Tribal communities risk losing local libraries and the history they hold amid DOGE cuts
Inside a 90-square-mile stretch of rural reservation between the eastern Jemez Mountains and the banks of the Rio Grande River sits the Santa Clara Pueblo Community Library, an anchor for the northern New Mexico tribe it serves.
Inside a 90-square-mile stretch of rural reservation between the eastern Jemez Mountains and the banks of the Rio Grande River sits the Santa Clara Pueblo Community Library, an anchor for the northern New Mexico tribe it serves.
Internet service across the Santa Clara Pueblo reservation is sparse, the tribe’s governor, James Naranjo, told NBC News, and resources to expand access to technology and literacy programs for its 1,700 members are already stretched thin.
Naranjo said the library relies on federal grant money to build bridges between the tribe and otherwise out-of-reach services — grants that could be on the chopping block thanks to cuts by the Trump administration.
The Pueblo’s was one of more than a hundred libraries on federally recognized tribal lands across the country that were notified by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) — a small federal agency responsible for funding local libraries and museums across the country — that their congressionally appropriated grant had been terminated midcycle, according to an IMLS spokesperson.
Children in the Santa Clara Pueblo Community Library.Santa Clara Pueblo Community Library“IMLS has determined that your grant is unfortunately no longer consistent with the agency’s priorities and no longer serves the interest of the United States and the IMLS Program,” one letter, obtained by NBC News from a tribal grant writer who received it, said. “IMLS is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
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