How Authoritarianism is Destroying Native American Rights

What's Happening

The current authoritarian takeover in the U.S. is launching the most devastating attack on Native American rights since the 1950s "termination era" when the government tried to eliminate tribes entirely. Project 2025 calls for massive budget cuts, and the elimination of protective laws. The current administration is systematically destroying the legal framework that protects tribal nations.

The bottom line: This isn't just about cutting government spending, it's about breaking legally binding treaties and eliminating Native American tribes as sovereign nations.

Understanding the Legal Foundation: Treaties Aren't Optional

What Are Treaty and Trust Obligations?

When the U.S. government signed hundreds of treaties with Native tribes, these weren't just handshake deals, they became the supreme law of the land under the Constitution. In exchange for giving up millions of acres of land, tribes were promised that the federal government would provide healthcare, education, and other essential services forever.

Courts have repeatedly said the treaty and trust obligation is settled law; violating these agreements, especially without Congressional approval could force a constitutional crisis as treaties are constitutionally binding.

How Bad Are the Current Violations?

The proposed cuts to Native tribes may exceed $2.5 billion, equivalent to 30 to 40% cuts to treaty and trust obligations of the federal government. To put this in perspective, imagine the government suddenly deciding to stop honoring 30-40% of Social Security payments - except these cuts violate promises that are even older and more fundamental.

Project 2025: The Blueprint for Destruction

What Is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is a 922-page authoritarian policy manual created by the Heritage Foundation to guide the current administration.

The Plan: Resource Extraction Over Tribal Rights

The Department of the Interior plan, written by William Perry Pendley, and assisted by former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary in Indian Affairs, John Tahsuda, outlines growth potentials for gas, oil and mineral extraction.

Translation: The plan prioritizes making money from oil, gas, and mining over protecting Native sacred sites and treaty rights.

The section in the mandate on the Bureau of Indian Affairs has one overarching focus: more coal, oil and gas, and mineral extraction.

Real-World Impact: Sacred Sites Being Destroyed

Mining has leveled entire mountains in Nevada. Mount Tenabo, the highest peak of the Cortez mountain range, figures prominently in Shoshone creation stories. Mining pits have demolished approximately half of it.

The administration announced its plans to quickly move forward with a copper mine in a site sacred to the Western Apache in Arizona. It will approve a controversial land transfer despite ongoing legal challenges.

Shutting Down Government Services to Tribes

Closing Offices That Provide Essential Services

The administration is calling on the General Services Administration, or GSA, to begin terminating leases on all of the roughly 7,500 federal offices nationwide, including more than a quarter of Bureau of Indian Affairs offices, which provide vital services to Indigenous communities.

Why this matters: Tribes go through BIA regional offices to approve things like road projects and law enforcement funding. Closing these offices means tribes can't access services they're legally entitled to.

The Scale: Targeting Less Than 1% of the Budget

Funding for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, and the Bureau of Indian Education represents the lion's share of the government's obligations to tribes and last year those departments made up less than a quarter of 1% of the federal budget, making cost savings seem unlikely as the primary motivation.

Healthcare Crisis: Destroying the Indian Health Service

The Plan: Force Privatization

Project 2025 calls for reforming the Indian Health Service (IHS), the primary healthcare provider for Indigenous people. Instead, the project suggests that tribal communities rely on alternatives to IHS through better access to private healthcare providers.

A report released by Senate Democrats states that changing IHS to focus more on privatized services would "destroy Indian Health Services."

What this means: Instead of the government providing healthcare as promised in treaties, tribes would have to buy private insurance - except most tribal communities are rural and poor, making private healthcare unaffordable or unavailable to many.

Already Cutting Programs

The Health and Human Services (HHS) department has dismantled the CDC's Healthy Tribes Initiative, which supports traditional wellness practices. Tribal leaders are concerned about the future of the Healthy Tribes program after 11 people supporting it were laid off.

Education Under Attack: Targeting the Next Generation

Massive Cuts to School Construction

The budget proposes a drastic $187 million (79.7%) cut to the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) Education Construction Fund. This reduces funding from $234.7 million (in 2024) to just $47.7 million for the coming fiscal year.

The cut would undermine the BIE's ability to address urgent safety hazards like gas leaks, mold, and asbestos. It would not even cover basic emergency and environmental repairs for BIE schools.

Real impact: Native kids will continue attending schools with dangerous gas leaks and toxic mold because the government won't honor its promise to provide safe education facilities.

Eliminating Early Childhood Programs

In general, Project 2025 seeks to eliminate Head Start programs, which over 28,000 Native children use, cutting early education for thousands of Native kids.

The "DEI" Attack: Misclassifying Treaty Rights

But in targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in federal policy, the administration also swept up the first Americans and their long-standing relationship with the U.S.

The administration has attempted to characterize 200 year old treaty agreements as DEI programs in order to include them in the ban on federal dollars being spent on DEI. What the administration is charactering as DEI is a fulfillment of treaty and trust obligations.

The problem: The administration is pretending that programs required by 200-year-old treaties are just modern "diversity" programs they can eliminate. It's not that unlike claiming the Constitution is a diversity initiative.

Law Enforcement and Public Safety Collapse

Defunding Tribal Police

However, the proposed budget cut to the Office of Justice Services (OJS), which is responsible for law enforcement and public safety in many tribal areas, would defund the agencies that keep tribal communities safe.

A 2021 Tribal Law and Order Act report concluded that $3.5 billion is needed to meet the federal government's public safety obligations in Indian Country or roughly six times what is currently appropriated.

Translation: Tribal communities already have six times less police funding than they legally should, and the government wants to cut even more.

Environmental Destruction and Resource Theft

Rolling Back Environmental Protections

Some tribal observers also fear that the administration could roll back regulations that allow tribes to protect their water quality. That's imperative for tribal members whose diet features high amounts of traditional foods such as salmon and wild rice.

Centralizing Control to Weaken Protection

Restructuring of the EPA intends to consolidate vital systems into the American Indian Office, a singular entity to be located in Oklahoma.

Why this matters: Instead of every part of the government understanding its obligations to tribes, they're trying to isolate tribal issues into one small office that's easier to ignore or eliminate.

Historical Context: We've Seen This Before

The Termination Era Playbook

So any way you slice it, it looks like we're entering into a termination era wherein they will eliminate the bureaucracy first, making it easier to eliminate the funding to tribal communities.

What was the termination era? In the 1950s, the U.S. government tried to "terminate" the federal-tribal relationship entirely, essentially trying to make tribes disappear as legal entities. It was a disaster that Congress eventually reversed, but not before causing massive harm.

The current strategy follows the same pattern:

1. First: Eliminate the government agencies that serve tribes

2. Then: Cut funding for programs

3. Finally: Argue that since there are no agencies or programs, the government has no obligations

Legal Obligations That Can't Be Erased

The treaty and trust obligation is settled law. That's very important to understand.

Despite this, many legal experts say the administration's efforts to gut federal agencies and cut off funds to Native communities likely violate the government's obligations.

What's Missing: Ignored Crises

No Help for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Other issues critical to Indigenous communities are omitted: There's nothing about addressing the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, for example.

Native women face murder rates 10 times higher than the national average, but Project 2025 completely ignores this crisis.

Cutting Healing and Truth Programs

The funding cuts included the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, which is developing an online database of archival records of the abuses that were suffered in this historical period. Confronting the government's role in this injustice is crucial to healing for survivors and their communities.

Context: For over 100 years, the government forcibly took Native children from their families and put them in boarding schools designed to "kill the Indian, save the man." Thousands of children died. Now, just as tribes are documenting this genocide, the government is cutting funding for the truth and healing process.

The Resistance: Fighting Back

Tribal Nations Unite

A coalition of tribal leader councils and Native organizations sent a letter to President Donald Trump, congressional leaders and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum warning against misclassifying tribal programs as diversity or environmental justice initiatives that could face cuts under recent executive orders.

Congressional Support

In total, 113 elected officials signed the letter from the Senate and Congress, including all of the Democratic members of Arizona's delegation opposing the cuts to tribal programs.

Legal Challenges

The tribal organizations' concerns come amid legal challenges to the administration's funding policies. A federal court in Rhode Island issued a temporary order on Jan, 31 blocking the administration from pausing federal funding in 22 states and Washington, D.C.

Why This Matters To All Of Us

Constitutional Crisis

If the government can ignore legally binding treaties with tribal nations, what other constitutional protections can it ignore? Today it's tribal sovereignty, tomorrow it could be any constitutional right.

Authoritarian Strategy

While deregulation and decentralization is posited in Project 2025 as empowering tribes themselves, further analysis would show their intent is to undermine tribal protections, and make Indian Country vulnerable to further exploitation.

This follows a classic authoritarian playbook:

1. Target vulnerable populations with limited political power

2. Dismantle institutional protections that could resist authoritarian control

3. Create precedents for violating legal obligations

4. Extract resources while eliminating organized resistance

Current Conditions in Indian Country

Even before these cuts, Native communities faced severe challenges. The current assault will make an already desperate situation catastrophic.

An Existential Threat

The evidence shows a comprehensive, systematic assault on Native American rights that goes far beyond budget cuts. This represents an existential threat to tribal sovereignty itself, potentially the most severe attack on Indigenous rights since the termination era.

What makes this especially dangerous:

1. Legal precedent: Violating treaty obligations sets a precedent for ignoring other constitutional protections

2. Resource extraction: Eliminating tribal protections opens sacred lands to mining and drilling.

3. Cultural destruction: Cutting education and cultural programs threatens the survival of Indigenous languages and traditions

4. Democratic erosion: Attacking tribal sovereignty weakens the broader constitutional framework

The stakes: This isn't only about Native Americans, it's about whether the United States will remain a nation that honors its legal obligations and constitutional principles, or become an authoritarian state that breaks promises whenever convenient.

The resistance from tribal nations and their allies represents not just a defense of Indigenous rights, but a critical front in the broader struggle to preserve democratic institutions and constitutional governance in the United States. If the government can eliminate tribal nations as political entities, no community's rights are safe.