The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, known as NABS, is losing critical grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities due to cuts made by the Trump administration.
Chief of the Shawnee Tribe and the President of NABS, Ben Barnes, said nearly $283,000 of funding from NABS was pulled overnight earlier this month. That unspent funding was part of a $500,000 NEH grant awarded from January 1, 2024, to December 31, 2025.
NABS is known for its advocacy work to seek truth, justice and healing for Indigenous people impacted by Indian boarding schools. The national organization does this through research, preservation, education, policy advocacy and community gatherings.
NEH is not the only source of funding for the organization. But withholding the money puts the archival preservation of 120,000 pages of Indian boarding school records at risk, which jeopardizes the preservation of history for future generations to understand and recognize the resilience of Indigenous people, Barnes said.
"Many Native peoples voted for Trump and voted for this administration," Barnes said. "I think it's vitally important to know that misguided actions of this administration had a net result in ruining our ability to collect the stories where ancestors went to these boarding schools."
According to a federal report and a list compiled by NABS, Oklahoma had the most Indian boarding schools in the nation.
In the final volume of the Department of the Interior report on federal Indian boarding schools, they found that 109 Indigenous children died while attending boarding schools in Oklahoma.
In total, records indicate nearly 1,000 Indigenous children died at a federal Indian boarding school, though that number could be higher.
"Even in the work that we've done with the Shawnee tribe, on a small scale, we're discovering ancestors we didn't know we had," Barnes said. "We're discovering people that went to these schools and they never exited them."
That's why Barnes said this preservation work is vital.
"I hope that people understand that the work we do now does not collect bad history, but simply collects the history," Barnes said. "And while that history has a lot of bad things in it, there's much that we can learn about what happened during that time, why it happened, why it should never happen again. But also, we need to honor those children that went through these things."
NABS is actively seeking financial support from other institutions to continue its work.
News of this funding cut came after Shelly Lowe, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, resigned as chair of the NEH under President Donald Trump's direction. She was the first Native American to hold that position.
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