Emily Manzo: Leading with purpose and vision

When Emily Manzo walks across the stage on May 7 as a UIC graduate, she will be the first in her family to don a university cap and gown.

But Manzo said she is not done learning. She’s not done helping. And she’s not done leading at UIC.

The urban education senior in the College of Education who has been a student leader in the Native American Support Program will return to campus in the fall to begin her PhD in math and science education. She still has work to do to help her community, she said.  

“I wanted to take my background, my education, and go back to the reservation where my people are from and just use what I’ve learned,” Manzo said, “because it’s a privilege to have an education and be able to spring that knowledge on to the youth.”

When she transferred to UIC three years ago from Harold Washington College, she was searching for a community of support. After discovering the Native American Support Program, she looked for ways to pitch in at the ground level. She asked if she could help make copies, distribute flyers and create awareness of the program’s impact on students.

“I think by default, I’ve always been a leader,” Manzo said. “Coming into UIC, I felt like I wanted to make the most out of my experience. That’s how I found the NASP office, and that kind of gave me my first real leadership opportunities here.”

It didn’t take long before she was encouraged to apply to be a student employee in the office. Once in, she led the charge to bring a powwow back to campus. It had been three years since the last campus powwow, and Manzo spearheaded marketing with flyer development and spreading the word on campus, and she secured help from the Native American community in Chicago.

She was already involved with the Chicago American Indian Community Collaborative, which helped with the UIC event. She is the most recent recipient of the organization’s Volunteer of the Year award for her dedication to lobbying with state legislators, volunteering at center events and dancing at other local powwows.

As an education major, she recently completed her student teaching at a middle school in Little Village and keeps her hand in all educational levels. She has also provided assistance to a Native doctoral student, including in research-related roles.

Manzo said it is important to her to be a voice for the Native American community, especially in higher education.

“Being able to work on projects or bring certain issues to the university or beyond the university, I think it’s important,” she said. “For me, being a student leader and a Native student leader just means being able to bring that visibility to everybody on campus, but also to leave that for future students, because we’re still here, and we’re going to keep coming.”

She said her doctoral studies will focus on decolonizing education — meaning she will focus on Indigenous knowledge to transform curriculum and teaching methods — bringing STEM concepts to students on reservations.  

“A lot of Native American kids are being brushed on the under the rug, and science is Indigenous,” she said. “We were here first, we planted the foundation for those to come and who came. Especially right now, science and environmental justice is threatened by the state of the world, so I feel like it’s important to go back to what started science, and we started science.”