Facing Defunding, Indigenous Culture Workers Resist

The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape federal cultural institutions as part of a broader attack on what the president characterizes as “woke” or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have left many Indigenous arts and culture institutions in a challenging position, according to leaders at those institutions as well as culture workers and advocates who spoke to Truthout.

Institutions offering Indigenous arts and culture programming, as well as those centering the histories and culture of other communities of color, are at disproportionate risk of being defunded and further marginalized under the administration’s policies. Faced with sweeping cuts to federal agencies that have historically supported cultural programming nationwide, these institutions are dipping into reserves, building new partnerships, turning to their communities for donations, and receiving added support from philanthropic organizations.

“At one level or another, we’re all impacted by this,” Estevan Rael-Galvez, executive director of Native Bound Unbound, told Truthout of his organization’s work and others in the field. Native Bound Unbound is a digital humanities project archiving histories of Indigenous slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Still, Rael-Galvez told Truthout, the Trump administration’s attack on cultural heritage programs “puts all the more fire in my belly to work towards recovering these histories.”

The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums (ATALM) called the proposed elimination of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) a threat to the future of Indigenous archives, libraries, museums, cultural centers, historic preservation offices, and language programs in the U.S. in April 2025.

Donald Trump ordered the elimination of IMLS’s non-statutory functions and the reduction of its statutory functions and personnel to the furthest extent possible under the law in a March 2025 executive order on “The Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” The following month, the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” terminated tens of millions in grant funding from NEH, which provides funding to thousands of groups nationwide, including museums, historic sites, archives, and libraries.

At the time, NEH said it was “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” Shortly after, the agency clarified that it would not support projects promoting what it called “extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.” When NEH announced a new funding round in August 2025, ATALM noted that seemingly none of the grantees’ projects “incorporates a Native perspective or benefits Native communities.” Instead, the new grant awards mostly fund projects dedicated to former presidents and statesmen, as well as the nation’s founding documents.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) also terminated grants en masse in May 2025, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced in August 2025 that it would cease operations after House Republicans voted to strip $1.1 billion in funding from the 57-year-old corporation over two years. Lawsuits have since resulted in the return of some terminated grant funding.

Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra, a Minnesota-based Indigenous artist and cultural extension officer for the Maya Lenca Nation, has seen the effects of lost funding up close. Layoffs at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, due to state and federal budget cuts, have left the future of Indigenous programming at the institution uncertain, including an intertribal roundtable that Crisanta de Ybarra co-chairs.

An event in California at which Crisanta de Ybarra was scheduled to present earlier this year was postponed indefinitely after federal funding was withdrawn. “That would have been a really important opportunity for especially Latin American Indigenous refugee communities to get together and talk about the nuances of rematriation,” she told Truthout. Rematriation refers to the restoration of relationships between Indigenous peoples and their lands and cultural artifacts, including the return of objects and collections.

“Without being able to transmit our traditional knowledge and oral histories, unfortunately, it feels like we’re at the end of a long genocide, where we still have such a valuable treasure of rich cultural heritage, but we’re not able to get together and share it with the next generation,” Crisanta de Ybarra told Truthout.

Elsewhere, funding cuts have disrupted Indigenous language preservation programs, the nation’s only Hopi-language radio channel, Native American boarding school research projects, and a nationwide network that sought to advance cultural equity by strengthening folklife infrastructure nationwide.

That network, called the National Folklife Network, was launched with a renewable two-year NEA grant of $1 million in 2021 by the Southwest Folklife Alliance, in collaboration with the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and the First Peoples Fund. The alliance is a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of Arizona that researches folklore and offers cultural programming in the Greater Southwest and the U.S.-Mexico Border Corridor.

Maribel Alvarez, the network’s director and a professor at the University of Arizona, told Truthout that her organization anticipated the grant would be renewed again this October. Instead, without explanation, NEA chose not to renew the program.

Alvarez told Truthout that losses like these are about much more than funding. “The money is important because the money makes things happen in communities, but I think the intention is the emptying out and weakening of the space of civil society,” she said. “People are not going to stop singing traditional songs because they don’t get a grant. However, the possibility of me encountering that tradition bearer in a public square where they’re presenting their work and that becoming a bridge for me to know my Indigenous neighbor, that’s a thing you can curtail … The target is not the art form itself. The target is the people who produce it.”

Funding cuts are one of the most obvious ways that the Trump administration’s policies are disrupting Indigenous cultural production and heritage preservation. But there are others, too: Crackdowns on freedom of expression and immigration, as well as the Trump administration’s dehumanizing rhetoric about the nation’s communities of color, also contribute to the issue.

“I have been frozen in my work because I am afraid to bring people together. I don’t want to put anyone in harm’s way,” Crisanta de Ybarra, whose performances often gather communities of Indigenous peoples of Latin America who live in diaspora in the U.S. and could be vulnerable to the Trump administration’s increased anti-immigrant actions, told Truthout. “I’m afraid to do a performance with an audience … because I don’t want the event itself to be flagged.”

The suppression of Indigenous cultural institutions and practices also threatens to worsen community health, according to organizers who spoke to Truthout. “A lot of the reason why these services and programs are so valuable for our community is because, during colonization, our people were not allowed to speak their language. They were not allowed to do their prayers or dances. They were not allowed to worship in the ways that they wanted,” Almalía Berríos-Payton, marketing and public relations officer at Native Americans for Community Action (NACA), told Truthout. “Cultural well-being is just as important as mental, spiritual and emotional well-being.”

Allie Redhorse Young, founder of Protect the Sacred, echoed Berríos-Payton. Protect the Sacred’s Connecting the Rainbow program pairs young people living in the Navajo Nation with local elders to learn storytelling and arts traditions in an effort to address disproportionately high suicide rates among Indigenous youth. “Cultural revitalization and reconnection to culture is a solution to that [and] a protective factor,” Young told Truthout. “It reconnects youth to their culture, helps them through this cultural or identity crisis that they’re facing, and helps them feel that they’re connected to a community.”

Indigenous cultural institutions nationwide are committed to resisting this escalating suppression. ATALM launched a survey earlier this year, aiming to quantify the impacts of the loss or reduction of federal funding on tribal cultural institutions and develop solutions. Now, the association is working with the progressive legal organization Democracy Forward to protect IMLS grants for tribal libraries and museums. It is currently soliciting declarations from individuals who depend on services made possible by those grants as part of that effort.

Additionally, ATALM recently appointed the first-ever director of the Tribal Library Council as part of its commitment to supporting and advancing the work of tribal libraries nationwide. That hiring was made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation, one example of philanthropic organizations bolstering cultural institutions that the Trump administration’s rollbacks have threatened.

Berríos-Payton told Truthout that NACA accepts in-kind donations and has pursued new partnerships to grow its reach as threats to federal funding for non-profit organizations have increased. Similarly, for Rael-Galvez of Native Bound Unbound, ​​“It’s always about building partnerships, ensuring people know about the project [and] that we have continuous engagement from various partners.”

He told Truthout that “grounding [the work] in the community and in people who continue to care about telling these stories, whether it’s family members or an institution,” has given him hope that Indigenous cultural programming and heritage preservation efforts will weather the current administration’s attacks.

Alvarez echoes that cautious optimism. “I think we’ll be surprised, and the nonprofit sector will demonstrate a resiliency that comes from models of cooperation, solidarity, and innovation that are not limited to the 501(c)(3) model.”

“The services have not gone away,” Berríos-Payton emphasized to Truthout. “Everyone who works in services that are at risk is doing everything they can to be creative and find ways to continue.”

This story was originally published by Truthout.