Megan Taros
Source New Mexico
After three iterations of legislation, the pueblos, Apache tribes and Navajo Nation are closer than ever to receiving millions in funding from New Mexico to create more educational opportunities for Native students as a bill bulldozes through the session with overwhelming bipartisan support.
Native lawmakers and tribal community leaders helped deliver a decisive victory for tribal autonomy in public education as House Bill 134, the tribal education trust fund, passed the House in a 68-0 vote.
“What this does is it pushes back against 200 plus years of federal policies that sought to erase Native Americans from this nation and says, ‘we know how to school, teach our children best,’” said bill sponsor Rep. Derrick Lente (D-Sandia Pueblo).
The bill must now pass through the Senate. If signed into law, the trust fund would be the first of its kind in the nation.
The bill faced challenges at the House Appropriations and Finance Committee on Feb. 2 where the Navajo Nation government walked back support of the bill in response to a previous component of the proposal that would have created a task force to design a funding distribution model for the trust fund money.
An amendment introduced Thursday by Lente on the House floor struck all language about the task force and instead requires a funding formula be “developed in a unanimous consensus process of consultation, collaboration and communication with New Mexico tribes.”
The formula would consider populations and capacity needs for each of the 23 tribal nations in the state.
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren and the Navajo Nation Council wrote in support of the bill after the latest amendment, Lente told lawmakers on the House floor.
Co-sponsor Rep. Anthony Allison (D-Fruitland) delivered a rebuke of the harm enacted on Native communities by the education system while praising the bill as transformative for being a step toward change and repairing that harm.
“Education has been used as a process to assimilate us,” Allison, Diné, said. “It has devastated generations of our people … The first Indian education policy was purposely designed to kill our language and kill our culture by removing children from their language and culture.”
The trust fund would distribute 5 perceent of the average year-end market values of the trust fund over the last five years directly to tribes. The money would not go directly to school districts due to concerns about inequitably funding schools.
The bill asks for a $100 million appropriation to start the fund, which is already half-funded in the current budget proposal. Lente said he is hoping the Senate side would agree to put up the rest.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham wrote a letter to the All Pueblo Council of Governors expressing concern that the trust fund may come at the expense of the annual $50 million tribal capital outlay package. Members of the All Pueblo Council of Governors wrote back requesting the governor work with Lente and the Legislature to fund both.
Lente told lawmakers that the bill would support tribal autonomy and give tribal governments the capacity to create programming for their children across the state, whether in tribal or public schools.
He said it was important for tribes to be able to build their own solutions, especially as the New Mexico Public Education Department lags in creating plans to address the landmark Yazzie-Martinez ruling. The ruling mandates public school education reform in the state.
“These types of actions here that we may be taking independently are being done on behalf of making sure that, while we agree that Yazzie-Martinez was ruled correctly, that we have to somehow some way have to step up for children in our communities to make sure that we don’t have to wait for PED to draft the plan,” Lente said. “That we have to take the bull by the horns and do something for our people.”
Another bill co-sponsor, Rep. Patricia Roybal-Caballero, was emotional as she spoke about her relatives being taken away from the families to residential schools, calling the tribal education trust fund necessary, but “a drop in the bucket” to addressing the violence enacted on Native communities.
Roybal-Caballero (D-Albuquerque) told lawmakers on the House floor it was “beyond time” to acknowledge the importance of Native populations in New Mexico, in the present and the future.
“Our return is in the form of an apology for what has been stripped from us all these generations,” Roybal-Caballero said. “This is just the beginning of attempting to correct our historical pasts and to bring to light in the classroom where our children will study the truth behind who they are…and the significance they bring to the table.”
