Last year, then-President Joe Biden came to Arizona and apologized for the federal government’s 150-year campaign to assimilate Indigenous children through boarding schools. He pledged to help fund projects documenting that dark past, but the Trump administration has since clawed back those federal dollars.
Elena Selestewa with the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center gave a Friday tour to Chief Benjamin Barnes of Oklahoma’s Shawnee Tribe. She took him to Memorial Hall, where names are etched into the brick building’s foundation.
“Back home, Shawnee Indian Manual Labor School, our kids did the same kind of graffiti on plaster and lading in an attic where they were domitoried,” said Barnes. “So that’s funny, hundreds of miles apart and those little kids are doing the same thing.”
He also sits on the board for the nonprofit National Boarding School Healing Coalition, which recently lost more than quarter of a million dollars to digitize 100,000 pages of records for its database.
An April letter from Michael McDonald, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, wrote that the nonprofit’s $282,000 grant “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities.”
But Barnes stressed they’re still not backing down, believing “we can chart and navigate a course to be successful in our mission that we have by pivoting to a foundational model in absence of the federal monies.”
“There’s much more to do – to remediate the harm that was caused during this period of our history,” he added. “I think every member of the U.S. government needs to honor that. Let’s not make it a hollow apology, let’s make it meaningful.”
The Trump administration has slashed at least $1.6 million following Biden’s historic trip to the Gila River Indian Community last October. Under the previous administration, NEH awarded $411,000 for 14 projects across Indian Country, including Diné College.
Shelly Lowe – a Navajo from Ganado – made history as the first Indigenous chair of NEH. She ran the independent federal agency responsible for supporting research of the nation’s history, literature and philosophy until March.
Lowe left her post at the direction of President Donald Trump.
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