“They want to completely terminate the trust responsibility"
“They want to completely terminate the trust responsibility"
The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 has an insidious agenda for tribal nations
Key takeaways:
Project 2025’s playbook for dismantling the federal government would functionally sever federal Indian trust responsibilities
The conservative playbook echoes over a century of assimilationist and Termination era Indian policies
Losing access to federal programs, funding, and services would inflame tribal economic and social disparities
By contrast, Project 2025’s conservative culture war fears Indigenous interest groups and activists will “tear apart the foundations of Western Civilization”
Since the Indian Wars ended and tribes were confined to reservations by military force, those who walked the halls of power in Washington D.C. have long discussed solutions to “The Indian Question,” that is: how to deal with United States’ relations with tribal nations, who were viewed as “an obstacle to national progress.” From the late-1800s, 1950’s, and most recently our election year 2024, white policymakers and special interest groups have been promoting assimilation as beneficial to the Indian “race” while eyeing natural resources on tribal lands. Today, these policies are now championed by the Heritage Foundation and its massive coalition of far-right organizations whose plan to “dismantle the administrative state” has no genuine interest in upholding any U.S. federal-Indian relations.
For centuries, tribal nations have fought for their existence and rights to self-determination with the U.S. As America approaches Election Day in November, tribes and Native peoples will face down the greatest twenty-first century threat to tribal sovereignty and Indian rights since the 1950’s assimilationist policies sought to dispose of “tribal status” altogether: Project 2025.
“They want to completely terminate the trust responsibility,” said David Wilkins, professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond and citizen of the Lumbee Nation of North Carolina. “The very thing that a trustee cannot do is offload their responsibilities.”
An analysis by No Frontiers found Project 2025 would aggressively offload the U.S. federal Indian trust responsibility, a legally enforceable fiduciary obligation to protect tribal trust lands, trust assets, as well as provide essential services across all departments. According to three Indian law and policy experts No Frontiers interviewed, the Heritage Foundation’s policy playbook would functionally sever the U.S. government’s obligations to provide essential federal programs and services, including health care, sacred site protections, Head Start education, housing, tribal loan programs. Instead the playbook opens up fossil fuel development on tribal and public lands once restricted by cornerstone conservation and environmental protections. Each year, Congress passes laws to secure funding for programs that fulfill its trust responsibilities, but what if agencies and their programs are cut or funding is slashed? Project 2025 seemingly ignores well-documented policy shortfalls and recommendations to alleviate Indian Country’s billions of dollars in unmet needs and services entrusted to federal departments and agencies.
Among its overarching goals, Project 2025 promises to “DISMANTLE THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE AND RETURN SELF-GOVERNANCE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” The conservative movement has long harbored anti-federal government sentiment, condemned government regulation and environmental protections, abhorred policy-making from the Washington liberal elite who have no “common sense,” and advocated for “state’s rights” to govern a citizen’s most important constitutional rights and civil liberties. But Project 2025 goes much further promoting the most extreme Christian Nationalist-aligned view of American society and a radical devotion to un-regulated big business. For tribal nations, its vision for Indian Country echoes a time-worn colonial aspiration: natural resource extraction.
“The purpose [of Project 2025] is a version of assimilation that Native peoples have had to endure in the past at a much grander scale,” said Keith Richotte, Jr., director of Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy Program at the University of Arizona and citizen of Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.
Reading Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s primary concern appears to the oil and gas development on tribal lands. The new administration, it reads, should “End the war on fossil fuels and domestically available minerals and facilitate their development on lands owned by Indians and Indian nations.” The playbook accuses the Biden Administration of breaching its federal Indian trust responsibilities to American Indians through its supposed war on fossil fuels, subsidies of electric vehicles, border security and illegal drug control policies, and the Bureau of Indian Education’s “un-American” curriculum and pro-LGBTQ+ student policies.
“Once we get past the surface layer of the language, there’s no interest in the trust responsibility whatsoever,” Richotte told me over the phone. The policy playbook, he said, uses the language of freedom and emancipation to promote “unburdening Native peoples from all these terrible restrictions” imposed by the federal government and sweeps tribal affairs into a Christian Nationalist, corporate-welfare, culture war agenda. But perhaps most telling of all, Project 2025 resurrects the age-old common denominator of colonial desires: natural resources.
“These proposals primarily aim to transfer wealth from tribal governments and individual Indians to private non-Indian economic interests like the oil and gas industry, mining, and corporations that have benefitted from the privatization of government agencies like schools and prisons,” said Matthew Fletcher, Indian law professor at Michigan State University and contributor to Indian law and policy blog Turtle Talk. Aside from that, much of the policy plan for Indian Country is “almost nonsensical,” says Fletcher.
[READ: Project 2025 and Indian Country at a glance]
One of the greatest challenges Indian Country’s social and economic disparities is that federal programs have remained “chronically underfunded and sometimes inefficiently structured,” according to U.S Commission on Civil Right’s December 2018 budgetary report, estimating billions of dollars in unmet need. The plan appears to have no awareness of tribal disparities or plans to address basic tribal nation needs within the billions of dollars in unmet federal funding.
The federal Indian trust responsibility arises from the “special relationship” created by the nearly 400 treaties signed between tribal nations and the U.S. government and has been affirmed by several U.S. Supreme Court opinions. Treaties assigned all manner of obligations to the federal government, most importantly the support for tribal self-governance, economic stability, and services like food, healthcare, and managing Indian lands. Yet the federal government has a long, mixed history of fulfilling their obligations and have even tried to permanently sever those obligations through assimilation while also opening access to previously restricted tribal lands and resources.
In 1887, Congress passed the General Allotment Act (also called the Dawes Act) that distributed reservation lands to individual Indians to permanently reduce the amount of land tribes collectively held, privatizing 90 million acres and selling them to settler homesteaders and corporations. Before the Allotment Act, tribes held 138 million acres, but were left with 48 million acres. Not only was Indian land targeted by Congress, but lawmakers explicitly wanted to “create divisions among Native Americans and eliminate the social cohesion of tribes.”
Over the next few decades, tribes faced untenable reservation living conditions, suffering from major issues like lack of healthcare, poverty, unemployment, economic stability, and poor land cultivation. “An overwhelming majority of the Indians are poor, even extremely poor, and they are not adjusted to the economic and social system of the dominant white civilization,” found a 1928 survey known as the Meriam Report: The Problem of Indian Administration.
In the 1950’s, after settling dozens of Indian land claims arising from treaty rights, congressional lawmakers were eager to jettison their federal Indian trust responsibility and government-to government relationship with tribes. In 1953, congress agreed that terminating tribal citizenship and legally assimilating Native Americans into American citizens “as rapidly as possibly” was in their best interest. Thus began the Termination Era, resulting in the “termination and liquidation of tribal owned reservation assets,” which ultimately removed the status of over 100 tribes by the time it ended in 1970. Along with their Indian status, tribes also lost their federal services and supervision like housing, education, healthcare, and more. When reservations dissolved and Indians began moving to urban centers, many felt they lost their collective tribal identities.
Congressional supporters of termination assured tribes these policies “freed” Indian peoples from the “disabilities” of being Indian by handing back the federal-Indian trust responsibility, yet these policies had only negative impacts on the poverty, death, and disease that afflicted tribal nations.
Project 2025’s plan for dismantling federal Indian administration echoes these seismic assimilationist policies that seem to arise every few decades and is no less blunt with their goals to open access to tribal lands and natural resources. “Colonialism at its heart is about resource extraction,” said Richotte. “It seems to me that’s what project 2025 is: to open up opportunities to extract resources under the guise of tribal sovereignty.”
The one Indigenous sign-off
In a seemingly inconsequential blog post published in January by the far-right nonprofit Center for Renewing America (CRA), the organization rails against the Indigenous decolonization movement that, among various goals, lays an ideological foundation to achieve certain American Indian tribal interests, such as recovering lost homelands and greater tribal sovereignty. If the president of CRA wasn’t a chief architect of Project 2025, this seemingly fringe far-right propaganda usually makes little difference to those it despises, but its role in envisioning a Christian Fundamentalist United States government and overhauled federal Indian administration makes its views all the more concerning.
The center quotes a Native American scholar from The Red Nation with their most radical-sounding academic assertions who write on Indigenous decolonization and activism, and likens the decolonization movement to “radical Islamic jihadists” who will use violence to achieve their goals and “tear apart the foundations of Western Civilization.” At its core, tribes taking back their homelands feels like an existential threat to these white far-right extremists who want to take back America—or Make America Great Again. “The end goal of the decolonization activists is the complete destruction and abolition of the United States.”
“Decolonization” has many varied political, historical, and even spiritual meanings to tribes, movements, and individuals. Broadly speaking, decolonization is about reversing and remedying the impacts of settler colonization, from economic development to returning dispossessed Indigenous lands, restoring tribal self-governance, and granting independence to colonial countries while expelling European powers. These movements have put their bodies on the line to stop fossil fuel pipelines, build solidarity across borders, demand accountability from state and federal governments, protect treaty rights and sacred sites to name just a few. In simple terms, it’s about righting the wrongs of a violent 500 years of colonization—not quite something tribes equate to terrorism, much less so-called Islamic terrorism.
The single Indigenous organization co-sponsoring Project 2025 is the Native Americans for Sovereignty and Preservation (NASP), which was granted tax-exempt status in May 2023. According to a now-deleted Instagram post, NASP is on the advisory board of Project 2025 and is a “pro-life, conservative, traditional organization led by the wisdom of our elders.” As of publication, there are no names or leadership, and no named “elders” attached to NASP, but No Frontiers has tracked down its owner: Michael Woestehoff, who appears to be Diné (Navajo).
In the past few years, Woestehoff’s Ellsworth, LCC has received over $882,000 through federal contracts with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, and Bureau of Indian Education, according to federal contract award data.
Woestehoff served on the Native Americans for Trump coalition and runs a blog called The Washington Lobbyist, a site that appreciates the many lobbies and restaurants in hotels and entertainment venues in Washington DC. According to reporting in Indian Country Today, he appears to have been the communication director for National Indian Education Association around 2018.
Project 2025 receives an endorsement from a single, though unnamed, Indian person and their recently inaugurated organization, yet they received no such endorsements from prominent and legacy tribal rights organizations like the National Congress of American Indians, Native American Rights Fund, NDN Collective, or other Indian organizations.
As we know from undercover reporting on Project 2025’s chief architect CRA president Russ Vought, the secret plans for a “second phase” of Project 2025 includes packing the new federal government with Trump loyalists who will not question the policies set forth in their playbook, just carry them out. According to the report, Vought is “overseeing the drafting of hundreds of executive orders, regulations and secretarial memos, to help make the US conservative movement’s radical goals a reality.” This includes including mass deportations, restricting abortion, using the military against racial justice protestors (like decolonization activists), and more.
This begs the question, who will be in charge of federal Indian administration that fits the bill as a Trump loyalist? And what secretive and unknown Indian Country policies are left out of the available Project 2025 playbook?
In an email to No Frontiers, Woestehoff wrote “Back in July, the Heritage Foundation announced that Paul Dans had stepped down and Project 2025's policy operations were concluding. We have not interacted with Project 2025 since then and have also moved on from those activities.”
He did not respond to a request for an interview.
Without a robust federal government with departments, agencies, and programs devoted to carrying the federal Indian trust responsibilities of providing health care, education, housing, management of trust assets and Indian monies, environmental protections, sacred site protections, what would be left for tribes to rely on? Project 2025’s privatization proposals aren’t clear.
One must also keep in mind that Project 2025 only contains the known policy goals of for Indian Country. There maybe a bevy of drafted legislation, executive orders, secretarial memos, and rules and regulations the far-right conservative movement is holding close to their chest that would impact Indian Country.
What is clear is white Christian fundamentalist assimilation is on the horizon for tribal nations once again.