The Weaving Our Stories conference in Blanding, UT brings Native American students, academics, and community members together. For three days, speakers and workshops explored how schools could best support Native American students.
Manny Manygoats is Diné, or Navajo, and is the student body vice president at Utah State University Blanding.
Manny said the conference is, "all about bringing everybody together and talking about our stories."
Manygoats' mother said that the core purpose of storytelling was represented in the three E's: "Educating, enlightening one another, and having empathy.”
At the conference, presenters led workshops in mental health services, art in school curricula, and the power of storytelling, all with a focus on Native American students.
This conference is just one of many opportunities funded through the Native-American Serving Non-Tribal Institutions (NASNTI) program.
According to their website, the original purpose of NASNTI was to help educational organizations, “improve and expand their capacity to serve Native Americans and low-income individuals.”
Funds from the NASNTI program did much more for USU-Blanding than just sponsoring the conference. NASNTI grant money supported professional development programs for Native students and paid the salaries of dedicated academic and mental health support staff.
But on Sept. 10, just a couple weeks before the conference, the US Department of Education, which oversees NASNTI, released this announcement:
“Today, the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) announced that it will end discretionary funding to several Minority-Serving Institutions (MSI) grant programs that discriminate by conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas.”
This funding cut removes $350 million in 2025 alone from institutions serving primarily Black, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Hispanic, and Native American populations.
USU-Blanding certainly doesn’t have an ethnic quota. But its student body is about 80% Native American, and the loss of funding will hit hard. One USU-Blanding administrator who wished to remain anonymous said that $4.5 million would be lost, several offices would close, and special services offered to Native American students would cease to exist.
The administrator said, “The mental health office will need to close if we cannot find a different source of funding. We will need to close the mentorship program. The grant pays for the salaries for eight mentors, they will not be available anymore. We will not have someone to work with the high schools to help the students in the transition to college, as that also was cut.”
USU recently opened a new campus in Monument Valley, in the far southeast corner of the state, on the Navajo Reservation. Without the NASNTI funding, the very existence of that campus is threatened.
“This year we will inaugurate a new campus in Monument Valley," the administrator said. "100% of the students there will be native. Of course, the school is open to all ethnicities, but it’s on the reservation and almost all students there are native. With this funding cut, I don’t know how the campus in Monument Valley or Montezuma Creek can survive.”
“Honestly, I think about it a lot," Manygoats said. "It's gonna lose a lot of kids from the reservation, because we're just a border town. Without the peer mentors, without the help that they need, without the checking up on the students, it's gonna hurt the numbers."
The NASNTI program funds interventions that are crucial for many Native American students as they transition to life in college.
Elden Brown is a Diné student at USU-Blanding. He said the NASNTI programs made a big difference when he first came to college.
“Something that really opened my eyes about this program was, you know, their goal is to also make sure we are feeling like we are home," Brown said. "To know that we still have our cultural ties to traditional ways.”
Native American students are underrepresented in the college sphere. For that administrator, the cutting of the NASNTI program feels like erasure.
“We learn our history through conferences like this," they said. "There is a debt that I believe the whole society has with our first habitants of this nation. They went through unspeakable things. They were victims for centuries of crimes. Cutting this grant is denying history, cutting this grant and all the other minority grants is denying what they went through."
"The NASNTI grant provides mentors that help them individually, not only in their academic needs, but in their emotional needs, allowed us to have a therapist that could assist them, academic advisors, counselors, staff that otherwise they will not have," they said. "For a school like ours, where almost 80% of these students are native, the loss of funding will be catastrophic, in my opinion.”