Tribal colleges are a unique resource — and they're under threat

This message comes from the podcast Vibe Check. Join Syed Jones and Zach Stafford as they make sense of what's going on in news and culture. Your favorite group chat come to life. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, you're listening to Code Switch, I'm BA Parker. And today I'm joined by Graham Lee Brewer, who covers Indian Country for the Associated Press. Hey Graham. Hey. All right, so what do you have for us today? I want to talk about Indigenous knowledge and education and the small network of tribally-led colleges across Indian Country. They're doing important and really vital work to not only provide higher education, but to also pass down and preserve Indigenous worldviews and lifeways that stretch back thousands of years. And to illustrate all of this, I want to take you to a very special garden on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. It's called the Four Sisters Garden. All right Graham, take us there. What if public radio stopped sounding like this? 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Listen to the novelizer's podcast posted by me, Dave Hill, from Cincinnati Public Radio and the NPR Network. Support for NPR and the following message come from Yarl and Pamela Mone, thanking the people who make public radio great every day, and also those who listen. There's some of the squash! Yay! On a chilly morning earlier this fall, the Hadatsa squash caught Ruth Dela Cruz's eye. They usually look kind of like a pumpkin and the meat is really a dark, rich orange color and sweet flavor. Ruth is the head of the Food Sovereignty Program at Nueita Hadatsa Sanish College. I like it a lot. Which owns and operates the garden as part of its agriculture department. The Hadatsa squash came from a seed bank Ruth is building. There's people who have seed, and so it's just a matter of getting them to share seed. She and her assistant Tiana DeBoys have been tracking down seeds from anthropologists and professors and tribal elders over the last couple years. The seed bank started small, but now they have gallons and gallons of seeds, and they're dispersing many of them to community members, who in turn promised to bring seeds back from what they grow and replenish the stock. For example, that would be like the blue Hubbard squash. We couldn't locate the seeds for a long time, and then someone had taken a picture of, I think, someone who had the blue Hubbard squash with them, and eventually through time and communicating to other traditional seed keepers, our partner was able to locate some of those seeds. Oh my gosh, they're like seed detectives trying to find all these seeds from pockets of the community. Yeah, it's important work, and it's just one example of the work this food sovereignty program and this garden are doing. So this is a permaculture demonstration area. We have some asparagus that's gone to seed, and I always get porridge and comfrey mixed up. I think this is porridge, but they look so similar to meat. We have walking onions, you can see the horse radish, and further some raspberries. I think these are currents. This area is part of the ancestral homelands of the Mandin, Hadata, and a rickaron nation, also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes, which operates the college. The Three Affiliated Tribes traditionally lived along the river banks, where they also farmed and hunted. Everybody lived along the bottomlands because the land was so fertile and it was similar to living in the bottomlands along the heart river or the knife river. You know, they were able to grow these large gardens and sustain their families. But then in the 1940s and 50s, the Army Corps of Engineers built the garrison dam to create a hydroelectric project. The dam caused the Missouri River to balloon, swallowing the river banks that were home to several native villages. And so that flooded our bottomlands, which was where my grandmother was living at the time. And so she and her family relocated. I was her oldest granddaughter, so I grew up hearing a lot of her stories about what it was like back then and other elders talking about that time period. So it's not so long ago history. Ruth said somewhere around 90% of the population of the reservation at the time had to be relocated, which meant moving to higher ground, leaving behind fertile soil of the river banks. And in many cases breaking up communities. And we saw a reduction in the number of people who gardened deterioration in our social systems community. Just it had a huge impact on our food systems. After the flood severed communities from their traditional farming spaces, several crops that their ancestors grew in 8 for millennia were lost. This impacted their nutrition and health. And the program gives them an opportunity to reintroduce some of the foods that sustained their ancestors. And the garden isn't just limited to students at NHSC. People across the community are able to grow and learn on the land. Their hope is to not only encourage tribal citizens to grow the crops that sustain their ancestors, but to eat them too. They're working with a local addiction program and gathering data on how returning to traditional diets can help recovery. And they want to put that food in head start programs and elder care facilities. It's sad as fine, but sometimes it's kind of overwhelming because like we were talking about the gaps and knowledge of the traditional gardening practices. And then there's that whole re-acclamation of our palettes. So getting people to eat the food, it's a lot different than what we have available in the grocery store. So our corn isn't going to taste the same as super duper sweet corn. And you see that sometimes only with like extra sweet corn. And then on top of that, you're going to have to process it a little bit differently. So not only do you have to learn how to cultivate it or where to get it from, but then you have to learn how to prepare it. And then you have to decide if you like those flavors or not. So it's a whole learning process. Okay, Graham, this is lovely, but I know you're not here to tell me about a nice garden, right? Like there's something tricky at play. Yeah, so this whole agricultural program is supported by grants. We had limited seeds available, so we partnered with the USDA Agriculture Research Service to multiply out those seeds. While tribal colleges and universities or TCUs get funding and resources from the tribal nations that operate them, most get the majority of their funding from the federal government. Places like the USDA, Department of Labor, and the National Science Foundation. Departments that have been the focus of significant funding and staffing reductions by the Trump administration. Wait, so has their funding been reduced too? Well, some of those grants were frozen or flagged for elimination. And earlier this year, the federal government also proposed cutting most of the funding for tribal colleges. That decision was later reversed, but faculty and staff from NHSC told us that nothing feels certain right now. Native education organizations are also concerned that other areas of funding for TCUs are at risk, as Republicans seek to cut back federal spending and shrink the federal workforce. They're also making the case that even though this kind of funding goes to native students, it isn't part of the DEI movement. In fact, these financial commitments are part of something else entirely, the U.S. government's trust responsibilities to tribal nations. But Graham, what are the trust responsibilities? Those are the U.S. government's legal and moral obligations they made through treaties, laws, and acts of Congress. To put it simply, it's part of what the U.S. government promised and returned for taking the land that built the country. There are about three dozen colleges operated by tribal nations across the country. In 2023, about 28,000 students attended a TCU. Most were founded in the late 1960s as part of the self-determination movement. After hundreds of years of non-tribal control over the education of their children, tribal leaders began establishing their own schools. There's no place in the world that I'm aware of where you get college credits for taking mandat language or hit odds or language or require language. I don't know if they've been offered at other places or hit odds or gardening, you know, so I think this is not just a haven for access to higher education, but also a place where you get that level of culturally tribally specific education. Most of these schools are in very rural parts of the country, often in places that have few, if any, other options for higher education. Got it. And the students who attend TCUs are mostly native? Yeah, although TCUs are open to anyone, but in many cases, tribal citizens attend for free or at a reduced cost. It's affordable. Here, it's $2,000 a semester, so it's more attainable here. That's Dawn Dixon, one of the students at Nueita Hadatsa Sanish College. She's getting her associates in basic sciences and she already has a degree in equine sciences. The end goal is to be a vet and then come back here and be a vet here. I specifically went and worked with large animals. That's why I started out with my equine. Dawn is a tribal citizen and she's from the reservation. Dawn was planning to attend college at a school a few hours away. When I left high school, about three months after high school, I found myself to be pregnant and I thought my life was over. I thought, you know, I missed the bus, like it's just got to work now. But people she knew who worked at the college convinced her of its benefits. It's close to the community that supports her and her family. The classes are smaller and it's a place where she could get a degree while raising her kids. They're the ones who kind of helped me come back and make it seem more possible to come to school and keep going to school. So I came home and I kind of knew everybody here already, so it's kind of just like a bigger family. TCUs often serve as repositories and protectors of traditional knowledge. They're places that are leading the way when it comes to preserving language, culture, and agricultural practices that have been around since time immemorial. The very life ways that were threatened or severed when tribal nations were forced to see their homelands. Nueida Hadatsa Sanish College focuses on agriculture. Oh yeah, the mandin Hadatsa and ricarot peoples have a connection to horses that spans centuries. And many of the college's students grow up working with them on nearby ranches. NHSC has the only equine program at a tribal college in the U.S. What does the equine program cover? They teach students how to care for horses about their anatomies, how to manage the business side of the industry, and even how to use horses and trauma therapy, which is something that Santos Cacera is the third. One of the students we met hopes to do someday. We're just down the highway from campus at the Healing Horses Ranch. Producer Lorne McGocchi and I meet first and foremost a beautiful tan horse with a beaded lanyard. He's being led by Santos. It's a great name. Santos grew up mostly in Oakland and came back to the reservation as a teenager, eventually finding his way back to working with horses in the college's equine program in the steps of his Hadatsa mother. So yeah, I moved to North Dakota when I was nine. Before this oil boom anyway, so all gravel roads, there was nothing I had to give up skateboarding until I was 16 and they paved the road. Santos grew up mostly in Oakland and he came back to the reservation as a teenager, eventually finding his way back to working with horses in the college's equine program in the steps of his Hadatsa mother. You think back to like you know my ancestors and other people's ancestors around here and people came here for the rodeo. That's cool to think about. Santos wants to pursue a career in therapy using horses as a way to connect with children. They're social creatures he explained and they respond to your feelings in a way that almost feel spiritual. I like how they ground you like if you come and frustrated angry or nervous that they would pick up on it. You know, because I was running a little late today and got down there, I'm like, oh, then I'm like, take a breath, like get connected with Dandy. Local schoolchildren often come to the ranch to interact with the horses and Santos says he sees the way it makes kids light up. How when a kid who might not have a whole lot of confidence suddenly finds it once they learn how to command a horse five times their size. But there's a moment when some of the kids get on who'd never had access and it just clicks. You know what I mean? And they're just like, I want to go again. I want to go again. Like there's been times and it was like the cheesy thing we like crying is you're happy, but then you don't cry in front of the kid so your way to get into the car and like you wish you could just keep him on the horse all day. That's things like that. So that stuff is really fulfilling. Horses are social creatures they want to be part of the herd. They don't want to be left alone and they will invite you to be part of their herd. And sometimes for kids that's a big revelation that they can be in relationship with this large animal and maybe for the first time pill understood. Lori Nelson is one of Santos's professors. She runs the college's agriculture department and teaches classes in the equine program. Her boots and belt buckle tell you that she's been around horses most her life. She grew up on her ranch and competing in rodeos. Okay, wait. The garden from earlier was also part of the agricultural program, right? So Lori runs that too. Yeah. And running a department that relies almost entirely on federal funding leaves her feeling anxious in the Trump administration. Like this. Horses don't just show up, right? We have to feed them. We have to care for them. And the gardens that we manage there's a lot of that goes into that too. The college's equine program is 100% grant funded mostly through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some of our grants were frozen earlier this year and we had to make a lot of like quick decisions and make a lot of adjustments, which always affects students. What kind of adjustments? Well, budgeting is always an issue for TCUs and all of this uncertainty means they have to be even more thoughtful about their contingency plans and how they grow or expand. Some of cut back on staff and programming, but everyone I spoke with was confident that no matter what, they would find a way to persevere as native people have shown they can do time and time again. There was a lot of stress on the staff that was left to fill in those pieces and stressful for students because they were dependent on those dollars. We also give them scholarships. So those were frozen. It was just a stressful time. I get a lot of ulcers at night like, oh my gonna pull this off this year, but yeah, we are the only program on campus that is 100% grant funded. So it can be stressful. Lowery and others remain uneasy about the next few years and with the federal government eliminating grants and funds that benefit a wide variety of industries and institutions, private grants have become significantly more competitive. Programs within the U.S. DA to diversify agriculture also came under fire from the Trump administration's purge of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which meant scholarships and internships for students in the program, which paid students to help care for the horses and maintain the facilities. We're also frozen. So Graham, I'm wondering how schools like New-Ata Hadatsa Sainish fit into President Trump's broader educational priorities. I mean, I know one of the administration's priorities has been to cut funding for anything D.I. related, but you mentioned earlier that doesn't apply here when it comes to tribal nations. Right, these federal dollars are not based on race. Tribes and tribal nations, we occupy a different space. You know, we're not within D.I. spaces. That's Twyla Baker, the college's president. Twyla is a really well respected academic and leader in indigenous higher education. She was born and raised in Newtown and she attended NHSC when it was known as the Fort Berthold Community College. Federal funds for TCUs are part of the trust responsibilities that we talked about earlier. We are a nation-to-nation relationship that we have with the federal government and therefore we want to make sure that we are urging them to live up to all of those responsibilities. We prepaid for all of this. Twyla has spent the last few months in a state of worry after President Trump's big beautiful bill proposed cutting funding for TCUs by nearly 90 percent earlier this year. She's been wondering what the future holds for her institution and the community it serves, if the federal government fails to hold up its end of the bargain and pulls funding for the college. We want to ensure that we are honoring treaty and trust responsibility and I believe that that also is true for those students who attend non-TCUs. There is a guarantee a promise of education. Then in September, the U.S. Department of Education surprised many, including Twyla, when it announced that it would increase federal funding to TCUs by 109 percent. There's still some big unanswered questions about how the Trump administration will allocate those federal dollars over the next few years. Not to mention how downsizing of federal employees who facilitate trust responsibilities like at the Department of Education, for instance, will impact the government's ability to honor them. We saw similar battles play out in other areas of Indian country like the Indian Health Service, where there were these massive cuts that were later clawed back. It's a nerve-wracking situation to be in, but Twyla said her job is to stay positive. I'm in the business of manufacturing hope and that hope comes in the form of these graduates, these students, and walk through our doors, walk through our halls, and then walk out again, you know, with these weapons of our oppressors. The diploma is the credentials, you know, and we've empowered them and they empower us right back. So after the break, we're going to visit what you might think of as a more traditional classroom setting that deals directly with the oil and gas industry that dominates the landscape. All right, that's coming up. Stay with us. This is Ira Glass. On this American life, we tell stories about when things change. Like for this guy David, whose entire life took a sharp, unexpected, and very unpleasant term. And it did take me a while to realize it was basically because the monkey pressed the button. That's right, because the monkey pressed the button. Spreising stories every week, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening to In Black America. Are you thinking about making any changes in the new year? The life kit podcast is here to help. In each episode, we have research-backed strategies, an expert advice on everything from meal prep to strengthening relationships to paying down your credit card debt. Make your resolution stick. Listen to the life kit podcast on the NPR app, wherever you get your podcasts. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Lemelson Foundation, dedicated to improving lives through invention, innovation, and climate action. Parker Graham Code Switch. We're talking with reporter Gram Lee Brewer about tribal colleges and universities. And Gram has been taking us to one college in particular. The Nuita, that's a Sainish college in North Dakota. So now we're headed over to the science lab to meet Dr. Kerry Hartman, who founded the college's environmental science department. Kerry is energetic, funny, and he comes off as perpetually busy. When we first approached him, he only had a few minutes for an interview. As far as being on my five minutes maximum, maybe three minutes. I get myself in trouble. But that soon turned into an hour, much of which he spent railing against the oil and gas industries, which have a heavy presence on the reservation. We were appalled at the environmental, usually I say really reaping and pillaging, so I'll just go with that. Kerry's passion is hard to contain. He has a deep love of the natural land and an even deeper distrust of the extraction industry that reshaped it. Okay, North Dakota, I think I have an idea, but what kind of impact has oil had around this reservation? North Dakota is the third highest producer of oil in the country, and the industry has significantly impacted the reservation. While it certainly provided the tribe with money and resources, some that even benefit the college, that level of resource extraction doesn't come without consequences for the natural environment. When Saddam Hussein lit all the oil wells on fire in the Gulf, that's what this place looks like. It's going to be polluting here and an environmental issue here for a long time. Kerry saw the need to have tribal citizens in positions of power when it came to decisions about how the land was protected and cared for and how the oil industry operates on the reservation. It was a major factor in his decision to establish the environmental science program. We've had dozens and dozens and dozens of outstanding tribal member students who became and now are tribal member employees. Kerry said several graduates of the college are now working in the state's environmental division, the natural resources department, and in water quality, Indigenous people providing Indigenous perspectives and departments that affect tribal citizens in countless ways. Those kinds of job opportunities are great. Yeah, they're what colleges do, right? For many TCU students, there's this added incentive. Getting a degree from a tribal college is also a chance to learn directly from the community. At NHSC, for example, the collective memory of the community, it permeates every facet of the college's programs. That's often done by linking elders with students and creating environment where culture is baked into the education system. That sounds lovely. Working with the tribal community is an aspect of the college that students cited again and again as a main reason they wanted to go to school there. To really drive home how central these concepts are to TCUs like NHSC, I want to take you to the department that every professor, faculty member, and student we spoke with said we had to visit. The department that so many of them referred to is the beating heart of the institution, the Native American Studies Department. All right, let's go! The NAS building itself almost looks like a home situated next to the college's main campus, and when you walk in, you're immediately greeted by the kitchen. On the day we visited, we were met by the alluring aroma of stew, cooking on the stove, and fry bread heaped on the counter. The kitchen opens up into a gathering space alongside the classrooms, and like many other offices on campus, you often catch this lingering smell of burnt sage or cedar. The NAS program specifically is like the heart and soul of like this place. That's St. Sugarnell. She's a student in the college's Native American Studies program. I come to the culture building and it just feels like communal here. We have our elders, so it's like you can't get that anywhere else. That experience, that knowledge, all of the knowledge that the ones teaching here carry and the elders come in and sit in on class and give their perspective, give their point of view, share their stories. The day we met her, she was scooping some of that stew into a container for her sick kiddo at home, and she offered us some homemade berry pudding. It was delicious, by the way. Okay, she come to Brooklyn. I actually have a three-year-old, and so I don't want to move like going to grad school and take this away from her, because I got to grow up here, and I grew up with my grandmother, so three generations in the household, and I was really fortunate, and my daughter doesn't have that, so it's like I don't want to take her away from home on top of that, too, so yeah, it makes it hard. Zatia said the class as she takes there, allow her to think deeply about aspects of life on the reservation that might otherwise seem kind of ordinary to her. This past summer, I took kiddo's burial rites with Bernadine, and I really enjoyed it, because it's something that we grew up always going to wake sadly, but it's something that's kind of usual, but we don't really think about all the teachings and all of the origins that they have, because we're just so used to it, and so to be in class and to hear the origin story, to why we do things a certain way, and why it's so important, so that they make their journey in a good way, like that was really helpful, and the faculty here, so Bernie and DJ, Charlie, Grab a mic, they're all really instrumental in learning about our knowledge, our values, our culture. Oh, there's Aisha. Who is Grandpa Mike? Who's your class? Who's good? Do you pay attention? Yes. Grandpa Mike is what Zatia calls Mike Bartholomey, the head of the Native American Studies Department. Zatia works for him as a historian, apprentice, and archive assistant. When I got the gig here, I needed a number two, and Zatia was at Tribal HR, so I was like, Zatia, you want to start building a library archive, and she was like, all right, Grandpa, let's do it. Everyone who insisted that we visit NAS said we had to speak with Mike. Mike is super passionate about the revitalization happening at the college. He exudes an ambitious kind of energy and he always seems to be smiling. This whole office space, well, it's going to be an office space, we've just kind of like transitioned to everything. It used to be like really junky in here, but it's actually space enough where I'm going to put my five, well, actually six, historian apprentices, it's exciting. For Mike, his department is not just a place to get an education for a future job. It's a place to reclaim the traditional ways of passing down knowledge that were disrupted by colonization. Nowadays, not everyone is lucky enough to hear oral histories in their homes or learn their language from their elders, and Mike says that the college is trying to bridge that gap. The community is very much a part of this place. The TCU doesn't stand apart, it's very much like this is the community's college, and so thinking about that and why we're oriented so much around community is because this is the whole purpose of this institution. Mike has big plans for the future. I have all of my crazy projects, like all happening, all the ones. He wants to build a graduate program, but before he can do that, he needs to strengthen the college's library. He wants to make it a repository for Mandin, Hadatsan, and Rikara knowledge that a graduate researcher could rely on to do great things. What does he need to make that happen? Well, he needs safeguards on that kind of knowledge. For generations, anthropologists, linguists, archaeologists, historians, and a slew of other professors went into native communities and extracted data for the benefit of their own careers. Rarely ever returning that important information. Information that sometimes was never recorded otherwise to the people they took it from. So for Mike and other native professors like him, Indigenous Data Sovereignty is a vital concept to building an archive. Yeah, I remember we talked about this on one of our other episodes. Part of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, Indigenous Data Sovereignty is the concept that Indigenous people should have agency over the collection ownership and application of their own data. And it's so interesting because sometimes you do have like relatives that are like so ready to like give you something. And then when I start talking about parameters for access, it's they have to take a moment. They have to think like well, how should we use this? Like who should have access to this? And he wants people today to think about what future generations will want to know about this time and how that information might enrich them. It's a conversation he's starting with the next generation, a living archive that he hopes will long outlive him. The mark of a great society is a society in which the elders plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never enjoy. The fruit of that tree, they know they'll never taste. And that's like long-term investment. That's like what you have to think about when you build a archive. When you build a repository, when you build systems that may not benefit us today, but they're going to benefit those that are to come. And that's like really thinking indigenously. That's really thinking like native people. I see the revitalization happening in real time and that's what really kind of restores me in order to be able to go back to DC for the umpteenth time or you know get on another call or things like that. Parker, I want to go back to Twila Baker. The college's president one more time. Okay. When we last spoke with her, she had recently returned from another trip to Washington, DC where she was lobbying for those federal dollars that finally came through. We have to be kind of statesman on top of being presidents and administrators. She said that she's of course grateful for the money, but she wonders how much work she could get done back at home if she wasn't having to constantly fly to the Capitol and remind the government of its responsibility to tribes. The college is currently undergoing a complete rewiring to update its connectivity and classes have been moved all over campus. Some professors are teaching out of the cafeteria. There's no shortage of things that need her attention. It's part and parcel to the relationship that native people have had with the United States government since the beginning of time. And you know, we're small, but I like to think that we're mighty. Also resilient against our will. The shade. The shade. Yeah, that constant reeducation of lawmakers and federal officials, not just about the needs of native communities, but the U.S. is moral and legal responsibilities to meet them is something that many tribal leaders say never really goes away. But when she sees the squash growing in the college's garden or she hears the students learning to speak their languages on campus, it reminds her of her elders and her ancestors and all they did to carry that forward so that her generation and the next can keep them alive. They carry the dream they carried our languages under their tongues. They carried them close to their heart. They carried these knowledge systems with them and protected them to bring them forward to us. So I feel as if I have a responsibility to do the same and continue to vision and continue to dream for our young people. And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR code switch. If email is more your thing, ours is code switch at NPR dot org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast. You can also subscribe to the code switch newsletter by going to NPR dot org slash code switch newsletter. Just a reminder that signing up for code switch plus is a great way to support our show and public media and get to listen to every episode sponsored free. So please go find out more at plus dot NPR dot org slash code switch. This episode was produced by Lauren McGacky, Jess Kong and Christina Calla. It was edited by Leah Denella and Jess Kong. Our engineer was Jimmy Healy. And a big shout out to the rest of the code switch massive. Example Lopez, Dalian Martata, Villain Williams, and Jean Demby. And shout out to Dandy and Gladys, the coolest horses on campus, and to Charlie, Mike, Laurie, Ruth, and all the other professors who were so generous with their time and knowledge. I'm B.A. Parker. And I'm Gramley Brewer. Hi, Dre. Don't Aunt DeGarrie. This holiday season, the team at first is still hard at work with all new episodes, but the news does not take a holiday. And we know it's harder than ever to keep up this time of year. Listen for three essential stories in under 15 minutes. Get caught up and get on with your day. Up first, listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. AI data centers use a lot of electricity, and you may be paying for it. I think it's almost inevitable that ordinary people are going to end up subsidizing the wealthiest industry in the world. On the latest planet money podcast, how data centers might be hijacking your electric bill. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. You care about what's happening in the world. 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