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Cuts to National Endowment for the Humanities Hit Rural Montana, Other States Hard [1]
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Date: 2025-04-28
When Jill Baker’s email pinged late on a Wednesday night in early April, she had no idea that her role as the director for Humanities Montana was about to fundamentally change.
“I received the letter from DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] through the acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities at 10:25 pm on Wednesday, April 2. The letter was dated April 2, and our grant was terminated April 2, so there wasn’t even an opportunity to close out our grant and to be reimbursed for expenses that had happened prior to April 2,” Baker told the Daily Yonder in an interview.
Humanities Montana is one of 56 regional humanities organizations that bring humanities programs to underresourced communities including in rural areas. In 2024, over 17,000 people attended a Humanities Montana program, with more than half residing in a rural county.
Funding was cut to all 56 regional humanities organizations, as well as the national office in Washington, DC. State humanities across the country are scrambling to continue running their programs. In Alaska, a note on their program’s website states, “Late on the night of April 2, the Alaska Humanities Forum received a letter from DOGE officials informing them that their NEH operating grant approved by Congress had been illegally terminated effective immediately.” Wisconsin Humanities also has an announcement on its website, noting that “the loss of NEH funding will likely result in Wisconsin Humanities closing its doors soon.”
Humanities Montana has brought experts in history, journalism, and poetry to speak to rural Montanans who would otherwise struggle to access such programs. Through their Montana Conversations program, they also bring trained facilitators to lead workshops and conversations that strengthen community resilience.
“Our mission is to bring untold stories that can help bring people together and find the humanity in one another,” Baker said. “In this moment, that’s a real challenge in and of itself. My worry is that without the public humanities, our divides will grow, we’ll have less opportunities to gather together and have simple civic conversations, to learn from one another.”
Humanities Montana has received general operating support grants through the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for over 50 years. The NEH funding provided most of their operating budget; in 2023, the NEH made up 80.9% of their $1,011,229 budget.
The sudden cut in funding meant they had to cancel all scheduled programs for the year immediately. Like with most federal funding, Humanities Montana needed to spend the allocated money and then submit invoices to be reimbursed. The way their funding was cut meant that they will not be compensated for the funds they have already spent, and they won’t be able to allot any more money for programs going forward.
“We need to pivot pretty quickly to private fundraising, and that changes our business model completely. So we’re pausing those programs and making a plan to move forward in a different landscape,” Baker said.
On With the Program
One person who isn’t ready to pause is the current Montana Poet Laureate and award-winning Métis storyteller, Chris La Tray. He is committed to attending all the events he had been scheduled for through Humanities Montana and has since added even more, regardless of the organization’s ability to pay. He has been working to raise the money through private donations.
La Tray, an enrolled member of the Little Shell tribe of Chippewa Indians, wasn’t surprised by the funding cuts, even if he was angry about them.
“The way those grants work, it’s like what they learned writing treaties with Indian tribes; just because you say you’re going to do something doesn’t mean you have to. It’s a pretty cruel kind of bait and switch,” La Tray told the Daily Yonder.
A poet and the author of Becoming Little Shell, a memoir about his journey to embracing his Indigenous heritage, La Tray’s commitment to continuing his program is borne from seeing firsthand how important his work is, especially in rural areas.
“When I started working with Humanities, I said, let’s make the list of all the little places that nobody ever goes to, and let’s make going there a priority,” La Tray said.
Since announcing that he planned to continue his programming regardless of payment, La Tray has been working with schools and community centers to find alternative ways to fund his work, finding private donors who have offered to step in.
For La Tray, the work is just too important to stop. “There’s a little school just on the eastern edge of the Fort Belknap Reservation who asked me to come do the commencement address at their high school graduation, and there’s six graduating seniors,” he said. “They have eighth-grade and kindergarten graduates as part of this. It’s not even 20 kids, and it’s a nine-hour drive away from me. And they started asking, right as Humanities was collapsing, and how am I not going to do that, you know?”
With more than half his work taking place in rural Montana, La Tray and Bake believe these cuts will hit folks in rural areas the hardest.
“For example, one of the places that we have had speakers is Petroleum County, population 500 in the whole county. Humanities Montana speaker, Mary Jane Bradbury, did her program talking about the history of Nancy Russell, and 80 people showed up in a county that has 500 people. I just think that shows the power of the humanities to bring people together, to gather, to share the hunger to learn,” Baker said.
Samantha French, the director of the Blaine County Museum in Chinook, Montana, is worried about losing such a valuable resource for her community.
“It’s so affordable to go through the speakers bureau, it’s a $75 copay. Humanities Montana funded all of the speakers’ other expenses, their mileage, their lodging, and that’s not something that’s feasible to do for a lot of small museums,” French said.
The Blaine County Museum holds its speaker series in the winter as a way to build community during the dark months. French said that it brings people from all walks of life, and they typically have between 15 and 30 attendees on a weekday night, out of a population of 1,200.
That’s where Humanities Montana programs were just invaluable, because they appealed to a really broad breadth of age groups and kinds of people,” French said. Humanities Montana also gave the museum $500 to fund its book club, which brought people to the museum and library with which neither institution had previously interacted with. After the programming was finished, the books were turned into kits that can be borrowed by other libraries in the state.
French recognizes the effects losing this program will have on Chinook and other rural Montanans. “There’s already so little here, and unfortunately, with the nature of these federal cutbacks, it really does impact the people who are the most disadvantaged,” she said.
“Rural people in rural communities are disadvantaged. We really have very few resources. We have very little access to transportation, healthcare, and healthy food. We truly need what was there. So yeah, it makes a big impact.”
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