Local opinion: The silent erasure of cultural heritage

It’s almost too perfect a crime — the anti-humanity of dismantling the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The agency was created in 1965 to ensure that American greatness be measured by more than military might and economic power, to include the cultural expressions that our very human activities define, celebrate, and uphold.

The gutting of the NEH’s staff and funding does not make America great; it greatly diminishes what Americans stand for. It’s not about reducing “waste and fraud.” The agency’s budget, $200.1 million in 2025, represents a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Rather, this crime is a deliberate unraveling of our collective commitment to understanding who we are and how we got here.

At the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson, Arizona, where I work as a folklorist, writer, and editor, the cut came swiftly and impersonally, via a form letter received at 4 a.m. announcing immediate termination of our NEH-funded program, ClimateLore. Already a year underway, the program has trained US-Mexico borderlands residents to document oral histories from agriculturalists, gardeners, educators, and cultural workers focusing on climate impacts and adaptations in desert communities. The stories represent survival knowledge from communities facing extreme heat, drought, and the loss of traditional foodways and sacred sites. Without NEH support, these stories — and the survival strategies they contain — might disappear, not unlike the reliable rainfall our borderlands once knew.

The cuts will also dry up funding to Arizona Humanities, which has served our state’s rural and urban communities for fifty years. In 2024, such funds supported included Representation Matters, a series of crucial conversations about democracy across the state; the Blue Corn Festival, celebrating Diné food and cultural traditions; AZ Reads, helping K-12 kids develop critical thinking skills; and AZ Speaks, hosting university scholars to unpack timely topics like AI and antisemitism. These programs aren’t luxuries — they’re necessities for a functioning democracy.

Over the past 15 years, Arizona Humanities has helped make possible half a dozen programs the Southwest Folklife Alliance. With modest but reliable funds, we built a mobile kiosk that traveled all over Southern Arizona highlighting the work of farmers and heirloom foods grown in the state; we documented cultural traditions around death and dying in vulnerable communities; and at last year’s beloved annual folklife festival, Tucson Meet Yourself, we staged a new pavilion that shared stories about how small businesses such as nail salons and barbershops hold cultural significance and encourage economic prosperity.

What makes the crime of ending humanities funding so unjust is how it capitalizes on false crises about waste and fraud to justify removing institutions that help us understand real crises — climate collapse, growing racial discord, displacement of people, and economic anxieties. When society faces its biggest challenges, that’s precisely when we need more engagement with history, ethics, and cultural analysis — not less.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act in 1965, he wasn’t creating just another government agency. The Act stated clearly that “world leadership which has come to the United States cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation’s high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.”

The perfect crime succeeds when victims don’t realize they’ve been robbed until the thieves are long gone. But we in the humanities are watching in real time, registering dissent with the tools of our trade.

Listen — there’s a song being sung right now, its melody one you know in your bones. There’s a special meal being prepared with flavors your great-grandparents knew well. There’s a cloth to weave, a greeting to offer, a dance to bring rain from desert skies. Let’s gather in the public square and remember those very human acts together. Here in the desert, resilience requires both adaptation and remembrance. The humanities help us do both.