White House budget request slashes funding for tribal colleges and universities

In President Donald Trump’s budget request, he’s proposing slashing funding for tribal colleges and universities, including eliminating support for the country’s only federally funded college for contemporary Native American arts.

If the budget is approved by Congress, beginning in October, the more than $13 million in annual appropriations for the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, would be reduced to zero. It would be the first time in nearly 40 years that the congressionally chartered school would not receive federal support, said Robert Martin, the school’s president.

“You can’t wipe out 63 years of our history and what we’ve accomplished with one budget,” Martin said on Friday. “I just can’t understand or comprehend why they would do something like this.”

The college, founded in 1962, has provided affordable education to thousands of Native artists and culture bearers, including U.S. poet laureate Joy Harjo, painter T.C. Cannon and bestselling novelist Tommy Orange. It’s the only four-year degree fine arts institution in the world devoted to contemporary Native American and Alaskan Native arts, according to its website.

Martin said he has spoken with members of Congress from both major political parties who have assured him they’ll work to keep the institute’s budget level for the next fiscal year, but he worries the morale of students and staff will be affected. Martin said he also spoke with staff in the office of U.S. Rep. Tom Cole, a member of the Chickasaw Nation and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Cole, a Republican and former member of IAIA’s board of trustees and a longtime advocate in Congress for funding that supports tribal citizens, was unavailable for comment.

Breana Brave Heart, a junior studying arts and business, said the proposal shocked her and made her wonder: “Will I be able to continue my education at IAIA with these budget cuts?” Brave Heart said she started organizing with other students to contact members of Congress. “IAIA is under attack,” she said, “and I need other students to know this.”

Martin said that amid the Republican Trump administration’s crackdown on federal policies and funding that support diversity, equity and inclusion, trust responsibilities and treaty rights owed to tribal nations have also come under attack.

“It’s a problem for us and many other organizations when you’ve got that DEI initiative which really is not applicable to us, because we’re not a racial category, we’re a political status as a result of the treaties,” he said. “We’re easily identified as what this administration might refer to as a ‘woke’.”

Democratic Sen. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico said the cuts are another example of the Trump administration “turning its back on Native communities and breaking our trust responsibilities.”

“As a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, I remain committed to keeping IAIA fully funded and will continue working with appropriators and the New Mexico Congressional Delegation to ensure its future,” Luján said in a statement to The Associated Press.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The congressional budget bill includes roughly $3.75 trillion in tax cuts, extending the expiring 2017 individual income tax breaks and temporarily adding new ones that Trump campaigned on. The revenue loss would be partially offset by nearly $1.3 trillion in reduced federal spending elsewhere, namely through Medicaid and food assistance.

A Jan. 30 order from the Interior Department titled “Ending DEI Programs and Gender Ideology Extremism” stated that any efforts to eradicate diversity, equity and inclusion in the department’s policy should exclude trust obligations to tribal nations.

However, earlier this year, several staff members at the other two congressionally chartered schools in the country — the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas — were laid off as part of Trump’s push to downsize the federal workforce. In a lawsuit filed in March, both institutions reported that some staff and faculty were rehired, but the Bureau of Indian Education notified those people that might be temporary and they may be laid off again.

“It shows what a president’s values and priorities are, and that’s been hard,” said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, an organization that represents more than 30 Tribal Colleges and Universities. “That’s been hard for our staff, our students, our faculty to see that the priority of the administration through the Department of Interior might not be on tribal colleges.”

In its budget request this year, the Interior Department is proposing reducing funding to the BIE’s post secondary programs by more than 80%, and that would have a devastating affect on tribal colleges and universities, or TCUs, which rely on the federal government for most of their funding, said Rose. Most TCUs offer tribal citizens a tuition-free higher education, she said, and funding them is a moral and fiduciary responsibility the federal government owes tribal nations.

In the many treaties the U.S. signed with tribal nations, it outlined several rights owed to them — like land rights, health care and education through departments established later, like the BIE. Trust responsibilities are the legal and moral obligations the U.S. has to protect and uphold those rights.

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.