Tribal Colleges and Universities Fear Their Future Amid Trump’s Sweeping Orders

WASHINGTON — The anger, resilience and ready-to-fight energy radiated from tribal college and university presidents and students as they packed into the conference room Tuesday, Feb. 4, for National Tribal College Week.

They arrived from as far away as Utqiaqvik, Alaska, for the annual tribal college and universities legislative summit hosted by the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, an organization that represents and supports all accredited tribal colleges and universities across the country. Of the 37 institutions in the country, 35 were represented at this year’s annual summit.

They already were bracing for what they would face in the coming year.

In just the first three weeks of his new administration, President Donald Trump had already signed an executive order on his first day in office that rescinded the White House Initiative for Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, Economic Opportunity for Native Americans and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities. The initiative had promoted the success and growth of Indigenous education in public schools, at home, or schools operated or funded by the Bureau of Indian Education, Department of the Interior, or postsecondary educational institutions, including tribal colleges and universities.

A week later came news of an abrupt decision to freeze federal grants and loans, which could affect more than $1 billion of federal funding for tribal nations in education, healthcare, climate initiatives, law enforcement, agriculture, and more.

Several lawsuits were filed immediately, and judges have placed a temporary block on the federal funding freeze, but administration officials indicated that “some kind of funding freeze is still planned as part of his blitz of executive orders,” The Associated Press reported.

A screenshot of the White House initiative floated around Native peoples’ and allies’ social media feeds of the action with comments expressing how upset they were with Trump’s order.

The consortium’s president and chief executive, Ahniwake Rose, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and of Muscogee (Creek) descent, stood on the stage encouraging college presidents and students to share their stories with their representatives and explain how the decisions will impact their education, institutions, families, communities, and tribal nations.

She said even a “pause” in funding would affect them.

“That’s the important part — the pause in funding,” she told ICT. “Because while the freeze has been lifted, the pause might not be and while we’re settling and figuring out what the executive orders mean across the agencies, the real-life impact for our TCUs is going to be felt immediately.”

Facing a Potential Funding Freeze

Rose, who previously served as the consortium’s vice president of congressional and federal relations, told ICT that when the organization found out about the funding freeze, officials immediately sent a survey to all the tribal colleges and universities asking how the move would affect the day-to-day operations and impact the institutions and their students.

Tribal colleges and universities receive 74 percent of their total revenue from federal funding. If the freeze continues, tribal colleges and universities could shut down, according to the impact sheets from the surveys that congressional leaders will receive this week.

More than 30,000 jobs are created across the local and regional economies. Most of these jobs are tied to federal funds and would affect faculty and staff positions, on and off campus.

Rose said many of the larger state institutions have alumni and endowments to draw from, but that doesn’t apply to all 37 tribal colleges and universities. Some of the TCUs don’t have six months of reserves, either.

“So a pause in funding that lasts six months means that we’re losing faculty,” she said. “A pause in funding for six months means that we’re closing courses. And if we close a course, if we lose (a) classroom, we’re losing students, then we’re losing revenue from our student enrollment.”

She continued, “So the ripple effect will be long-lasting. If this is not just a freeze, if this is just a pause, if it goes on much longer, then it will have a devastating impact on our TCUs. Some of our TCUs have noticed that, or have noted that, if it goes past six months, they might have to consider closing.”

Leander R. McDonald, president of United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota, estimates that his college has six months of reserves. He is Ihanktowan, Sahnish, Hidatsa, and Hunkpapa, and serves on the consortium’s board as vice chair.

“After that we would have to discontinue operations,” he said. “So when we started hearing about these funding freezes, we started looking at our budgets a little bit more closely and saying … ‘Well, what do we need in order to get us to the end of the school year?’”

McDonald said about two-thirds of the college’s funding relies on federal funds, with one-third coming from endowment monies and foundations.

Each institution also has to worry about accreditation, officials said, since tribal colleges and universities are obligated to meet the standard for each area of study, he said. They have one of two choices: fulfill the educational commitment themselves or refer students to other educational institutions.

“We’re certainly in quite a predicament should that funding freeze happen, because we wouldn’t be able to complete the mission that we’re set out for,” he said. “We would need time in order to stop operations, and we’d be liable for that, and with the treaty and trust responsibility, just begs the question is that, do we file suit as a result of that, for the liability that we’re incurring as a result of a pullback of federal funds? And I think that’s where the majority of us as tribal colleges would fall in my mind.”

Twyla Baker said Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College’s soft-funded projects are approximately 60 percent made up of federal funds. Soft-funded projects are grants, sponsored-programs, private donations, anything external to the tuition money they receive. Baker is the president of the North Dakota college and a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes.

The school has done a lot to build up its reserves and endowment but it’s nowhere near where they need it to be. It’s still in the “infancy” stages, she said.

“It’s not something that we would be able to tap into long term, and we haven’t even really tapped into it right now to start pulling the interest off of or anything like that, because we still wanted to build it up,” she said.

“We’ll probably be able to stay for the academic year if there are no pauses in federal funding. But beyond that, it starts to be a big question mark,” Baker said.

Closing the educational doors would have a “colossal impact” on her students, she said.

“We live in a very rural and remote area in Northwest North Dakota, and these students can easily drive up to an hour one way to come to school with us,” said Baker, who sits on the consortium board as the research chair.

“They receive all types of supports that we can possibly find for them, and a lot of them are tied to federal dollars, so it’s crucial that we are able to keep our relationship considered under treaty and trust, and that those dollars can continue to come to the tribal colleges, and that we be kept in that consideration,” she said.

The United Tribes Technical College and Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College are two of five tribal colleges and universities in the state.

The consortium’s impact sheet from North Dakota, for example, offers a closer look at the impact a disruption in funding could cause. The impact sheet, summarized by the consortium, indicates the harm could be felt in five areas:

• Immediate impact: Reduced services, staff layoffs, tuition spikes, and campus program closures
• Financial consequences: Dependence on federal grants means institutional operations would be at serious risk. Tuition would increase drastically to offset loss of federal funding.
• Impact on students: Loss of educational opportunities for TCU students, increased dropout rates, financial insecurity, and loss of access to crucial financial aid.
• Impact on faculty/staff: Staff and faculty would face severe job losses, impacting institutional stability.
• Impact on research: Research activities would be disrupted, particularly those funded by federal agencies such as NASA and U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Extensions of Sovereignty

Rose, McDonald, and Baker emphasized that tribal colleges and universities are chartered by federally recognized tribes, and are therefore extensions of tribal nations and sovereignty.

“We’ve ceded billions of acres of land to this country to and in exchange for that we have certain protections, and we have a relationship with the federal government that ensures that we have services in place,” Baker said. “We have education, health care … infrastructure, things in place to ensure the health and the well being of our peoples in perpetuity, because they bet they benefit from the land that was ceded.”

There’s also federal legislation in 1994 that designated more than a dozen tribal colleges and universities land-grant institutions. They are part of a land-grant university system that dates back to 1862. Most TCUs are now considered land-grant institutions.

The first tribal college was Diné College, known as Navajo Community College before 1997. Former Navajo Nation Chairman Raymond Nakai established the college as a step toward self-determination in 1968, which was 100 years after the Navajo Treaty of 1868.

While self-determination was part of the formula, McDonald said the tribal colleges were also created to address non-completion of tribal students at mainstream institutions. He’s seen its success. “We’re able to provide a higher education experience where they’re at home and they’re able to experience higher education and courses and programs of study that they receive and complete them (courses and programs) as a result of coming to school with us and at higher rates than they do with mainstream institutions,” he said.

From Associate Degrees to Doctorates

The number of tribal colleges and universities has grown since the start-ups decades ago.

According to the consortium numbers:

• Thirty-seven tribal colleges and universities operate at 90 sites in 16 states — Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Alaska, California, and New Mexico
• TCUs serve 80 percent of Indian Country
• Approximately 160,000 Native students and community residents are served by TCUs
• 245-plus federally recognized tribes have students at these institutions.

Many of these schools offer degrees ranging from associate to doctoral degrees.

Perhaps the biggest misconception of tribal colleges and universities, however, is that they are for Native students only. Non-Native students, or non-enrolled, can also attend most TCUs. About 13 percent of the students enrolled at tribal colleges and universities are non-Native, according to the consortium.

For Baker’s college, that number hovers around 10 to 15 percent for their non-beneficionary, or non-Native, students.

“We are public institutions of higher education, so they can come to school with us and are held to the same standards as the rest of the other colleges, mainstream colleges in the state and in the country,” she said. “We are accredited by the same accrediting bodies, and they can get their education with us or get their start with us at a really good deal, because we are very cognizant of the students that we’ve worked with and their socioeconomic backgrounds. So we try to support them, and we understand how tough it can be for some of these students to access higher education if it weren’t for a TCU, and that includes non-enrolled students.”

McDonald and Baker both said that their alumni go on to work in their communities as entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, and more. They become part of the workforce and contribute to their families, communities, nations, and American society.

“I think it’s a great investment that needs to be continued by the U.S. government and recognizing our contributions here, not only for the cessation of land, but also our contributions too, for building this country,” McDonald said.

Swept Into DEI

Despite the broad impact tribal colleges and universities have had on their communities, Trump’s decision rescinding the White House initiative implemented under President Joe Biden startled much of Indian Country.

Tribal nations are not part of the anti-DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) rhetoric because of political and legal obligations.

The executive order rescinded had “unwavering” support from both sides of the aisle, according to Rose. She hopes that the administration understands that tribal colleges and universities are nation builders that are connected to sovereignty.

The American Indian Higher Education Consortium, along with two dozen tribal organizations that represent tribal nations and communities, issued a letter to Trump on Feb. 2.

The coalition summarized in a statement, “Tribal Nations are not special interest groups—they are sovereign governments with a unique legal and political relationship with the United States and with their own Tribal communities. The trust and treaty obligations of the federal government are political and debt-based in nature. Tribal Nations’ sovereignty and the federal government’s delivery on its trust and treaty obligations must not become collateral damage in broader policy shifts.”

Trump’s executive order dissolved the initiative, which was housed in the Department of Education, and eliminated the executive director position.

“This was our political office, and so by losing the political appointee, we lose some direct access to the (education) secretary,” Rose said. “We lose the opportunity to directly impact policy, to have somebody that understands what it means to work at a tribal college and university, and to ensure that as policies and as regulations and as legislation is being implemented and put into place, that our students and our faculty and our communities are being specifically addressed and thought about.”

It was a surprise for the former executive director of the initiative, Naomi Miguel. She joined the initiative in February 2023.

“My shock was more or less on the fact that this was a day-one first executive order action,” said Miguel, T’ohono Odham citizen. “That was one of my first shocks. My second shock was the amount of work that we did in that initiative and knowing that work is not going to continue in this administration.”

She said the initiative also provided information to different agencies and outside stakeholders such as non-Native institutions that are specifically interested in recruiting Native students for their programs.

She added that during her work she made efforts to inform those in the federal workplace and non-Native organizations that the Native American and Alaska Native connection to education is political. Boarding schools were used as a tool to assimilate Indigenous children and federal funding is outlined in treaties.

“A lot of the work that I was doing was internally having those discussions. It was a lot of education about us and a lot of education on our status in this country that was fully backed by the Supreme Court for centuries. I think that type of work unfortunately isn’t going to continue,” Miguel said.

Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders will also be affected. Trump also rescinded the Executive Order 14031, Advancing Equity, Justice, and Opportunity for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders.

Miguel said that she worked with the Department of Health and Human Services, which housed the initiative, repeatedly. They worked together with connecting Native Hawaiian education and helping develop the work they did, on the inter-agency level, with the Department of Interior for Native languages.

“Native Hawaiians and University of Hawai’i are kind of the road map for us in revitalizing and retaining our languages for Native languages,” Miguel said. “A lot of the work they were doing was starting to be connecting all of us together, really looking at a lot of our policy papers making sure we’re being inclusive of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders.”

Miguel said that rescinding the initiatives will make it harder and slower for information to be easily shared about training and technical assistance, federal aid assistance, announcements from the Department of Education or general announcements about education.

“Our students will see the impact of that unfortunately,” Miguel said. “There were times when we had FAFSA grants available for schools to utilize to help their students fill out their FAFSAs or learn how to fill out their FAFSAs. That didn’t just apply to TCUs, it applied to other high schools that may have had high populations of Native students there. There are things like that that came up that is not explicitly named in that executive order.”

Miguel also encouraged the career staff who are still working in the Department of Education and other departments to take care of themselves from possible pushback from the Trump administration.

“We did a lot of work, and it is sad and it does break my heart a little to know that it’s gone, but we need each other,” she said.

Stirring Students to Action

Executive orders are not in the U.S. Constitution but are accepted as part of a president’s executive powers to either amend, repeal or replace any previous executive order. Although Congress can’t easily overturn executive orders, federal courts can review, challenge or block the orders if they violate or contradict the Constitution, federal laws or fundamental rights.

That’s exactly what Dakota Waupoose is learning at the legislative summit. Waupoose is a student at the College of Menominee Nation. He will be advocating for TCUs on Capitol Hill all week.

“It’s just helping bring this information back from this legislative summit to our communities, so that they don’t have to worry as much, and understanding that when we come here, we’re representing them here on the Hill,” said the Prairie Band Potawatomi citizen who is part of the consortium’s Student Congress.