New City, ND – On a recent cold fall morning, Ruth De La Cruz walked through the Four Sisters Garden looking for Hidatsa pumpkins. For college students in her food sovereignty program, the crop can be an undertaking. But for her, it is the literal fruit of her ancestors’ work.
“There are some pumpkins, yay,” De La Cruz exclaimed when she found the little gourd-like pumpkin catching the morning sun.
The garden is named after the Hidatsa practice of growing squash, corn, sunflowers and beans — the four sisters — together, De La Cruz said. The program is part of the Nuita Hidatsa Sahnish College, run by the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation.
It is one of more than three dozen tribal colleges and universities across the country for which the Trump administration proposed cutting funding earlier this year. Tribal citizens exist among communities Overcoming the effects of huge cuts On federal spending and its effects The longest government shutdown in US history.
Increase funding for tribal colleges and universities Announced before closing This was welcome news, but university leaders still felt uneasy about the government’s financial commitments. These federal dollars are part of some of the nation’s oldest legal obligations, and tribal college and university (TCU) presidents and Indigenous education advocates worry they could be further eroded, threatening the transmission of Indigenous knowledge to new generations.
“This is not just a haven for access to higher education, but it’s also a place where you can get that level of cultural and tribal-specific education,” De La Cruz said.
When the United States took the lands and resources of tribal nations to build the country, it promised through treaties, laws, and other congressional resolutions that it would support the health, education, and security of indigenous people. Today these credit obligations are known as Trust responsibilities.
“We’ve already paid for all of this,” said Twyla Baker, the college’s president.
The United States may have deliberately and violently disrupted the passage of indigenous knowledge and ways of life, but their ancestors forced the government to pledge to protect them for future generations, Baker said. She said that these legal and moral obligations must be respected.
“They carried our languages under their tongues. They carried them close to their hearts. They carried these knowledge systems with them and protected them to bring to us. So I feel as if I have a responsibility to do the same,” Baker said.
today, The education pillar is one of the trust’s responsibilities It takes many forms, such as the hundreds of elementary schools on reservations funded by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education and funding that pays for Native history and language classes taught at TCUs.
That financing It is set to be reduced By up to 90% in President Donald Trump’s federal budget proposal. But in September, the US Department of Education announced that technical education units would receive a more than 100% increase. While many welcomed the decision, those new federal dollars came at the expense of other institutions where many Native students attend, such as Hispanic-serving institutions.
Educating Native students outside of TCUs is also part of trust and treaty rights, said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which advocates for higher education units.
The increase in Education Department funding coincides with a decline in many areas of the federal government that provide critical grants to TCUs, such as the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Rose said.
In 1994, Congress passed a bill that classified tribal colleges as land-grant institutions, opening them to new sources of federal funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But unlike other land-grant universities like Cornell, Purdue and Clemson, which are still supported by profits from unceded 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, Rose said that is becoming more difficult. Tribal liaisons in some of those federal departments who ensure compliance with their fiduciary responsibilities have been laid off or furloughed, and many of those positions remain vacant, she said.
“We’re still under a lot of pressure,” Rose said. “I don’t want people to think, because we got this increase in money, that everything is fine, because it’s still not stable.”
That kind of uncertainty makes budgeting difficult, said Leander McDonald, president of United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, North Dakota. This, coupled with current pressure to reduce the federal workforce, leaves him and other TCU presidents weighing decisions to create educational programs and hire staff.
“How long will the storm last?” MacDonald said. “This is the part that I think is unknown to us.”
Presidents like McDonald and Baker spend a great deal of their time on the road, traveling to Washington, D.C., to demonstrate the value that TCUs add and the government’s responsibility to support them. A September American Indian Higher Education Consortium report concluded that in 2023, higher education units generated $3.8 billion in additional income for the national economy in the forms of increased student and business revenues, health-related social savings, equity, and income assistance.
On top of the opportunities that higher education provides, there is an additional incentive for TCU students. The United States government has systematically attempted to erase their cultures, and many students and faculty believe that part of the government’s fiduciary responsibility to tribal nations today includes providing opportunities to preserve the traditions it threatens.
Learning directly from the elders who pass on this knowledge is an essential part of the Native American Studies program at Noita Hidatsa Sahnish College. Students like Zaisha Grinnell, a citizen of the MHA Nation enrolled in the program, learn their languages and take classes on tribal sovereignty and traditional burial rituals.
“You can’t get that anywhere else,” she said. “That experience, that knowledge, all the knowledge that the teachers here bring.”
Many of the communities where these traditions were taught have been dismantled, the languages they spoke have been deliberately targeted, and the lands where they flourished have been seized, said Mike Barthelemy, head of the college’s Native American Studies program.
“You can look around in any direction for hundreds of miles, and you will find these lands that have been ceded,” he said. “There is not a single Aboriginal nation that has received real compensation for what they have provided. So I think the responsibility of the trust still remains.”