The women’s basketball coach stood atop a ladder on Sunday night, carefully cutting down the last of the net after Haskell Indian Nations University won the league championship.
The scene is a familiar one at this time of year in college basketball. But the celebration in Lawrence, Kan., where the man who invented the sport worked for decades, was nevertheless astonishing: Officially, Haskell’s coach, Adam Strom, was only a volunteer.
He had been fired 16 days earlier, swept up in an executive order that led Haskell to oust about a quarter of its workers on a Friday in February.
The only other federally run college for Native people, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, also laid off a similar share of workers that day.
More than 140 years after the United States first used the grounds in Lawrence as a boarding school to assimilate Native children, Haskell students feel that the federal government, which…
