Faith and Values: Government making promises it can’t keep affects U.S. Native tribes

It is yet another promise apparently broken by the federal government.

In February, the Trump administration’s immediate termination of all temporary federal employees cut the faculty and staff at Haskell Indian Nations University by a quarter, leaving the school in chaos. The action was taken at Haskell without the Department of Government Efficiency first consulting with the tribes, a move required under federal law.

Similar action was taken at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute with the same results.

To date, three tribes and a group of five Haskell and SIPI students are suing to reinstate the lost faculty and staff. The federal lawsuit was filed on March 7 in the U.S. District Court, District of Columbia.

The tribes – the Pueblo of Isleta, the Prairie Band of the Pottawatomie Nation and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes – filed the suit claiming the firings at Haskell and SIPI were baseless. There are eight specific counts listed in the suit.

The students joined the action because they said the move impacted their education and educational opportunities. The students and the tribes filed the lawsuit against the Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Assistant Secretary, Indian Affairs Bryan Mercer and the director of the Bureau of Indian Education Tony Dearman.

In the meantime, the school’s faculty and staff have been told not to speak about the action. An email from Haskell president Francis Arpan said employees could not speak without authorization from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Stacy Saldanha-Olsen for the Topeka (Kansas) Capitol-Journal reported it took more than a week for the BIE to respond for a request, which read:

“The Bureau reaffirms its unwavering commitment to providing BIE students with a quality and culturally appropriate education in a safe, healthy and supportive environment while prioritizing fiscal responsibility for the American people. We do not have a comment on personnel matters, however Interior will continue to uphold federal responsibilities to tribal communities as we embrace new opportunities for optimization and innovation in workforce management.”

However, the current Interior secretary, former North Dakota Gov. Burgum, who pledged tribal consultation, did not reach out to the tribes or the schools prior to the DOGE actions.

Indigenous schools are not like other federal government programs nor are they a form of diversity initiative. The schools and other programs were agreements with the federal government, stemming from legal obligations when the government entered into treaties with the tribes.

In a story for NPR, Bo Schnieder, Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribal member and Haskell Foundation Board of Trustees president, said the DOGE actions “added to the list of broken promises.”

Specifically, the lawsuit claims the students have been harmed because instructors were laid off, student services were reduced or discontinued and custodial services and maintenance across both campuses were degraded, all making educational initiatives more difficult.

Taken without tribal consultation, the DOGE action is a violation of federal law 25 USC sections 2003 and 2011. The lawsuit claims the actions were “arbitrary and capricious and were an abuse of agency discretion.” The lawsuit asks the court to rescind the firings, and the employees return to their jobs. They also seek a permanent injunction against further such firings.

Here is an issue with the federal government making such sweeping moves, especially when led by someone obviously unfamiliar with tribal-U.S. government history: Promises were made, and to date, very few if any of the promises made by the government have been kept.

Education and health care are two key concepts the federal government agreed to in 1975 with the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act.

To have those promises destroyed once again points to why Indigenous people rarely trust the U.S. government.

Actions by DOGE are currently under fire from several sources, it is prudent for the government to look at the wholesale cuts into the nation’s bones and reverse some of the moves.

They should start with honoring the promises made in treaties and reinstate employees of tribal schools.

Then if cuts really do need to be made, it should be strategically rather than with a chainsaw.

An award-winning journalist and public relations professional, Rebecca “Becky” Tallent was a journalism faculty member at the University of Idaho for 13 years before her retirement in 2019. She is of Cherokee descent and is a member of the Native American Journalists Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. She and her husband, Roger Saunders, live in Moscow, Idaho, with their two cats.