United States | News & Politics

Haskell Indian Nations University was seemingly in the middle of a rebirth. Then the Trump administration happened.

More than three dozen faculty and staff at the university’s Lawrence campus were fired on Valentine’s Day, more than a quarter of Haskell’s workforce. It was part of a sweeping effort by the Trump White House and Elon Musk to essentially strip the federal government for parts — Haskell falls under the U.S. Department of the Interior — without regard for the work those employees did, or the harms that might result in letting them go.

. . . After all, Haskell began life in 1884 as one of the infamous boarding schools created by European Americans to strip young Native Americans of their tribal identity brutally, to assimilate them into whiteness. There are, by one count, the graves of 103 Native children on the Haskell campus.

Unlike many of those institutions, HINU eventually transformed itself into something better: a Native-led university now intended to serve — instead of erase — the cultures of more than 100 tribal nations across the country. “It’s a place for students that are native, they don’t have to explain themselves like they would at another institution,” Venida Chenault, Haskell’s former president, told me Friday.