Community colleges have long provided students a gateway to greater economic opportunities, primarily through two pathways: completing two years of college courses while preparing to transfer to earn a four-year degree or career training that can lead to stable, well-paying positions. Eva L. Rivera Lebrón, a professor of mathematics at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPI) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, feels she also offers her students something more: a much-needed affirmation of Native American students' histories, values, identities, and cultures. When it comes to issues of culture, math as a discipline mostly goes unnoticed. Given that subjects in the humanities and social sciences more easily lend themselves to students' lived experiences, classes about equations and functions hardly seem to connect to values and identities. But at SIPI, they show students that these connections do in fact exist, and they ensure that they play a central role in Native students' education. In this article, she describes her experiences at SIPI and how she finds teaching math courses--and building relationships with her students rewarding.