Doug Burgum created the Government to Government Conference in January 2018. His third week as North Dakota’s governor, he met with leaders of all five tribal nations headquartered in the state and the presidents of all five tribal colleges. He designated tribal engagement as one of his administration’s five strategic initiatives. Three hundred people came to the first conference. It became annual.

The eighth conference was held in Bismarck on June 3, 2026. Burgum was not there as governor. He was there as Secretary of the Interior — the man whose department has recommended cutting more than $1 billion from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education for fiscal year 2027. A 27 percent reduction to the BIA. A 32 percent cut to the BIE. More than $150 million stripped from tribal higher education.

The man who built the room proposed to cut the floor.

In May, testifying before the House, Burgum called tribal college spending “way out of whack.” He said he wasn’t sure the federal government was “giving a high-quality experience.” He pointed to Arizona State University, which enrolls more than 3,000 Native students without BIA subsidies, as proof that the subsidies aren’t necessary.

Arizona State University sits in a metropolitan area of five million people. Sitting Bull College sits on the Standing Rock Reservation. Turtle Mountain Community College sits in Belcourt, population 2,400. Comparing them to a research university with a billion-dollar endowment and calling the per-student cost “out of whack” isn’t efficiency analysis. It’s a category error designed to look like one.

Jamie Azure, chair of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, stood at the conference Burgum built and said: “We ask that we get past the words — we ask that we have true partnerships moving forward because of the threats to our ways of life with potential cuts at the federal level.”

He was asking Burgum’s room for protection from Burgum’s budget.

Azure also said what the conference might have preferred not to hear: “It’s community — it’s not only a college.” Tribal colleges teach Ojibwe. They teach Dakota. They teach land management and tribal governance. They are often the only post-secondary institution within a hundred miles. The cost-per-student comparison doesn’t account for the fact that the student can’t commute to ASU from Belcourt.

Mark Fox, chair of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, was blunter: “Never will the United States come in and put enough capital — in my estimation, somewhere around maybe a trillion dollars — into all the Indian reservations.”

That’s not despair. That’s an invoice. Fox is quantifying the gap between treaty promise and delivered reality, and he’s saying the check will never come. So he’s building without it. The MHA Nation is developing natural gas infrastructure and data centers on the Fort Berthold Reservation, charting a path toward eliminating federal dependence entirely. They can do this because they sit on the Bakken formation — one of the most productive oil regions in North America.

Most tribes don’t have the Bakken.

Here is the structural trap. Federal funding to tribes is not a grant program. It is a treaty obligation — the legal settlement for the land the country stands on. The U.S. Constitution recognizes hundreds of treaties as the supreme law of the land. The Supreme Court established that the federal government holds tribal land in trust. These are not DEI line items. They are the terms of a deal the United States signed and has never fully honored.

But the deal also created the cage. Trust land can’t be used as collateral. Tribes can’t issue tax-exempt bonds the way cities and counties can. They can’t levy property taxes the way every other government does. The structural mechanisms that allow every municipality in America to fund its own infrastructure are denied to tribal nations — by the same federal system that now says they should be more self-sufficient.

Be sovereign, the budget says. But not with the tools sovereignty requires.

The Turtle Mountain Band set aside $1.5 million of its own money to cover safety net services when the federal government shutdown suspended SNAP and other programs. They funded the obligation the federal government walked away from. That’s sovereignty in practice — not as aspiration, but as emergency response to a broken promise.

Billy Kirkland, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, delivered the keynote. He said the Department of the Interior’s focus is cutting red tape that prevents tribal nations from exercising their independence. He cited new rules under the Tribal General Welfare Exclusion Act and an online platform for the tribal probate backlog.

Red tape is real. Probate backlogs are real. But red tape is not a $1 billion line item. The budget isn’t cutting bureaucracy. It’s cutting services — law enforcement, housing, healthcare, education, the programs that land on reservation soil. Congress rejected nearly identical cuts on a bipartisan basis in FY 2026. The administration submitted them again.

Thirty-four accredited tribal colleges serve Native students across the country. Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute — the only two tribally-serving universities run by the federal government — laid off 20 percent of their staff under DOGE-mandated cuts. Professors. Maintenance staff. Student support. Classes canceled. Graduations delayed. The proposed FY 2027 budget would eliminate all dedicated TCU funding.

The conference Burgum created eight years ago was designed to be a bridge. In 2024, when he was nominated for Interior, North Dakota tribal leaders called him an ally. They had reason to. He’d spent seven years building the relationship.

Now the eighth conference is the venue where tribal leaders organize against the policies of the man who built it. The word “sovereignty” is spoken at the same podium by two speakers who mean two different things. Kirkland means deregulation — fewer federal requirements, more flexibility. Azure and Fox mean survival — the right to exist without the funding floor disappearing every fiscal year.

One of those definitions comes with a $1 billion cut. The other comes with a $1.5 million emergency fund, paid from tribal coffers, to feed people the treaties were supposed to feed.

Steve Sitting Bear, chair of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said: “We come from a proud people who have always stood up for our rights, for our lands, for our resources.”

He said it in the room Burgum built.

// NEON BLOOD