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Trump Is Taking a Wrecking Ball to Indigenous Education [1]

['Connor Arakaki', 'Jeet Heer', 'Chris Lehmann', 'Elie Mystal', 'John Nichols', 'Rachel Jones', 'Dr. Jamila Perritt', 'Dave Zirin', 'Paola Mendoza', 'Kate Wagner']

Date: 2025-05-07 09:00:00+00:00

Society / StudentNation / Trump Is Taking a Wrecking Ball to Indigenous Education After mass layoffs and scholarship freezes, students and tribal leaders are suing the Trump administration for violating treaty obligations.

(Saul Loeb / Getty)

This story was produced for StudentNation, a program of the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism , which is dedicated to highlighting the best of student journalism. For more Student Nation, check out our archive or learn more about the program here . StudentNation is made possible through generous funding from The Puffin Foundation . If you’re a student and you have an article idea, please send pitches and questions to [email protected] .

On Valentine’s Day, Kaiya Brown was in class at her local tribal college, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when she learned that 20 of her school’s faculty and staff members had been laid off. They were given two hours to clear out their offices. By the time they left campus, their work had been wiped from federal servers. “When we came back after the long weekend,” Brown said, “there wasn’t a single class where someone wasn’t crying.”

Brown, a 19-year-old freshman from the Navajo Nation, picked SIPI because she wanted to be surrounded by other Native students and educators who understood her. “These aren’t just people. These are our family members,” she said. But in the aftermath of the layoffs, many basic support systems of her college disappeared: tutoring programs ended, financial aid disbursements were delayed, and students were unsure if their classes would resume. For those relying on financial aid, it wasn’t clear if they could afford their next semester of school—or even food and rent.

In the weeks that followed, Brown became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Indian Education. The case is part of a broader legal effort led by Native students and tribal leaders represented by the Native American Rights Fund to stop the Trump administration’s sweeping federal cuts to Indigenous education. At tribal colleges across the country, students are confronting the consequences of these rollbacks: sudden staff layoffs, frozen scholarships, or the looming loss of tuition waivers.

Across the United States, 35 accredited Tribal Colleges and Universities serve more than 22,000 students across 15 states, primarily in rural and low-income areas. Most TCUs operate as two-year colleges, chartered by either federal agencies—such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs—or respective tribal governments, functioning as both educational institutions and cultural centers. Today, many TCUs rely on federal funding to provide financial aid for Native students.

Jermaine Bell, a 43-year-old enrolled member of the Wind Reservation in Wyoming, began college at the United Tribal Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota last year. He’s a recipient of a Native American Tuition Waiver, a full-ride scholarship to earn his associate degree in Indigenous leadership. With President Trump’s slew of federal funding cuts to the agencies that support Indigenous higher education, the waiver is at risk, and Bell’s goal of becoming a tribal liaison—a Department of Interior official responsible for managing government-to-government relationships with the 574 federally recognized tribes across the United States—could become much more difficult.

Over the past 100 days in office, the Trump administration has taken a wrecking ball to Indigenous education, with tribal colleges taking the largest hits. On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded Biden’s Executive Order 14049, which staffed an Education Department office to increase funding for TCUs. Less than a month later, the administration announced layoffs of hundreds of thousands of probationary federal employees across the US—an estimated 3,500 of whom serve Indian Country. These layoffs included 950 employees in the Indian Health Service, 2,600 workers at the Department of the Interior, 118 from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and nearly half of the Office of Tribal Justice within the Department of Justice—which resulted in a quarter of the faculty both at Haskell Indian Nations University and SIPI to be laid off.

The North Dakota Tribal College System, which encompasses five tribal colleges and 650 employees, was completing the final stages to receive a grant from the National Science Foundation in January that would have allowed the system to double its system’s office staff. That funding is on hold.

Noelle Dauphinias, a member of the Spirit Lake Reservation in North Dakota and senior majoring in early education studies at Cankdeska Cikana Community College, receives financial aid from the Tribal Colleges and Universities Head Start Partnership Program, funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services. Over the last five years, the Head Start Partnership Program has funded $8 million across 20 TCUs to increase education degrees among American Indian and Alaskan Natives. As the Trump administration suspends scholarship grants from other Native scholarship programs, Dauphinias wonders whether her scholarship program could be next.

Though she graduates this spring, Dauphinias expressed concern for underclassmen just entering the program. According to Partnership with Native Americans, just 17 percent of Native youth can continue their education beyond high school. “If that funding is not going to be there for them, what are they going to do?” Dauphinias asked. “How are they going to pay for their education?”

At Bell’s college, around 65 percent of the student body are first-generation university students and 68 percent are low-income. “I need my tribal education to continue to be this tribal political leader I wanted to be,” Bell said. “Now I have to go and figure out how to pay for school, when this tuition was so huge—that’s why I came to school.”

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/trump-indigenous-education-cuts-tribal-colleges/

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