NEA Response March 2025
March 5, 2025
Dear Professor Mithlo,
Thank you for following up – I hope things are better or improving.
In case it's helpful, and as you may have seen, the NEA updated its FY 2026 grant guidelines and covered the changes in a
February 18th webinar. It's available on YouTube and you can access the webinar slides here.
Best,
Funding Opportunities Officer
Research Enhancement Office (REO) | UCLA Office of Research &
Creative Activities (ORCA)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Dear Funding Opportunities Officer,
Thank you for your kind assistance. I have reviewed the grant requirements and learned that due to President Trump's new
mandates listed under "Assurances of Compliance," I am ineligible for the "NEA Grants for Arts Projects LSO," due to my
role as faculty with Gender Studies and American Indian Studies.
RE: "In accordance with the President’s Executive Orders, the NEA will not fund projects that include DEI
activities. Applicants must certify that they do not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate federal antidiscrimination
laws, including programs outside the scope of their NEA project."
Also: "The applicant understands that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
Because my current project directly addresses Indigenous feminisms and the environment in the arts, I cannot pursue my research under the National Endowment of the Arts due to the agency's recent restrictions to my field of study.
Please note that I have published three peer review articles with my co-researcher Dr. Aleksandra Sherman, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, Occidental College under our prior NEA Grant awarded in 2015: "NEA Research: Art Works project Seeing American Indians" (Grant # 15-3800-7003).
The "Seeing American Indians" project trained dozens of undergraduate and graduate students over the past ten years and has been presented in conferences as varied as the American Anthropological Association's Visual Research Conference, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Academy of Sciences and most recently in the boardroom of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024). Our planned future work with LACMA and UCLA is now jeopardized due to our ineligibility of support for our very training and teaching in our subject matter, stunting the public's enhanced understanding of empathy and bias using cross-cultural communication tools.
Please feel free to share my message with your supervisors.
Yours,
Nancy
Nancy Marie Mithlo [pronounce]
www.nancymariemithlo.com
Professor, Gender Studies and American Indian Studies
University of California Los Angeles, 1120G Rolfe Hall
Box 951504
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1504
UCLA Gender Studies strongly believes in the principle of academic freedom and insists on our duty as ethical scholars to teach, discuss, and research wherever inquiry leads. Our interdisciplinary field was forged to recover and build knowledge that is systematically marginalized, discredited, or disappeared by systems of power. We value academic freedom because it supports an environment for a rich exchange of ideas and interventions, including those that may be critical of existing power relations, deemed controversial or provocative, or vulnerable to being targeted by doxing, censorship, and repression. As scholars whose work collectively interrogates various forms of power, violence, and repression, we are committed to defending and advancing the rights of faculty, staff, and students to produce dissenting knowledge and voice dissenting opinions, both in the classroom and out.
After Mass Arrests, UCLA Faculty Protest at Hammer Museum Gala
May 6, 2024 As black luxury SUVs dropped off guests, faculty demanded the resignation of UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, a member of the Hammer’s board of directors.
LOS ANGELES — Over 50 faculty members of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) gathered outside the Hammer Museum on Saturday evening, May 4, ahead of the institution’s annual gala, to call for amnesty for students and colleagues arrested during the police siege of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment last week. As guests arrived at the Westwood and Wilshire Boulevard entrance, faculty chanted, held signs, and made noise with whistles and bells, demanding the resignation of UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, a member of the Hammer’s board of directors. READ MORE >>
UCLA cancels in-person classes after protests continue on campus
May 6, 2024
UCLA has canceled all in-person classes on Monday, May 6, after Israel-Hamas war protests continue on campus for a second week. All classes will be held remotely through Friday, May 10.
The campus sent out and alert saying, "Law enforcement is stationed around campus to help promote safety and actively monitor conditions. The hospital and health system, other clinical operations, and housing and hospitality facilities remain open."
43 protesters arrested at UCLA, as school shifts classes to remote for the week
Tuesday, May 7, 2024 12:29AM
WESTWOOD, LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- UCLA is shifting all classes this week to remote learning after more protesters were arrested on campus early Monday.
Forty-three protesters were arrested on the third floor of a UCLA parking structure for "conspiracy to commit burglary," authorities said Monday.
Police In Riot Gear Clear UCLA Encampment, Firing Flash Bangs And Arresting Protesters
By Frank Stoltze, Brian Feinzimer, Yusra Farzan and Makenna Sievertson
Updated May 2, 2024 6:16 PM
Published May 1, 2024 6:29 AM
(Brian Feinzimer/LAist)
Hundreds of law enforcement officers in riot gear cleared out a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA early Thursday, firing flash bangs and dismantling barriers.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block released a statement Thursday confirming that 200 people were arrested. UCLA associate professor Graeme Blair told LAist that around 10 of those arrested were faculty members. READ MORE >>
Pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli protesters support their respective causes at UCLA
Organizers behind the demonstration urged activists to gather at Royce Quad until their "demands are met."
By Helen Jeong and Christian Cázares • Published April 25, 2024 • Updated on April 25, 2024 at 11:28 pm
Native American Scholars Take on "Killers of the Flower Moon"
on NPR's "It's Been a Minute" with host Brittany Luse, November 14, 2023.
Featuring Liza Black, Robert Warrior and Nancy Marie Mithlo
Listen to the interview or read transcript here: www.npr.org/transcripts/1197954279
Killers of the Flower Moon:
Wrong Message, Wrong Moment:
Why Hollywood Still Can’t Get Indians Right
Nancy Marie Mithlo, October 28, 2023
“We’ve had so many deaths, we’ve lost count,” declares an Osage elder in the Killers of the Flower Moon.1 I lost count too.
Most educators agree that suffering bodies are not a productive way to understand oppression.2 The Los Angeles Times described Killers as a “triumph” in the same frame as using the term “a pile up of bodies.”3 No, actually the entire phrase was a “steady, systematic pileup of Osage bodies.”
As a college professor, I’ve spent a good part of my life trying to figure out what the best approach to fixing mainstream ignorance about Native cultures might be. I’ve researched museums, visual arts, and film, asking which strengths in Native communities could be advanced, given the immense knowledge possessed by the hundreds of Indigenous communities residing in what is now the United States of America. I can tell you this - the substitution of oil and land barons for cowboys in the eternal narrative of America’s founding is not a step forward.
Disempowerment is not the right message and certainly now, in an era of increasing rates of Missing, Murdered Indigenous Women/People, the graphic depiction of women being shot, poisoned, blown up and carved up is not the right time.4
It's easy to see where Killers is going in the first five minutes of the film with naked dancing Indians and crying Indians featured. I suppose the subsequent juxtaposition of rich Osage Indians in modern clothes and cars was intended to be a novel and maybe even empowering storyline. But really, both depictions are steeped in irretrievable exoticism.
Maybe the people responsible for this film believe they are empowering viewers with a strong dose of “truth-telling.” Perhaps they think the female lead of Mollie Burkhart (played brilliantly by Lily Gladstone) in her grace and heroism makes up for the ceaseless scenes of death and destruction. Listen up Hollywood – a five-minute monologue and female point of view on camera does not justify over three hours of gratuitous violence. Yes, America’s origins are premised in the annihilation of its Indigenous peoples. We get that. Tell us something we don’t know. Tell us something that surprises, delights, or sparks curiosity.5
It's not hard to get Indians right. Don’t try to be a hero and don’t assume your audience is simple. Indigenous inhabitants of the U.S. survived systemic genocidal practices on this soil. We have the stories.
Nancy Marie Mithlo, Ph.D. (Fort Sill Chiricahua Apache) is a Professor of Gender Studies and an Affiliated Faculty with the American Indian Studies Center at University of California Los Angeles. She is a co-editor (with Yve Chavez, Tongva) and contributor to Visualizing Genocide: Indigenous Interventions in Art, Archives and Museums, University of Arizona Press, 2022.
1 Killers of the Flower Moon, Official Trailer 2. www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=7cx9nCHsemc
2 Livia K. Stone, “Suffering Bodies and Scenes of Confrontation: The Art and Politics of Representing Structural Violence” Visual Anthropology Review 31, no. 2 (2015): 177–189.
3 Justin Chang,“Review: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ is a powerful historical epic
— and a qualified triumph.” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 2023.
4 See the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs: www.bia.gov/service/mmu/missing-and-murdered-indigenous-people-crisis/. Also see the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women: www.csvanw.org/advocate-corner/
5 Artists who inspire me in this way include: Sterlin Harjo, Shelley Niro, Marcella Ernest and Osage artist Keli Mashburn.