May 9, 2025
Trump Is Taking a Wrecking Ball to Indigenous Education
By Phoebe Grandi
After mass layoffs and scholarship freezes, students and tribal leaders are suing the Trump administration for violating treaty obligations.
On Valentine’s Day, Kaiya Brown was in class at her local tribal college, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when she learned that 20 of her school’s faculty and staff members had been laid off. They were given two hours to clear out their offices. By the time they left campus, their work had been wiped from federal servers. “When we came back after the long weekend,” Brown said, “there wasn’t a single class where someone wasn’t crying.”
Brown, a 19-year-old freshman from the Navajo Nation, picked SIPI because she wanted to be surrounded by other Native students and educators who understood her. “These aren’t just people. These are our family members,” she said. But in the aftermath of the layoffs, many basic support systems of her college disappeared: tutoring programs ended, financial aid disbursements were delayed, and students were unsure if their classes would resume. For those relying on financial aid, it wasn’t clear if they could afford their next semester of school—or even food and rent.
