A decade after college, 1L and 2026 Nash Scholar Lauren Drennan’s strong ties to her Indigenous community led her to pivot in her career path.
Growing up on the Colorado River Indian Tribal (CRIT) lands in rural Arizona, Drennan had always planned to go into agriculture, even choosing a STEM path for her undergrad studies at the University of Arizona. A self-proclaimed “farm kid,” Drennan had participated in 4-H as a child and raised animals on her family’s property.
But returning home to her tribe through internships while earning her degree convinced her there was another path for her. The internships centered around community programs in areas such as environmental preservation and restoration.
“That’s where I found my passion, working for my community in these outreach programs,” Drennan said. “Those tribal internships saved me because getting to connect back to my home and finding that thing that made me happy felt like it clicked.”
Drennan’s hometown of Parker is small and tight-knit, with many of the other residents numbering among her relatives.
“The services I worked for were for community and my family,” she said, crediting her mentors in the region with instilling a sense of civic-mindedness within her.
She went on to spend 10 years after her undergrad and graduate studies at the CRIT Department of Health and Social Services, which provides a variety of tribal programs ranging from mental health to senior support to child protective services. Drennan held a variety of roles in that time, including interim director, deputy director, coordinator, grant writer, budget specialist, and even HR staffer.
“Over time, everything that I worked in, every program, working with the community, I saw that the law was always in the backdrop of everything we did. I got used to that,” she said. “I saw the influence that our legal team had with our services, our government, just everything. It really encouraged me and motivated me to work toward that.”
After determining that she wanted to go to law school, Drennan set her sights on Seattle University School of Law because of the warm welcome she got from the Admissions Team and the opportunities within the Northwest Center for Indigenous Law (NCIL), especially against a backdrop of nearly 30 tribes in Washington.
Drennan has already signed up for the Native American Law Students Association (NALSA) and is interested in completing the Indigenous Law Certificate, which is earned through taking a mix of Indigenous law classes and experiential learning opportunities.
While Drennan is keeping all of her career options open, she right now is leaning toward becoming in-house counsel for a tribe. She dreams of working for a variety of tribes and then one day returning home to her own tribe in Arizona, bringing with her all the lessons and experience she will have gained during and after law school.
“My work in tribal programs showed me how much representation matters whenever decisions are made that affect Indian Country,” Drennan said. “That’s why I’m pursuing law. We need more representation in those spaces since those decisions directly affect our communities.”