For Native American Tribes, Shutdown Stakes Are Especially High

On the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the contingency planning started weeks ago.

If the federal government shuts down, money that helps keep child welfare programs running, police officers paid and food programs stocked would dry up. Federal employees on the reservation could be asked to work without paychecks. And the tribe might need to tap its own reserves to keep the most basic functions of government going.

“When we start shutting things down, now do we have the funding to make sure that necessary services, life-and-death services, are going to continue?” said Jamie Azure, the chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

Shutdowns reverberate widely and painfully throughout the country — closing parks, disrupting loan applications, furloughing workers — but the stakes are especially high for Native American tribes. Generations ago, tribal nations reached treaties with the U.S. government that guaranteed basic services like health care and education in exchange for huge expanses of land.

Tribal governments have long criticized the United States for failing to fully live up to those treaties. But when the national bureaucracy stops functioning, the impact is still severe.

“Because those treaty rights are almost entirely funded through discretionary funding, it just shuts off” those services, said Tyler D. Scribner, the director of budget and appropriations for the National Indian Health Board and a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

On reservations across the country, tribal officials have been dusting off emergency plans, lining up stopgap funds, and prioritizing which programs and services they would keep running during a prolonged shutdown. But their planning has been complicated by a lack of clarity on how federal agencies plan to carry out slimmed-down operations during a shutdown.

“If they haven’t gotten their contingency plan out yet, it’s hard for us to figure out what are we going to do,” President Terri Parton of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes said on Thursday. “Our tribe is small enough that we would be OK for a little bit, but you don’t ever know how long these are going to last.”

Ms. Parton said her tribe, which is based in Oklahoma, was thinking through how it could keep running its food distribution program and child care facilities, which are administered by the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes using federal money.

Caitrin McCarron Shuy, the government relations director for the National Indian Health Board, which represents tribal governments, said tribes had varying abilities to weather a shutdown.

“They all have a different kind of funding picture,” she said. “Some may be looking at minimal disruption because they have enough money, but I think by and large most are really concerned that basic government functions won’t be able to continue.”

The threat of a shutdown conjures bad memories from 2018 and 2019, when another federal impasse forced tribes to either spend their own funds or endure painful cuts to basic services. A snowstorm on the Navajo Nation during that shutdown left roads unplowed, trapping people in their homes. On Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians spent about $100,000 of its money every day to keep federal programs running.

“The federal government owes us this: We prepaid with millions of acres of land,” Aaron Payment, who was then the chairman of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe, said during that shutdown. “We don’t have the right to take back that land, so we expect the federal government to fulfill its treaty and trust responsibility.”

In contrast to the last shutdown, there is less concern this year about immediate cutbacks to medical care through the Indian Health Service, which serves about 2.7 million Native Americans and Alaska Natives. A recent funding change provided that agency with advance appropriations, meaning it has more of a fiscal cushion to weather a funding lapse.

But other vital programs remain threatened. On the Turtle Mountain Reservation, Mr. Azure said he was already concerned about what would happen if a shutdown stretched into the long and brutal North Dakota winter. His tribe, whose land is near the Canadian border, relies on federal money to distribute food and fuel for heating homes to vulnerable residents.

He worried that a shutdown could touch off a vicious cycle: If federal employees who live on the reservation are furloughed or are working without pay, then they also might need aid from the food and fuel programs, adding to the strain on the tribe’s budget.

“The tribal government is trying to make decisions to make sure that nobody freezes to death,” Mr. Azure said. He added: “It’s a lot of work. We’re trying to forecast all of these things all at once.”