Minnesota’s Red Lake Nation College received a transformational $7 million donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott, school officials announced Friday.
The college board and president have decided to invest 100% of the donation into a new permanent endowment fund. This is intended to end the "poverty cycle" for the institution by ensuring long-term financial sustainability.
In alignment with Ojibwe teachings, the gift is being managed with a 150-year "Seven Generations" horizon. This philosophy dictates that current leaders look seven generations into the future to ensure today's financial decisions provide for descendants long after the current generation is gone.
The bigger picture:
The news of MacKenzie Scott’s gift to Red Lake Nation College comes as the Trump administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget again seeks to slash funding for tribal colleges. Students at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in New Mexico recently sued the Bureau of Indian Education over funding and staffing cuts in last year’s federal budget.
As the Trump administration continues to shuffle funding to pit minority groups against each other in his ongoing war against DEI, there is an even greater need for philanthropists and state governments to step in to fill the void left by federal funding. MacKenzie Scott, who has donated over $1 billion to HBCUs since 2020, is writing a model in real time for how unrestricted gifts to the nation’s most vulnerable institutions can have transformative impacts on the lives of the students they serve.
