The Trump administration’s “Big Disastrous Bill” is looking to cut over 13 million dollars of funding from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). This represents about 75% of their annual budget!
The Institute of American Indian Arts was founded in 1962 with funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and grew from a high school to an accredited 4-year public tribal land-grant college chartered by Congress. While the college focuses on Native American art, it has a full academic program and accepts a fair number of non-Indian students.
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| IAIA Campus |
According to their website, “IAIA seeks to attract… students from diverse backgrounds and cultural experiences. IAIA believes in equality of educational opportunity and welcomes all applications for admission. Non-American Indian applicants are evaluated by the same criteria as American Indian, Alaska Native and Canadian First Nations applicants. Admission is granted without regard to age, gender, race, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, or religion.”
The Santa Fe location of the college is appropriate since 20% of the Native American population resides in the Southwest. In its 68 years of existence, 4,000 students, representing more than 90% of the 562 federally recognized tribes, have graduated from IAIA, and more than 20% of those have earned graduate degrees. What I found particularly interesting was that IAIA has a Museum Studies Program and many of its graduates have gone on to museums around the map.
In addition to their campus on the perimeter of Santa Fe, IAIA also has a museum in the center of town. It presents independent exhibitions of indigenous art and also shows alumni work that is part of their permanent collection. The downtown location serves to introduce the many visitors to Santa Fe to contemporary Native American Art.
In the Southwest the names of many Indian artists and their teachers are far better known than those of the European Old Masters that I was familiar with in New York. The list of prominent Native artist/teachers and graduates of IAIA is long so I will only mention a few.
One of the teachers, I wrote about a few weeks ago was Fritz Scholder, others are Allan Houser, Otellie Loloma, David Bradley as well as the renowned author N. Scott Momaday. Among the graduates are Tony Abeyta, Roxanne Swentzell and her daughter Rose Simpson (who had an outdoor exhibition last year in New York,) as well as Diego Romero and his brother Mateo Romero (who did the paintings of Powwows Indians which are on the new Forever U.S. postage stamps).
Though there are many things lacking in the education we give our children these days, I believe that there are few who do not know that the Indians were here first, hence the term Native Americans. Further it is acknowledged that their population was decimated by the “Manifest Destiny” of an advancing White population who came as immigrants from Europe seeking freedom and economic opportunity.
In response to the proposed new budget cut for IAIA, Dr. Robert Martin (Cherokee Nation), who has been President of the University for the past 18 years and is planning to retire at the end of July, said this: “Our ancestors faced similar kinds of challenges, probably even more difficult than something like being zeroed out … and they continued to persevere and not give up … That’s the same thing that has to happen here.”)
Why, with the destructive chaos that the Trump administration has already caused, would they now go after the education promised by the federal government to the original inhabitants of this country? Yet another promise broken.
The Santa Fe location of the college is appropriate since 20% of the Native American population resides in the Southwest. In its 68 years of existence, 4,000 students, representing more than 90% of the 562 federally recognized tribes, have graduated from IAIA, and more than 20% of those have earned graduate degrees. What I found particularly interesting was that IAIA has a Museum Studies Program and many of its graduates have gone on to museums around the map.
In addition to their campus on the perimeter of Santa Fe, IAIA also has a museum in the center of town. It presents independent exhibitions of indigenous art and also shows alumni work that is part of their permanent collection. The downtown location serves to introduce the many visitors to Santa Fe to contemporary Native American Art.
One of the teachers, I wrote about a few weeks ago was Fritz Scholder, others are Allan Houser, Otellie Loloma, David Bradley as well as the renowned author N. Scott Momaday. Among the graduates are Tony Abeyta, Roxanne Swentzell and her daughter Rose Simpson (who had an outdoor exhibition last year in New York,) as well as Diego Romero and his brother Mateo Romero (who did the paintings of Powwows Indians which are on the new Forever U.S. postage stamps).
Though there are many things lacking in the education we give our children these days, I believe that there are few who do not know that the Indians were here first, hence the term Native Americans. Further it is acknowledged that their population was decimated by the “Manifest Destiny” of an advancing White population who came as immigrants from Europe seeking freedom and economic opportunity.
In response to the proposed new budget cut for IAIA, Dr. Robert Martin (Cherokee Nation), who has been President of the University for the past 18 years and is planning to retire at the end of July, said this: “Our ancestors faced similar kinds of challenges, probably even more difficult than something like being zeroed out … and they continued to persevere and not give up … That’s the same thing that has to happen here.”)
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| Dr. Martin receives National Humanities Medal |
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