Tribal leaders reflect on a year of uncertainty — and possibility

 

by Anna V. Smith, B. ‘Toastie’ Oaster, Chad Bradley and Sunnie R. Clahchischiligi, High Country News
April 9, 2026

Over a year into the second Trump administration, Indigenous communities have seen dramatic changes, from rescinding land-management policies that were more inclusive of Indigenous knowledge and reducing $1.5 billion in climate funding for tribal initiatives to removing tribal flags from Veterans Affairs hospitals. The administration has regularly bypassed tribal consultation or rolled back the work the previous administration did in partnership with tribes.

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To better understand the on-the-ground impacts, High Country News reporters and editors spoke with the leaders of intertribal coalitions, commissions and Native-run community organizations across the Western U.S. Tribal leaders described the haphazard changes that affected their funding and staffing amid an atmosphere of uncertainty, but a few also mentioned a sense of possibility: While some changes have caused irrevocable community harm, there are also unexpected opportunities within the disruption — opportunities to reflect, remember their elders and to make new choices with the generations to come in mind.

These conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

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Click to read about tribal leaders' experiences during this time

Autumn Gillard (Southern Paiute)

Coordinator for the Grand Staircase Escalante Intertribal Coalition

During his first term, President Donald Trump shrank Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half. Last spring, the five tribes with ancestral lands within Grand Staircase-Escalante formed an intertribal coalition to better advocate for the monument and ensure that their perspectives were included in its management under a second Trump administration. In early March, Republican members of Congress sought to repeal the monument resource management plan that had been approved under the Biden administration.

Location: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah

“The groundwork actually started in 2019 to establish the coalition. A previous cultural manager from one of the tribes said we really need to have a tribal coalition for this monument, so that Indigenous voices can be heard.

“The resource management plan prior to 2020 did not include Indigenous voices in the management of our ancestral landscape, and so we had worked diligently as the coalition to make sure that we were putting comments in for this new process for the resource management plan that was approved in January of 2025.

“The (congressional actions) would severely impact the process that tribes had taken to integrate our traditional ecological knowledge into the commenting process for this management plan. It could also prohibit a future Resource Management Plan — maybe there wouldn't even be one. It would diminish all of the consultation that was held between the government and tribes. We worked so hard, and we have some individuals that have worked on these comments that are no longer with us. We’re not going to be able to re-retrieve that beautiful cultural knowledge.”

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Cody Desautel (Colville)

President of the Intertribal Timber Council

The Intertribal Timber Council, which comprises some 50 tribal nations, is focused on the management of forests, fire and natural resources. 

Location: Colville Reservation, Washington

“The Department of Interior fire reorganization has us concerned. The structure and how the leadership gets built out will be important in ensuring that they understand Indian Country; what some of their responsibilities will be for protecting tribal trust resources and then how they navigate (contracting with tribal governments), which will be new to most of them. There’s a lot of unknowns going into this fire season.

“With the reduction of the workforce in the U.S. Forest Service, and particularly under the leadership of the new chief, there seems to be a renewed objective to partner with tribes. We’ve got several bills working through Congress now that would expand tribal co-management authorities on adjacent federal land, and we've had some discussions about what shared stewardship agreements might look like. There's as much tribal-specific legislation moving through Congress as any point I've seen in my career.

“We always tend to pivot, recognizing where we’ve got opportunities with any given administration, and sometimes we pick up one political agenda with a change and then set down one that we worked on in the past. From a forestry and fire perspective, typically there’s a lot of alignment with those, and so we seem to be able to maintain some of the momentum that we’ve gained in past Congresses. 

“I think there’s always opportunity, even when there’s change. One of the best things that has come out of this administration is the focus on partnerships. Downsizing the federal government has impacts to us; it also creates opportunity when they're looking to have other partners do some of that work. I think tribes are situated to do that.”

KEEP READING: https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-leaders-reflect-on-a-year-of-uncertainty-and-possibility/

This article first appeared on High Country News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

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