I joined the Nevada Humanities Committee in 1999 thinking I knew a little something about our state and its people.

After all, I was born and raised in Nevada. Members of the Smith family tree have rambled and roamed around the Great Basin for generations without ever striking gold or owning a gambling hall. We’re lucky that way.

As a committee member, I soon realized my Nevada education was only beginning. I met an eclectic group of people with a common purpose: to help the state’s many communities and cultures celebrate and share their stories. My wife Sally Denton, a current board member and multi-generational Nevadan, has made the same observation.

The humanities lasso a wide range of subjects, including history, literature, language, law, ethics, philosophy, comparative religion and archaeology. In six years on the committee, I was regularly reminded that Nevada is a cultural mosaic, an epic poem filled with triumph and heartache, and home to diverse, resourceful, and creative people whose stories and experiences are worth heralding and preserving.

Today the Nevada Humanities Committee is in trouble. As one of 56 councils that partner with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), it faces an unprecedented funding crisis. 

Vilified by the Trump administration as a promoter of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” NEH 2025 grant funding was terminated in an early April purge by the Department of Government Efficiency. Most of the NEH’s $211 million budget is distributed to state committees, which then award grants to worthy applicants whose projects fall within well-established guidelines. When the slashing and burning was over, more than 1,200 grants nationwide had been killed.

In a conversation Tuesday, Nevada Humanities Executive Director Christina Barr talked about the good work those grants support. Recipients in 2024 such as the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno and the Neon Museum in Las Vegas are easily recognized. Others, such as the “Veterans’ Voices: We’re Listening” oral history project at UNLV and “A Thousand Cranes: A One-Act Theater Production” in Elko, were less well known. Last year, the committee distributed more than $202,000 in major project grants to 35 nonprofit organizations throughout Nevada. Smaller grants reach every corner of the state and help rural communities celebrate local culture and history. As one deft headline captured it, “The humanities budget is tiny. The loss is huge.”

“The federal dollars that we distribute throughout the state help to leverage local dollars and local investment in the programs that these organizations produce,” Barr says. “This money helps to go out and connect those organizations and to strengthen them. Without this money, we anticipate that these organizations will suffer, in particularly rural organizations.

“… It’s really a travesty. I think of the web of this work as being kind of the connective tissue that our organization provides around the state through our humanities infrastructure and our cultural infrastructure.”

With so much chaos coming from Washington, the plight of the NEH might seem almost quaint and barely newsworthy. But it speaks volumes about where we’re at as a nation. I think Barr is right when she says, “By removing the public seed funding from our program and from the support of our experiences and our communities, I think the repercussions of this will be felt far and wide.”

By Thursday, the NEH issued what it called an “update” on its funding priorities following the Trump executive orders, noting that it has made internal changes to improve efficiency, including eliminating nonessential offices, “and to return to being a responsible steward of taxpayer funds.” It has, in short, undergone a MAGA makeover.

The NEH statement explains, “In collaboration with the Administration, NEH has cancelled awards that are at variance with agency priorities, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) and environmental justice, as well as awards that may not inspire public confidence in the use of taxpayer funds.”

In addition to anything that might be labeled “DEI,” “at variance” also includes the “promotion of gender ideology” and “environmental justice initiatives or activities.”

Those who prattle about being for “America First” should be standing up for the mission and work of the NEH and the Nevada Humanities Committee. If you really love America, the humanities are all about the exploration, interpretation, preservation, and celebration of the nation’s diverse cultures.

Diversity isn’t a dirty word. It’s who we are.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.