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On a recent cool autumn morning, Ruth de la Cruz walked through the Four Sisters Garden, looking for Hidatsa squash. For college students in her food sovereignty program, harvest can be an assignment. But to him, it is the literal fruit of his ancestors’ labor.
“There’s some squash in there, yes,” de la Cruz said as she watched the small, pumpkin-like gourds catch the morning sun.
De la Cruz said the garden is named for the Hidatsa practice of growing squash, corn, sunflowers and beans — the four sisters — together. The program is part of Nueta Hidatsa Sawhney College, which is operated by the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation.
It is one of more than three dozen tribal colleges and universities across the country that the Trump administration proposed cutting funding to earlier this year. Tribal citizens are among the communities bearing the brunt of deep cuts in federal spending and the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.
The increase in funding for tribal colleges and universities announced before the shutdown was welcome news, but college leaders remain uneasy about the government’s financial commitments. Those federal dollars are part of some of the oldest legal obligations in the country, and tribal college and university (TCU) presidents and Native education advocates worry they could be further eroded, threatening the passing of Indigenous knowledge to new generations.
“It is not only a haven of access to higher education, but also a place where you get a level of cultural, tribal specific education,” de la Cruz said.
America is committed to Native education
When the US took tribal nations’ lands and resources to build the country, it promised through treaties, laws, and other acts Congress That it will maintain the health, education and safety of indigenous people. Those fiduciary commitments are known today as trust responsibilities.
“We prepaid for all of this,” said college President Twyla Baker.
The United States may have deliberately and violently disrupted indigenous knowledge and lifestyle, Baker said, but their ancestors forced the government to promise to protect them for future generations. Those legal and ethical obligations must be respected, he said.
Baker said, “They kept our languages under their tongues. They kept them close to their hearts. They carried these knowledge systems with them and protected them to bring them to us. So I feel like I have a responsibility to do the same.”
Today, the education pillar of the Trust’s responsibilities takes many forms, such as hundreds of elementary schools on reservations funded by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education and funding that pays for the Native history and language classes taught at TCU.
President Donald Trump’s federal budget proposal was set to reduce that funding by 90%. But in September the U.S. Department of Education announced that TCU would receive an increase of more than 100%. While this decision was welcomed by many, those new federal dollars came at the expense of other institutions where many native students attend, such as Hispanic-serving institutions.
The education of Native students outside of TCU is also part of those trust and treaty rights, said Ahnivek Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which advocates for TCU.
uncertain funding outlook
Rose said the increase in Education Department funding coincides with reductions in several areas of the federal government that provide significant grants to TCU, such as the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In 1994, Congress passed a bill designating tribal colleges as land-grant institutions, which opened them up to new sources of federal funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But unlike other land grant universities CornellWhile Purdue and Clemson are still sustained by the profits from undivided tribal lands, TCU does not share in those billions of dollars. Instead they rely on grants from federal agencies that support land-grant universities.
However, that has also become more difficult, Rose said. Tribal liaisons in some of those federal departments who ensure they are complying with their fiduciary responsibilities have been removed or furloughed, he said, and many of those positions are vacant.
“We’re still under a lot of stress,” Rose said. “I don’t want people to think because we’ve had such an increase in funding that everything is OK, because it’s still uncertain.”
That kind of uncertainty makes budgeting difficult, said Leander McDonald, president of United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota. This, coupled with the current pressure to cut the federal workforce, forces him and other TCU presidents to consider decisions about creating education programs and hiring staff.
“How long will the storm last?” McDonald said. “I think that’s the part that’s unknown to us.”
Presidents like McDonald and Baker spend a lot of their time on the road, traveling to Washington, D.C., to make the case for both the value added by TCUs and the government’s responsibility to maintain them. An American Indian Higher Education Consortium report released in September found that TCU generated an additional $3.8 billion in 2023 to the national economy in the form of increased student and business revenues and social savings related to health, justice and income support.
schools Help preserve traditions
In addition to the opportunities that higher education provides, there is an added incentive for TCU students. The U.S. government systematically tried to erase their cultures, and many students and teachers believe that the government’s fiduciary responsibility to tribal nations today includes providing opportunities to maintain the traditions it threatens.
Learning directly from the elders who passed on that knowledge is an important part of the Native American Studies program at Nueta Hidatsa Sawhney College. Students like Zaisha Grinnell, a MHA Nation citizen, enrolled in the program learn their languages and take classes on tribal sovereignty and traditional burial rites.
“You can’t get that anywhere else,” he said. “That experience, that knowledge, all that knowledge that those who teach here bring with them.”
Many of the communities in which those traditions were taught were torn apart, the languages spoken in them were deliberately targeted, and the lands on which they flourished were taken over, said Mike Barthelemy, head of the college’s Native American studies program.
“You can look around us for hundreds of miles in any direction, and those are assigned areas,” he said. “There is not a single indigenous nation that has actually received compensation for what they did. And so I think that trust in accountability, it persists.”