"Red Feather, which works to improve housing on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, is just one of hundreds of groups that have had grants meant to help disadvantaged communities terminated by the Trump administration."
"TUBA CITY, Ariz. — When Carol Parrish built her first fire using her new wood-burning stove, tears streamed down her face.
“My prayers have been answered,” she remembers thinking. For years, Parrish’s home had been in a state of disrepair. Her previous stove, the only way she had to warm her home during the winter, was cracked in the back, allowing smoke to fill the home. Water leaked from the roof. Her windows were broken, covered with a wooden board. A member of the Navajo Nation, she tried for years to get help from the tribal government, but none ever came.
Parrish was just one of thousands of homeowners across the Hopi and Navajo nations in the Four Corners region living in unsafe housing conditions. For decades, families across the region have relied on older coal- or wood-burning stoves to heat their homes. But those stoves can emit high levels of particulate matter and smoke, a major cause of the two reservations’ high levels of respiratory illness, far exceeding the U.S. average.
In November, her stove, windows and roof were finally replaced and fixed, a beneficiary of surging federal funding from the Biden administration to Red Feather Development Group, a Flagstaff-based nonprofit. But now the funding to continue this work is in question as President Donald Trump and his administration slash funding across the government."
Wyatt Myskow reports for Inside Climate News June 15, 2025.
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