The women’s basketball coach stood atop a ladder on Sunday night, carefully cutting down the last of the net after Haskell Indian Nations University won the league championship.
The scene is a familiar one at this time of year in college basketball. But the celebration in Lawrence, Kan., where the man who invented the sport worked for decades, was nevertheless astonishing: Officially, Haskell’s coach, Adam Strom, was only a volunteer.
He had been fired 16 days earlier, swept up in an executive order that led Haskell to oust about a quarter of its workers on a Friday in February.
The only other federally run college for Native people, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, also laid off a similar share of workers that day.
More than 140 years after the United States first used the grounds in Lawrence as a boarding school to assimilate Native children, Haskell students feel that the federal government, which controls the university, has once again become a malevolent force upending lives.
The student government association president said three of her five instructors had been dismissed. Rumors had swirled over whether enough dining hall workers were left to serve meals. A senior had wondered whether the university, a sanctum for Native American students shaped by tradition and tragedy, would remain open long enough for him to receive his degree.
As other potential policy changes loom, students, leaders and experts fear that the federal system for educating Native Americans — which serves tens of thousands of students at Haskell and beyond, and which already has some of the worst outcomes in the United States — is lurching into a new phase of crisis.
In President Trump’s Washington, firings across the federal government have been billed as an “optimization” of the bureaucracy. But on Haskell’s campus, where at least 103 people are buried, the seemingly indiscriminate budget cuts represent another breach of the government’s vows to Native Americans.
“We’re not necessarily repeating the history of the school; it’s just continuing in our own modern way,” said J’Den Nichols, a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana who is majoring in American Indian studies.
As she spoke, less than a week before the conference championship game, a tepee stood near the student union in response to the cuts.
“We only bring that up in times of ceremony, or in times like now, where we are either mourning or attacked by others,” Tyler Moore, the senior and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said of the tepee.
Haskell’s president, Francis Arpan, referred an interview request to the Bureau of Indian Education, which declined to make any federal officials available. A spokesperson for the Interior Department, which includes the bureau, said in a one-sentence statement that the department “reaffirms its unwavering commitment to the American public while practicing diligent fiscal responsibility.”
Although the administration’s quest to reduce federal spending has led campus officials across the country to weigh layoffs, hiring freezes and other steps, schools like Haskell are particularly vulnerable to disruptions since they are directly run by the government. And perhaps no education system in the United States is as familiar with upheaval and shattered promises than the one that provides federal schools for Native students.
Almost a century after a major federal report about conditions for Native Americans warned that “cheapness in education is expensive” because thriftiness in schools could deepen future societal problems, witnesses repeatedly told Congress in written testimony last week that the federal system for teaching Native people suffered from “chronic underfunding.”
About 45,000 children are enrolled in bureau-funded schools in 23 states, their options fashioned by court cases, laws and treaties. In addition to operating Haskell and SIPI — as the small college of about 200 in Albuquerque is known — the government financially supports tribal colleges and universities that are run independently.
Although some measures of student success are improving, the high school graduation rate for Bureau of Indian Education schools regularly lags the nation’s. In the 2020-21 school year, standardized tests showed that roughly one in 10 assessed students were proficient in math, and about 17 percent were proficient in language arts, according to the bureau.
The system’s colleges are also troubled. The most recently reported six-year graduation rate at Haskell was 43 percent; the national rate is usually around 62 percent. Dr. Arpan, congressional aides noted before a hearing last summer, was Haskell’s eighth president in six years.
And a 2023 Interior Department report, which emerged last year after the watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility sued to obtain a redacted copy, depicted Haskell as “severely dysfunctional.” The report concluded, in part, that the university had been insufficiently attentive to accusations of sexual assault, housed an athletic department “in disarray” and used adjunct instructors “inappropriately” while federal employees worked beyond their job descriptions.
Last December, some congressional Republicans floated a new governance structure for Haskell that has drawn mixed reviews on campus and not yet cleared Capitol Hill.
Despite their university’s problems, one student after another said that Haskell was one of the few places in academia where they felt their culture was honored. Shrinking the university, they argued, was more than a violation of the government’s promises; it was an assault on their heritages and futures.
Angel Ahtone Elizarraras, the student government president, talked of how the library offered spiritual medicine and every dorm had a smudge room. (“If you ask anyone on campus, English isn’t the coolest language we know,” Marina DeCora, a student who is a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, said wryly.)
Students frequently used the word “family” to describe the community at Haskell, where they pay some fees but no tuition. This semester, the university reported an enrollment of 918 students representing 153 tribal nations.
Shiannah Horned Eagle, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe of South Dakota who is a social work student, said she started out at another college, but found it “isolating.” She found solace at Haskell — and then learned of the cuts when an instructor told the class.
“Basically, they just told us they got fired and that they don’t know what’s going to happen to the classes,” she said.
Ms. Ahtone Elizarraras was preparing for a Valentine’s Day dance when she heard.
“As a Native, as you’re at this school, you kind of read through the books, and it prepares you for moments like this,” said Ms. Ahtone Elizarraras, a citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma, adding, “It makes it to where you realize, ‘Hey, my ancestors stepped so that I could walk.’”
But there is also fury.
“How much more can you take?” Ms. DeCora fumed.
Haskell’s board of regents has appealed to Washington. In letters to federal officials, the advisory board’s interim president, Dalton Henry, argued that the ousted employees should be reinstated because they were fulfilling duties that were mandatory under treaties. Last week, students protested outside the Kansas Capitol.
Later in the week, Dr. Arpan told student government leaders about a reprieve that would allow ousted instructors to finish this semester as adjuncts. But that fix is, for now, only temporary.
Among the university workers who have lost jobs are a photography instructor and custodians. On the morning of Feb. 14, there were rumors among some employees about coming cuts.
Then Mr. Strom, who was in his fourth season as the women’s basketball coach, was summoned to the athletic director’s office.
He figured he was in for a talking-to about sharing gym time with other teams. Instead, the athletic director told him he was out of a job.
Mr. Strom, a member of the Yakama Nation, said he had been a contractor for his first three seasons. He was only recently hired full time as a federal employee, which meant he was still in his probationary period.
“I felt safe. I really did,” he said, adding, “I thought being an educator was important in America.”
Ahniwake Rose, a Cherokee Nation citizen who is the president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, said that the Trump administration should reverse the firings soon. Otherwise, she warned, there could be “a trickle-down effect on long-term harm to these institutions” if students decided not to enroll because they feared for the universities’ health.
Tribe-controlled colleges, she said, were offering to send volunteer faculty and staff members in the meantime.
Mr. Strom decided to stick around for the rest of the season and coach as a volunteer, only miles from where James Naismith, basketball’s inventor, founded the University of Kansas’ fabled men’s team. The current Kansas coach, Bill Self, is the highest-paid college basketball coach in the United States.
“I really could paint that very ugly picture in that that coach is a white male, and I’m a minority, I’m a Native American,” Mr. Strom said in the gym complex, where four Native star quilts flank the American flag.
He paused.
“At the same time, I’d rather be better than bitter.”
On Sunday, the now-volunteer coach and his team won the conference title, securing a spot in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics national championship tournament.
But instead of recruiting for next season or spending as many hours preparing for games, Mr. Strom has been searching for jobs, hoping he will find a coaching gig someplace else.
Students are also worrying about the way forward for their lives and their campus, even though events like graduation remain on track.
“I know there’s going to be a day where this is talked about in history books,” said Mr. Moore, who was chosen as this year’s Haskell Brave, one of the university’s highest honors, adding, “I’m just sad that I’m living through it today.”
Catie Edmondson contributed reporting from Washington.
