Earlier this month, Native American nonprofit leaders like Joshua Arce were disappointed but not totally surprised to learn that the Trump administration aims to cut 90 percent of federal funding for tribal colleges and universities.
“This isn’t the sixth month of Trump’s term, it’s actually the 54th month of his presidency,” said Arce, a citizen of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation of Kansas and head of Partnership With Native Americans, which provides essential services to hundreds of tribal communities. “We have a long history of knowing what this administration is capable of.”
Should Congress approve the Department of Interior’s budget request, the results will be disastrous for the nation’s 37 tribal colleges and universities. Among them is Haskell Indian Nations University, where Arce earned his associate’s degree — before earning a JD and certificate in tribal law from the University of Kansas — and then returned to serve as its chief information officer.
Arce points out that Haskell’s history is complicated: Although the university educates about 1,000 Native American students annually, it was founded in 1884 as one of the 526 Indian boarding schools funded by the U.S. government to force-assimilate Native American children into Anglo-American culture. When he served as Haskell’s chief information officer, Arce said there were times when the university, which remains federally funded and tuition-free, “conflicted with academic liberties and freedoms. … I have war stories.”
Now that some of the nonprofit sector is in conflict with the federal administration, Arce thinks non-Indigenous Americans working in the social sector have a thing or two to learn from Native Americans. Namely, endurance and resilience.
“Native communities are survivors,” he said during an interview at the June 4 Social Innovation Summit in San Francisco. “And we’re survivors of survivors. My great grandmother survived the boarding school era at its worst. She is the great-granddaughter of people who survived the Potawatomi Death March. Native communities have survived the Long Walk, the Trail of Tears, massacres, mass hangings, so many things. We’re very resilient communities in the purest sense of the word. There are a lot of solutions that can come from Native communities.”
The Bridgespan Group recently published a report with Natives in Philanthropy to underscore that less than 1 percent of philanthropic funding directly benefits Native Americans, with Native-led organizations receiving roughly only half of that funding, and only 20 percent of large foundations giving to Native communities and causes at all. That doesn’t surprise Arce, who notes that less than one percent of nonprofit or other boards include Native Americans and so they are not involved in philanthropy, government, or corporate ecosystems. In fact, he became president and CEO of PWNA five years ago after serving on its board, as well as half a dozen other boards, to better understand how U.S. institutions can serve Indigenous Americans.
Partnership With Native Americans doesn’t receive government grants. Since 1990, the organization reports that it has provided $500 million to tribal communities, where 23 percent of families face food insecurity and 48 percent lack water access. The Chronicle of Philanthropy spoke with Arce about federal funding cuts, DEI, and hard-times resilience. His remarks have been edited for brevity and clarity.
I saw on PWNA’s IRS 990 Form that revenues leapt from $23 million in 2019 to $45 million in 2020. Did you receive a big donation the first year of the pandemic?
I was sitting at my dining room table around April 2020 with my head in my hands thinking, “What’s going to happen?” People might ignore Native American issues, the challenges we face, or they might show up and donate. And to my surprise, people showed up and donated. They were mostly private and individual donors. I think it was a result of all the free press — ABC, NBC, PBS, Fox News, MSNBC, every news outlet was running a story about how Covid was impacting Native American communities. We were positioned to pop up first on Google search as a nonprofit to serve Natives. We had people donating their whole stimulus check to our organization. It was incredible.
How did PNWA start?
It’s a 30-year-old organization. It was started as a charity to help Natives in the Northern Plains, the Sioux Nation. But it has changed a lot. At one point, PWNA had a development office in Virginia to focus on government advocacy in D.C. and a gift shop to sell Native American goods. It relied on a direct mail program for fundraising for a long time. Now, we’re really trying to diversify revenue streams. We joined recently as a statutory partner on an EPA grant, but all that EPA money went away.
How is your organization diversifying revenue streams in this difficult funding environment?
We have increased pursuing grants, philanthropic giving, digital strategies, planned giving, and storytelling. We are also expanding our network to include Engage for Good, Social Innovation Summit, The Funders Network, and Native Americans in Philanthropy, which exposes the work we do, the communities we serve, and the reservations we reach. Our strength is access to countless communities in the Northern Plains and Southwest. This has opened up new sources of funding for the reservations we serve, new corporate partners, and increases the impact we have in community.
What is PWNA doing in response to federal cuts that affect Native Americans?
We are doing as much as we can. It feels like there is an ax hanging over the communities that could drop at any time. Some communities rely on the federal government for up to 80 percent of their operational funding. Others — that have diversified their portfolio, have economic development initiatives, and are geographically closer to opportunities — might be minimally affected. We are bracing for impact. We have heard from community members that are starting to experience the federal cuts, and we anticipate the needs for our services, training sessions, and community improvement resources will increase. If we have more, we can do more.
Are you surprised by the Trump administration’s executive orders attempting to cancel higher education, climate change, and racial justice grants?
Am I surprised? Yes and no. No, because during the first term, when I was still working at the university, there was very conscious scrubbing of the word “climate change.” That was the boogeyman at that time, and you couldn’t go to a conference that had anything to do with climate change. I didn’t anticipate that DEI was going to be the next boogeyman. That part was a little bit more surprising. People don’t realize the amount of funding from the federal government that keeps tribes afloat — dollars from FEMA, USDA, Medicaid, SNAP — and funding that goes to tribal colleges and the health-care component through HHS or IHS services.
What might the effects be should federal funding continue to evaporate?
It’s really setting us up for some dire situations. It goes beyond communities not being able to buy school buses. People could die from this. Medication and health care have been critically underfunded and understaffed in tribal communities. But there are still treaty and trust obligations [from the federal government] because we’re a politically distinct people. We have seen some unlikely allies, such as Doug Burgum, secretary of Interior, say that Native nations are politically distinct, separate, and so that’s a little bit reassuring. But it doesn’t mean that they can’t change their mind in a Friday 5 p.m. email and decide to do something very different.
The complexity of the [tribal-federal] relationship goes beyond health care. Is the federal government going to also open up mining rights in sacred places? There are challenges like Rio Tinto, down in Arizona. Jobs that were grant-funded are going away. The ability to access training or technical assistance is starting to go away. And FEMA support is starting to go away. All are crucial for the communities we serve because they’re so rural, isolated, and geographically challenged.
Why do you think Native American nonprofits receive less than 1 percent of philanthropic funding?
I think it’s a couple of different things. One is visibility. Native communities aren’t in places telling and sharing their story, so they are out of sight, out of mind. I also think there’s a myth, or illusion, that Natives are doing fine because of casinos; but casinos are profitable for only about 15 percent of tribes that operate them. The communities we serve are rural, remote reservations and geographically challenged communities. I think part of the problem is telling people that there’s a problem, making sure that we are continuing to talk about the challenges that these communities face, that they still don’t have running water and electricity.
Do you think there are opportunities for Natives to build coalitions with rural white communities? Or Latino and Black communities?
I do, especially around climate change. We visited a group in Montana, a white community, that got hit by floods. I felt really sorry for them because if they had the same preparation our Crow communities have, they might have fared better. I want to create coalitions so that people can learn together, especially in some of the rural areas that are shrinking, where the impact of a storm wipes out a trailer park. These lower socioeconomic communities are getting displaced. We’re looking at building small partnerships in the Northern Plains. If we can help communities map their areas, they can be more effective when a disaster strikes.
What advice do you have for nonprofit leaders, for Americans, Native or not?
I think this is a time to get centered principally on what you stand for. Native Americans believe in living not just for ourselves. We talk about the Seventh Generation concept, the idea that what we do today will affect seven generations down the road. We also understand we are somebody’s seventh generation, that somebody seven generations ago was praying for us and putting plans in place for us.
So we take this responsibility seriously. We’re going to keep doing the work that we do, resourcing communities, upskilling communities, serving immediate needs, finding long-term solutions. Even if some funding goes away or if somebody wants to redirect it, we can show a high degree of impact and improvement. We’re culturally strong people. Our passion is for community improvement, and that’s where we find ourselves.
