March 2025 brought a curious disappearance. The Navajo Code Talkers — military heroes whose Indigenous languages helped secure Allied victory in World War II — vanished from Pentagon websites. Not through executive decree, but via database management: thousands of bytes documenting Native American military valor simply recategorized as “DEI content” and removed.
Peter MacDonald Sr., age 96 and one of just two surviving Code Talkers, found the rationale bewildering. “The Navajo code was a weapon,” he told reporters, “it absolutely has nothing to do with DEI.” After intense backlash from tribal leaders and veterans groups, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell admitted an “aggressive timeline” had led to mistakes: “We want to be very clear, history is not DEI,” he stated, as pages were gradually restored.
The digital purge swept broadly. U.S. Marine Ira Hayes of the Gila River Indian Community — immortalized in the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph — temporarily disappeared from military history. Ty Seidule, retired Army brigadier general and history professor at Hamilton College, underscored the absurdity: “The reason they were chosen was based on their ethnicity. It’s impossible to disentangle their ethnicity from their mission success.” This taxonomic reshuffling applied retroactively to accomplishments predating contemporary diversity initiatives by generations — an Orwellian rewriting of military history.
Thomas Begay, 100, the only other living Code Talker, remained unaware of the controversy. His son Ronald couldn’t bear to tell him: “I didn’t want him to feel hurt by this type of order from a country that he served and used his own language to win the war.”
Systematic Erasure: Beyond Military History
The pattern extended beyond military accomplishments. On March 18, the flags of Arizona’s 22 tribal nations were removed from the Carl T. Hayden VA Medical Center in Phoenix and unceremoniously delivered to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community for “preservation.” Ricardo Leonard, the tribe’s vice president and Army veteran, condemned the action: “Not only is this nonsensical, but it dishonors all Native American veterans and their families who have given so much to protect this country.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs intervened, accepting the flags from tribal leaders on March 25 and displaying them in the Executive Tower rotunda at the Arizona Capitol. “Arizona is proud of the Tribal Veterans who sacrificed for their country,” she declared. “We should be recognizing their service, not disrespecting their heritage.”
In parallel, the Trump administration quietly removed the Not Invisible Act Commission’s final report from federal websites — a landmark document Trump himself had signed into law during his first term. The report addressed the missing and murdered Indigenous peoples crisis through testimony from nearly 600 people nationwide. Charolette Gonzales, policy director at the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women, expressed shock: “When you think about that as someone that’s in the work and you know how many people already don’t know about it, and then it’s removed from the United States website, it’s definitely disheartening.”
Karrisa Newkirk of MMIW Chahta called the removal “a slap in the face,” adding, “It felt like we were being heard and recognized, and then all of a sudden it felt like that was no longer what it was anymore.”
The administration even flagged words like “indigenous community,” “tribal,” and “Native American” for limitation or avoidance in federal communications — a bureaucratic technique for rendering Indigenous experiences invisible through linguistic erasure.
Project 2025: Blueprint for Tribal Relations
These incidents reveal the concrete implementation of Project 2025’s vision for tribal nations — a vision articulated before the 2024 election but dismissed by many as hypothetical. The Heritage Foundation’s 920-page roadmap to authoritarianism, developed with over 100 right-wing and Christian nationalist organizations, has steadily materialized as the administration’s operational manual despite Trump’s campaign-trail disavowals.
William Perry Pendley authored the section on tribal affairs, which reveals three troubling priorities: expanded drilling and mining on tribal lands instead of protecting sacred sites; presidential appointees making decisions without meaningful tribal input; and most critically, treating tribal sovereignty as something the government can grant or revoke rather than a permanent right guaranteed by treaties and the Constitution.
Pendley’s selection itself raised red flags given his problematic history of extremism. For three decades before joining the Trump administration in 2019, he headed the Mountain States Legal Foundation, an organization heavily funded by fossil fuel companies. There, he mocked Native American land management practices and dismissed the Black Lives Matter movement as based on a “lie.” Pendley openly shared racist views on blood quantum, a legal term used to quantify Native American ancestry and determine tribal enrollment, while warning about what he termed “an increasingly important issue in the West, that is, the willingness of federal land managers to close public land because it is sacred to American Indians.”
From Recommendation to Implementation
The alignment between Pendley’s Project 2025 recommendations and initial administration actions demonstrates the document’s function as a governance blueprint. Pendley advocated expanding drilling in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve and dismantling the National Environmental Policy Act’s tribal consultation requirements. The Alaska Executive Order and Unleashing American Energy were among Trump’s first actions upon taking office on January 20. Perhaps most revealing was the immediate revocation of Executive Order 14112, which had affirmed that the federal government “must promote partnerships with Tribal Nations, recognizing that they bring invaluable expertise on countless matters from how to more effectively meet the needs of their citizens to how to steward their ancestral homelands.” Its elimination, grouped among 18 others characterized as “Additional Recissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions,” signals not merely policy adjustment but philosophical realignment.
Pendley’s recommendations include repealing the 1906 Antiquities Act — a key legal mechanism through which tribes have secured protection for culturally significant landscapes off-reservation. During Biden’s term, tribes successfully pushed for national monument protections in Arizona and Nevada through this act.
Reclassifying Sovereignty as Diversity
Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community President Martin Harvier identified the central tension: “Tribal programs are not DEI initiatives. They are a fulfillment of treaty and trust obligations and must not be subject to arbitrary reductions or freezes.”
For Charity MacDonald, daughter of Code Talker Peter MacDonald, the Pentagon’s erasure represents a pattern, not an anomaly: “You cannot erase an entire history of people. Our federal government is doing this purposely. The federal government is making a statement, saying that this is how they feel.”
Chase Iron Eyes of the Lakota People’s Law Project places these maneuvers in historical context: “The Heritage Foundation and other Christian fundamentalist organizations have attempted to strip tribes of their sovereignty… Their ultimate goal is to assimilate all Indigenous nations. That is why we’re called Indigenous peoples because they want to deny us our nationhood.”
The Navajo Nation Council similarly condemned the conflation: “The Navajo Nation Council is deeply concerned by being conflated into DEI initiatives that fail to recognize our unique political status,” explained Speaker Crystalyne Curley. “The United States would not be the nation it is today without the bravery and service of the Navajo Nation Code Talkers. Their legacy is a cornerstone of American history.”
The Strategic Pattern of Erasure
Taken together, the removal of Code Talker histories, the eviction of tribal flags, the deletion of vital reports on missing and murdered Indigenous people, and the flagging of words that acknowledge Native identity — these actions reveal Project 2025’s vision: reimagining tribal sovereignty as optional rather than constitutionally protected; recategorizing government-to-government relationships as diversity initiatives rather than legal obligations; and reframing sacred commitments as administrative preferences.
Indigenous communities now face the profound challenge of preserving not only their physical resources but their very legibility within American governance. Some tribes and advocacy organizations have begun creating independent archives of government documents likely to disappear from federal websites. Others seek protection through state-level partnerships, as seen in Governor Hobbs’ shelter for tribal flags. Still others are organizing litigation challenging the constitutional basis for these revisions to long-established federal-tribal relationships.
The erasure of Indigenous existence from the historical and administrative record serves a practical purpose beyond ideological signaling — it creates space for expanded resource extraction from tribal lands, reduced consultation requirements for federal projects, and diminished recognition of treaty obligations. For the architects of Project 2025, the less visible tribal nations become in federal records, the easier they become to sideline in federal policy.
“Our survivors and our resources truly help decrease the violence that happens in our communities,” Gonzales explained. “And once we heard this, I think our minds instantly went to the fact that Native women will die if we don’t have federal funding. That’s just a fact.”
Project 2025’s implementation raises a fundamental question: Can America’s constitutional promises — its oldest political relationships — withstand this systematic reimagining? The answer will determine not only the future of tribal sovereignty but the integrity of American governance itself.
