Kaiya Brown was at work last week when she started getting the texts. Her friends were asking if she’d seen the news: The Trump administration wants to cut funding for tribal colleges by nearly 90%.

Brown (Diné) is in her first year at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in northwest Albuquerque, one of 37 tribal colleges and universities in the country and four in New Mexico, many of which offer free tuition to tribal citizens.

If Congress approves the administration’s budget request released last month, funding for the schools will drop from over $183 million to about $22 million in the next fiscal year, starting in October. Federal funding makes up 74% of total revenue for tribal colleges and universities, ICT reported in January.

“It’s really scary,” Brown said. “I don’t think enough people understand the importance of tribal colleges and what they do for our communities. They provide opportunities that many students would have never had. It makes me really emotional, honestly, because they don’t understand how this would impact so many lives.”

Brown is studying early childhood education with hopes of going into social work to advocate for Native children.

Part of why she chose a tribal college was because she didn’t feel safe or supported at her Rio Rancho high school. In one instance, Brown wore her regalia, including moccasins and jewelry, to school, and a teacher asked, “Where’s your feathers?” Another time, she and a couple other Native students were carrying frybread for a sale, and a group of their peers started mocking them. One of the students told them, “I thought we killed all your people.”

Her experience so far at college, Brown said, couldn’t be more different.

“We’re all so close to one another. We all want to see each other succeed,” she said. “And I truly feel that from the staff and from my instructors. These are Native instructors, people that look like me and know my ways.”

She’s also enjoyed the small class sizes. Last fall, 215 students were enrolled, according to data from the college, which was founded in 1971. The largest class Brown is in right now has five students total. Instead of getting lost in a lecture hall with a hundred other people, she’s able to get more hands-on help from instructors.

But the mood on campus hasn’t been the same lately, Brown said. The community has been reeling from a round of layoffs earlier this year.

The institute, along with Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, is federally operated. In February, the Bureau of Indian Education laid off dozens of faculty and staff members at the two institutions in response to Trump’s directives to reduce the federal workforce. Many classes were left without instructors, and a power outage in Brown’s dorm lasted 13 hours because there weren’t enough maintenance workers available to fix it. A few weeks later, some employees were re-hired, but it was unclear whether the hirings were permanent or temporary.

That’s according to a lawsuit against the federal government brought by the Native American Rights Fund in March. Brown is a plaintiff, along with four Haskell students and three tribal nations, including Isleta Pueblo.

“Tribal nations and the federal government should be working together to best serve our Native students,” Isleta Pueblo Gov. Eugene Jiron said in a statement. “Instead, the administration is randomly, without preparation and in violation of their federal trust responsibility, taking away teachers and staff from already-underserved facilities. Our students deserve better.”

The layoffs worsened problems caused by chronic understaffing at the schools, the lawsuit argues. Congress has underfunded tribal colleges by $250 million a year, ProPublica reported in 2024.

The re-hirings brought some relief, Brown said, but the proposed cuts have stirred up fear among students and employees again.

“These schools have done so much for our people,” she said. “So many passionate people and talented artists have come from these schools. They give us the tools to pursue our dreams. It’s like our stepping stone into the world. And taking that away will be devastating to a lot of students, including myself.”

New Mexico is home to three other tribal colleges: Diné College, which has campuses in Shiprock and Crownpoint, as well as in Arizona; the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe; and Navajo Technical University, with a main campus in Crownpoint. In fall 2024, an estimated 3,378 students were enrolled at the schools, according to the state Higher Education Department.

In a statement on June 4, Robert Martin, president of the Institute of American Indian Arts, said, “I know that we will prevail in the end, but we can’t take that for granted. We have strong Congressional support but they need to hear from all of our constituents.”

This story originally appeared on New Mexico In Depth on June 12, 2025. It is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 4.0).