Some members of Gardipe’s family; back row, from left, Trey (George III), George himself, wife Lisa, and Alan; in front, Jasper and Daysia.
George Gardipe ’94 woke up in a hospital room in Oklahoma in late January, where one of the physician’s assistants said that she had just seen his brain.
“It was beautiful,” she said. Gardipe had to chuckle.
Days earlier, his wife had rushed him to the emergency room after he’d complained of “massive” headaches, dizziness, and fatigue. A CT scan revealed that his brain had shifted 14 millimeters inside the skull, the result of a calamitous car accident he’d been in the month before. A midline brain shift of 5 millimeters or more is considered significant; 14 is, well, unheard of. They rushed Gardipe, 47, to OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City had placed him on an operating table for brain surgery within an hour.
The son of two members of the Pawnee Nation in north-central Oklahoma, Gardipe had no expectations other than living and working in Pawnee. His father worked construction, and when Gardipe was 12, he asked if he could apprentice on his dad’s jobs. He told him no. He wanted Gardipe to get an education.
One day, an older couple came to town who said they represented the Dr. Lillie Rosa Minoka Hill Fund, an initiative to help Native Americans attain scholarships to elite college preparatory schools around the country. Gardipe took the PSAT and filled out a universal application.
Taft was a “culture shock,” Gardipe says, but playing on the football team helped him assimilate with his new classmates. “One of my best friends [on the football team] was a Puerto Rican [student] from the Bronx,” he says. “To that point in my life, the only people I’d ever known were either Mexican, white, or Indian.”
“It was so different,” he says, “but I wouldn’t change anything.”
Gardipe went on to attend Dartmouth College, but he never had any intention of living anywhere but the Oklahoma plains. He returned home to follow in his father’s footsteps in carpentry and construction—but with an education and worldliness that was uncommon for kids on the reservation at that time. He dedicated himself to trying to rectify that for the Pawnee people, who number around 3,600 today.
The grand opening of Pawnee Power, a meal replacement and energy tea shop, in Pawnee, Oklahoma, in May 2022.
Gardipe was elected secretary of the Pawnee Business Council in 2021 and chairs or sits on several other economic and housing commissions, both within the tribe and the city of Pawnee, Oklahoma. One of his biggest endeavors is bridging the divide between the tribal community and the surrounding county.
“The town is named after us, but there’s this green bridge that separates the tribe from the city,” Gardipe says. “I’m trying to let our children know that there’s more beyond the tribal lands—this is our town. And vice versa. There’s older people that have never been across that bridge.”
Gardipe was instrumental in forging a first-of-its-kind agreement between the Pawnee Nation and Canoo, an electric-vehicle manufacturer, to connect Pawnee students to internships and jobs in clean-energy fields and perhaps even produce Canoo vehicles in Oklahoma.
Last year, Gardipe also helped Pawnee Nation secure a $2 million grant from the Biden administration to repurpose abandoned oil wells into plants for geothermal energy.
“It’s a movement we want to be in right now,” Gardipe says. “Anything that’s an alternative to using fossil fuels. Our tribe, as a people, we want to see that.”
Gardipe’s “bonus daughter” Caitlyn, Alan, Daysia, Trey, and oldest daughter Jaden.
Gardipe said he took Taft’s Non ut sibi mantra to heart for his community. And this life of dedication boomeranged back when he was lying in a recovery room in Oklahoma City, and the outpouring of calls, texts, and letters came in from his tribe 90 miles north.
Initially, there was shock over what had happened and the slow-moving events that transpired. The accident, in which Gardipe was a passenger in a car that got rear-ended and spun into oncoming traffic, occurred on December 1, but he was released with the hospital with only sore ribs and a hazy memory. “I don’t remember hitting my head,” he says. “All I remember is the white dust from the airbags.”
It wasn’t until six weeks later that the headaches and dizziness set in from a brain bleed that nearly cost him his life. He was rescued in the nick of time. And this spring, he was back laying tile for new home constructions and finding new ways to set his tribe up for the future.
“I feel like I was saved for a reason,” Gardipe says.