who are still playing semiprofessional today, and they're getting by. And they were on a different level than me, but they were probably not going to make it. The chance of making it (professional) is so low. And so what I realized is that first, these guys probably weren't going to get a college education; and second, they probably weren't going to make it professionally. So, I wanted to go the college route. I wanted to get an education, but I knew that I wasn't going to stop wanting to play soccer yet. I wanted to keep going and college was going to be that path for me.

How did you choose WWU?

My mom got her master's degree here. I was actually born in Mount Vernon. The first two years of my life was right around this area and my sisters actually went to the preschool at Western while my mom got her MBA. So the school was on my radar. I knew Bellingham was a cool area. And I have a ton of family around here over in Everett, Blaine, and Seattle. So I really wanted to come back home to be close to family. That was a big thing. I was pretty much exclusively talking to the schools on the West Coast. And I knew I was going to have a better chance of playing and getting scholarships if I went the Division II route.

How would you describe how your Indigenous identity impacts your experience as a student-athlete at WWU?

What I connect with to being Indigenous for me is hunting more than anything. It's being able to visit family back in Montana. It's being with my family just in general. And then my academics. My academics are far more connected to the fact that I'm Indigenous than athletics are or sport is. And I don't really know how I would bridge that gap, honestly. And especially with soccer too, because it's such a foreign sport. It's such a different sport. It's not lacrosse. It's not something like basketball that is such a big deal in Native communities. So I think in a lot of ways it's something I use as a way to maybe connect to my Dutch side more.

But, there’s also pressure for me because I want to be able to perform and I want to be able to show that Native athletes can do it at the college level. We play Billings every year, and I feel pressure on myself at that match because I have family that can make it to that game. And because it's not a sport that attracts a lot of Native people. I'm financially lucky that we're comfortable. We're in a good spot and there's a lot of investment in soccer. There's traveling, there's tournament teams. It's not always an easy sport to pick up financially. So I feel pressure to be able to have my family watch me and be proud of me, I guess. And I know they're always proud of me. But it's still something always in the back of my head for sure.

Last year you hosted a youth soccer camp in partnership with the Lummi Nation Boys and Girls Club. What made you want to do that? What was that experience like and what did it mean to you?

It was super cool. Even though I'm not Indigenous to here, meeting other Indigenous people, meeting Indigenous youth, you always have something more to connect about. I was surprised by how many kids were so excited about soccer. It was really awesome. It came together super quick and we got about 20 kids out there and they were super excited. We got them playing games, playing against each other. Most of them already had some kind of basic idea of how to play. I was really trying to represent that Native athletes can make it into the college game, particularly to get that education. Trying to show them, hey, I'm a Native person that's not only going to college, which I think is too rare. But, I'm a Native college athlete too, you know? So that was really, really special. And probably one of the things I'm most proud about having done here as a student-athlete.

Talk about your journey. You are in your third year. What has the journey been like as an athlete? What has kept you going?

Yeah, I think every single person that gets into college sports, like (in high school) they were 'The Guy.' They were the top person for their high school and club or one of the top people. Then when you get to college, you get humbled really quickly. I would say probably within the first practice I knew I wasn't going to play a single minute my freshman year. It was like, this is a different game, way quicker. 

Physicality was never much of an issue for me. I've won the beep test every single year. It's when you just run back and forth for as long as you possibly can. So, I've won that all three years. I've been at the top. So physically I knew that wasn't going to be an issue for me. But, the coordination, the speed, the agility, quick thinking, 1-2 touch, all of that stuff, it's at different levels. 

So I knew I wasn’t going to play my freshman year and I redshirted. Which is hard, because it's difficult to stay motivated when you literally know you're not going to play the game. So at that point, you're just thinking, how do I get these guys who are playing the games to be better? And how do I get them to be able to perform to their best come game day? Even though if you're a redshirt, you're still totally a part of the team. You're still making guys better. You're still getting the reps and you're still improving drastically. I’ve improved an incredible amount. It was just that, you know, you're not going to suit up.

Last year was difficult, because I played a little bit, but not as much as I would have liked to and some of that was due to injury struggles, but a lot was I just don't think I was ready yet. And it's especially hard to come back to try and get into games when you haven't played in over a year, you haven't stepped on the field, you haven't gotten used to that kind of adrenaline. I would say the adrenaline of playing after coming off a redshirt season was like bar none. I remember having feelings in my legs where I literally didn't feel like I could run after 5 minutes because I had warmed up so hard, sprinting back and forth, hyping myself up. And I would say the second year I really realized I had to calm down a lot. Because I'm super competitive and that's normal. But trying to learn how to rein that in was difficult. 

My third year has been really different. I've been available and I've been playing, I've been getting minutes and I think it really comes down to the fact that I took a whole different approach because what I realized is like high school, club, whatever, being the top guy I would hype myself up, get myself ready, listen to whatever music and get ready. And then I was taking that same approach despite the fact that I had changed drastically as a person and was in a completely different environment. So now I listen to calm music before games. Now I try to dance a little bit and have some fun before games.

Growing up in Oregon, but knowing your Blackfeet family is from Montana, what was your connection to Browning and how do you stay connected to your Blackfeet culture?

The last person in my direct family to have lived on the reservation was actually my great grandma. She moved off reservation basically during that elimination era, when Natives were getting encouraged to move off reservation and go into these industrial cities. 

At one point, there were actually more Blackfeet in Seattle than in Browning. There was that big of a diaspora. It was one of the bigger cities that was semi-close to Browning. And so, there was a lot of encouragement to get Natives off the reservation, to move there. My Grandma Jenny, my dad's mom, was born. At that point there was already kind of a big encouragement to kind of stifle this feeling of being Native, of Indigeneity. And my grandma, she had a white father too. And I think that kind of played a role into it too.

It wasn't really until later in my grandma Jenny's life, and a little bit later in some other family members life that they started to feel comfortable expressing their Indigeneity. Probably not until my grandma Jenny was in her 50s or 60s, that she kind of realizes this thing about herself. She started reading about it, learning the history of it and the history of our family, more so than anything, and started making connections back in Montana and started going back there regularly and meeting with everything. And we also had a lot of other family members that had moved to Tulalip. So a lot of them moved to the Tulalip reservation and my grandma Jenny and my dad actually grew up in Marysville, which is one of those reservation border towns.

So my dad started hunting when he was in about his mid 20s or so, once he started to have kids. And he kind of was like, 'OK, I want to be able to provide meat for my kids,' and it was actually my grandpa on my mom's side, who taught him how to hunt. And then my grandma Jenny learned and thought he should go learn how to hunt back in Montana because he has hunting rights. And so every year he started going out and meeting with my family out there to go hunt. You know, cousins and people who I’m really close with now, but really didn't make that connection until he started hunting with them. And now I go back there with him too, because I also have hunting rights. 

That's really how I started to get connected and how my family started having to do what a lot of Native families have to do who have had this part about them suppressed …You kind of have to re-find it in a lot of ways and do that active effort. And for us that active effort of reconnecting has been through food and through hunting.

For the previous two years you have been a part of the planning team that has helped revitalize the Native American Student Union Spring Powwow. How important is that to you? Why does that matter?

I would say more so than anything academically more than anything athletically, the powwow is the thing I am the most proud of that I've done in college. Bringing this group of Indigenous people and community onto campus and being able to express ourselves this way is the most powerful show of resistance, resilience, and expression. It's the most powerful show of healing. So, being able to make a space and an event that empowers Native people, has been incredible. Being able to teach people and bring volunteers into the fold who aren't Native has also been really cool. I've had teammates, and being able to inform them and teach them about these things and they're genuinely curious and want to know and want to help; it's the coolest thing. It's just the coolest project that I have done.

What does Native American Heritage Month mean to you specifically as a member of the soccer team? And where do you see opportunities for WWU Athletics to continue to grow their relationships with Native communities?

It's corny, but every month is Native American Heritage Month for me. It's really cool that athletics is empowering these Native voices that are a part of their community. Being able to have more outreach to local Native communities like Lummi (Nation) would be really great. I did that soccer camp, but I didn't have any funding or anything. 

My coach did help me a lot with setting up that camp and gave me advice on how to run broad ages and what kind of drills would work. But I think that athletics could do a lot more with reaching out to Lummi Nation School, reaching out to Nooksack and running camps and doing youth outreach to encourage the idea of going to college into kids’ heads at an early age. 

Because a lot of kids don't even have college on their radar. I think for a lot of kids, it's elementary school, middle school, high school, and then there's a big question mark. And not to say college is always the answer, but at least having a plan or something like that. Some kind of post-secondary education. And I think athletics are an amazing way to encourage that, and at least get kids to think about it for a long time. And so if we have something like Native American Heritage Month, having like two camps or something where either you have one camp where you go to their school and another camp where you bring them to campus and show them around. To show them the amazing halls and labs we have and all these other cool aspects of college outside of sports. 

I think that would be a lot more impactful than people realize.