Budget Sequester Relief Would Help Students Already Sequestered on Indian Reservations
It is not surprising that the educational impact of the federal budget cuts known as “sequestration” should most seriously affect American Indian children on the reservations. After all, my dictionary defines sequestration as “seclusion, separation, setting apart, removal.”
Indian reservations are places where, over the past two centuries, our society has set apart and made invisible the indigenous people we defeated. If you have visited northern Montana, where I grew up, you may have noticed the flag of the Blackfeet Nation flying next to the U.S. flag at the St. Mary’s visitor center at the east entrance to Glacier Park, but you have probably never heard of Rocky Boy, Fort Belknap, or Fort Peck.
It is therefore entirely predictable that in 2011, when Congress passed a budget-reduction plan that carved 5 percent of funding from all the federal departments, the cuts to education would most seriously hurt the schools serving already sequestered American Indian children, schools which, according to a recent article in Education Week, are likely to depend on Congress for as much as 80 percent of their funding. Federal Impact Aid is a program that supports schools in places where there is little private property to tax locally—the reservations and schools on military bases.
According to Education Week, “Perhaps no other single group of students has been as walloped by sequestration—the biggest cuts to federal education spending in history—as Native