Cavalieri first in Kootenai Tribe to earn doctorate

By LYNN BERK

Hagadone News Network

A long time ago, a teacher at an elementary school here looked at Consuelo Cavalieri and saw something she didn't see herself.

"I had a teacher in sixth grade who noticed my academic potential and I thought I could do better than what I was doing," says Cavalieri, now 35 and the first person in the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho to earn a doctorate.

"He could see something beyond what I could see in my grades, and from that point on, I felt pretty fired up. Once I started getting Bs, then As, I could see that putting in the effort got me some pretty good results."

Bonners Ferry teacher George Hays, she says, "had a profound effect on me."

So did her family — her mother, her aunt and her uncle, and, by extension, the Tribe. Even though there was very little money in the home coffers, her family did their best to keep that from dimming Cavalieri's dreams.

"I remember once I needed $5 for a field trip meal, and my family had trouble coming up with that," Cavalieri says. "And in high school, I briefly fantasized about being a music major. That worried my family a little bit."

But, she says, "They've always been supportive. They never set limits on what I could do and if I wanted to go to college, we would find a way."

She spent 16 years earning three degrees — a bachelor's in psychology and a master's in counseling and human services from the University of Idaho in Moscow, and then her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.

"I slowed down a little bit at the end," she admits. "When I finished my dissertation, I spent a week at the beach. Now I'm writing a paper for an academic journal."

But the fact that she now has a Ph.D. in counseling psychology is still a little dream-like for Cavalieri, who hopes someday to return and teach at the college-level somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

"I guess I'm a little bit in denial," she says. "I haven't got the degree in the mail yet, so it hasn't quite hit me yet."

Except for that brief interlude in high school when she harbored notions of a career in music, Cavalieri has longed to be part of "academia," to leave her own imprint in those hallowed halls of ivy.

"When I was young, I used to pretend to have little classrooms," she says. "I was always into pens and pencils and papers. The intellectual process always interested me."

So did Wisconsin.

"The university looked interesting to me because their customs are a little different, there's a diverse group of students, and it's a really good school," she says. "It's a good place to grow intellectually."

That's where she discovered that people in the Midwest somehow equate their winters with those of Idaho.

They're not even close, says Cavalieri, who cheerfully admits she nearly froze all of her body parts off before she even began to acclimate.

"It took me about a year before I really knew what layers to put on, and it took me five or six years before I wasn't scared of winter coming," says Cavalieri who now lives in Minneapolis with her husband of 15 years, Rick, a computer scientist.

She says she decided to study psychology and counseling and human services as a way of understanding her own heritage. Somewhere along the way, she got hooked on the human psyche.

"I discovered as I went along that what truly fascinates me is the way people interact with each other," Cavalieri says. "Being a member of the Tribe, I grew up knowing there was something a little different about me from my peers. I was going (back and forth) between two cultures.

"I decided I wanted to understand more about group cultures and how people who are different come together."

But while she is the first member of the Tribe to earn a doctorate, by the time she reached that level, she'd already fulfilled her own family's hopes.

"I didn't feel pressure from my family over the doctorate," she says. "That was something I had chosen. There was more pressure from earning the bachelor's and the master's in my family, because that was territory that was really new."

Her husband was there for her through it all. But what also kept her going, she said, "was the fact that the topic is so fascinating. It's something that keeps me fresh."

She also knows she's now a role model for all the doctorates yet-to-be in the Kootenai County Tribe.

"I really hope the young people in my Tribe will realize there's a lot of opportunity out there, even if it's not academia," Cavalieri says. "You don't have to set your limits. I hope what I did allows people to dream. I hope it lets them pursue the things that make them happy."

Since her husband is now working, Cavalieri is limiting her job search for the moment in the Minneapolis area.

"But it would be nice to end up back in the Northwest," she says. "I miss the mountains; it's terrible how much I miss the mountains."