Leech Lake Tribal College celebrates new leadership before start of semester
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After months of searching to fill the role of president at Leech Lake Tribal College, school leadership announced in June that Erin Stresow would take on the role.
Leech Lake Tribal College is a two-year institution that offers transfer, career and technical degrees. Its mission is to provide higher education grounded in Anishinaabe values and culture. The school is in Cass Lake within the boundaries of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota.
An investiture ceremony was held on Monday evening to formally celebrate Stresow taking over the position, which had been held by interim president Stacy Lyon. Stresow started work at the college in early July.
“[I] just felt so welcomed from the moment that I stepped on this campus,” she said.
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Stresow earned a doctorate in business administration and previously served as executive director of Equitable Student Success at the Community College of Aurora in Colorado and as senior director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Colorado State University Pueblo.
She has nearly two decades of experience, including roles in higher education, tribal nations, nonprofits and corporate ventures.
Despite being from Colorado, this isn’t her first time in Minnesota. She previously taught at Lake Superior College in Duluth and Pine Technical and Community College in Pine City.
Stresow has also worked in human resources for Mille Lacs Corporate Ventures and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe. She says working with the tribal nation led her on a pathway to learning more about Native American-serving institutions like tribal colleges and universities, or TCUs.
“I started to become more familiar with the institutions, and I started following them more closely,” she said. Within her first month at Leech Lake Tribal College, Stresow attended the 2026 Summer TCU Conference at Salish Kootenai College in Montana.
In her role, she will focus on the school's mission of culturally grounded higher education and implementing workforce development opportunities.
“Some that would be possibilities for LLTC is home health aides, welding technology, automotive mechanics,” Stresow said.
Stresow says school leadership is looking into grant-funded opportunities to expand its programming.
Alongside the tribal college's mission, Stresow emphasizes the school's work on Indigenous data sovereignty and hopes to expand leadership in the area. The term “data sovereignty” refers to the idea that tribal nations have a right to govern, own and control how information is shared about their communities.
“It's about our Indigenous communities being able to have a say and control over the data that gets collected about the population and how it gets used,” she said.
Leech Lake Tribal College will begin its fall semester next week.
“I'm humbled, honored and privileged to be invited into this role,” Stresow said. “I'm just really excited to start doing all of this amazing work that we already do and continue to do.”
Chandra Colvin covers Native American communities in Minnesota for MPR News via Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues and communities.
