When a dozen education leaders met in Alberta, Canada, in August 2002, they felt the familiar thrill of history being made. They had come to form a worldwide organization for indigenous higher education, and their excitement sustained them for 12-hour days etching the road map for a new organization. Despite differences in language, ethnicity, heritage, and birthplace, men and women joined their minds together and created the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC). Making history was familiar to many of them because decades earlier, they had given birth to indigenous post-secondary institutions and programs serving indigenous students in their own countries. They had endured the joys and frustrations of leading their institutions through their adolescence and in some cases, on into middle age when the excitement of making history had given way to the often mundane responsibilities of keeping their schools alive.