IGNACIO, Colorado – The Trump administration delivered a one-two punch this year to KSUT, a small NPR member station in southwest Colorado. Among the communities it serves are Native American tribes.
In February, the administration froze a grant for more than $500,000 to replace the station's aging radio transmitters, one of which is more than two decades old. Then, in July, Congress voted to kill funding for all public media, costing KSUT twenty percent of its approximately $1.5 million annual budget.
"This has been the most unreal roller coaster ride that I've been on in my career," says Tami Graham, who has run KSUT for the past decade.
The federal government didn't specifically target KSUT. It was just among several dozen tribal radio stations caught in the crossfire as President Trump moved to defund NPR and PBS for what he calls biased coverage.
KSUT is in a better financial position than most that serve native communities. Brian Wadsworth, Chief Operating Officer at Native Public Media, which supports native stations, says the vast majority of those affected have relied on federal funding for anywhere from 40 percent to all of their annual budgets.
KSUT is now trying to figure out a future independent of Uncle Sam.
"We're very conscious that two years from now or even a year from now, what are we going to be facing?" says Graham.
KSUT sits on the Southern Ute reservation in this town of about 1,000, a six-hour drive southwest of Denver. Ignacio's main drag is lined with adobe-style store fronts, just a short drive from a tribal casino with bowling and mini-golf.
KSUT has a tribal signal that provides a wide range of listening for the Southern Ute Tribe and other native Americans, from traditional drum music and native heavy metal to coverage of local high school basketball games and tribal news.
Sheila Nanaeto, the tribal station manager, serves as DJ for a morning show that features a variety of native American music, most of which you can't find online. She says the station plays at least forty-six hours of traditional music each week.
Angela Richards, who is raising her children in Southern Ute traditions, listens to KSUT while doing laundry and running errands.
"There's just something in the music; it's in the drum," says Richards, during an interview with her family at the local library. "It's healing. It brings you peace. It brings you strength."
Richards says she listened to tribal music on KSUT during all three of her pregnancies and recalls her eldest, Andres, tapping along to the beat when she was pregnant. Andres – now a tall, lanky high-school senior – says he participates in the Bear Dance, an annual Spring social dance, and the Sun Dance, a mid-summer spiritual ceremony. Andres says reinforcing tribal identity is crucial in a world where social media dominates.
"Many parents don't associate themselves with the traditions," says Andres, "It's kind of sad."
Although KSUT's tribal signal has only three employees, it does enterprise reporting on issues facing Native Americans. In 2022, Crystal Ashike, the digital content editor, noticed posts on social media about a mysterious white van picking up Navajo tribal members and taking them to sober living homes with the promise of treatment.
Instead, the homes allegedly used tribal members' information to defraud Arizona's Medicaid program of nearly three billion dollars. Thousands of tribal members were left untreated and stranded far from home. Ashike says she did the story as a public service and a warning.
"There's cases where people have not come home and are still missing," says Ashike, who works part-time for KSUT and has another full-time job to make ends meet.
In recent months, KSUT's fortunes have improved. Responding to the loss of federal funding, listeners donated at record levels.
"We eclipsed $500,000 in fundraising for the first time ever on general membership," Chris Aaland, the station's development director, explained at a recent staff meeting.
And – in a one-time deal – the federal Bureau of Indian affairs is restoring the federal money lost this year to support emergency alerts, which warn listeners about storms, flooding and road closures in a rural region where the internet can be spotty.
Graham is using this breathing space to begin to build a $6 million endowment, which she says would generate more than $200,000 annually and go a long way to replacing the federal funding on which the station has long depended. Graham says that, so far, she has commitments for $125,000.
"Do I wish we had started this endowment fund five or ten years ago? Of course," Graham says. "But this is the moment where people really do deeply understand more than ever the value of their local stations, including ours, and are willing to step up."
Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Correspondent Frank Langfitt. It was edited by Managing Editors Vickie Walton-James and Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself and the NPR Network, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
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