🔥 The Academic Assassination: How UA Perfected Firing Indigenous Voices for Student Safety
Julian Juan protected Native students from an administrator who physically silenced them—so the university fired him for it.
😽 Keepin’ It Simple Summary for Younger Readers
👧🏾✊🏾👦🏾
🏫 University of Arizona fired Julian Juan, Native American administrator 👨🏽💼 for protecting Indigenous students 🪶 from unsafe administrator 😡. Same administrator physically silenced Navajo law student 👩🏽🎓 weeks earlier for criticizing university's removal of diversity language from land acknowledgment 📜❌. UA promised flexibility ⏰ then fired Juan for missing "deadline" during graduation 🎓. Students organizing resistance 📱✊ while university destroys cultural programs 🏛️💥 on stolen Indigenous land 🏜️. Apache Wars continue with pink slips 📄⚔️ instead of rifles 🔫.
🗝️ Takeaways
🔥 Julian Juan fired for asking the administrator to leave the student event after she physically silenced Navajo law student Jacquelyn Francisco at the February tribal summit
⚖️ UA promised flexibility with tribal leader schedules, then terminated Juan for not meeting "mid-May" deadline during graduation season
🎭 University quietly removed "committed to diversity and inclusion" from land acknowledgment without consulting tribal nations who helped create it
🏫 UA is consolidating seven cultural centers into one "multicultural center" while claiming to value Indigenous voices and sovereignty
📱 Students organizing digital resistance, sharing stories of how NASA programs saved their academic careers and provided essential community support
⛰️ Juan's firing parallels Oak Flat destruction—both examples of Indigenous rights sacrificed for institutional/corporate convenience
✊ Community response includes calls to tribal leaders, media coverage, and demands for accountability from alumni and faculty
🌍 This connects to the broader Trump administration assault on diversity programs and Indigenous sovereignty across the country
From Geronimo to the Provost's Office: How UA Perfected the Art of Firing Indigenous Voices for Protecting Students
The Apache Wars never ended—they just traded rifles for pink slips and moved the battlefield into mahogany-paneled conference rooms where shameless administrators perfect the art of colonial violence with PowerPoint presentations and diversity rhetoric.
The desert wind carries ghosts through these borderlands, compadres.
Some nights, when the chubascos, jegos, and monsoons roll in from the south and lightning illuminates the Catalina Mountains, you can almost hear Geronimo's war cries echoing across the valleys where the University of Arizona now sprawls like a colonial outpost dressed up in academic regalia.
But these days, the Apache Wars play out in conference rooms and administrative offices, where Indigenous voices are silenced not with bullets but with bureaucratic brutality and the kind of institutional gaslighting that would make a nineteenth-century Indian agent weep with professional jealousy.
Julian Juan's voice trembles with barely contained fury as he records what he knows will be the most devastating video of his career.
Morning sunlight streams through the window of the former Native American Student Affairs (NASA) director, illuminating a face that carries the weight of generations of resistance.
This member of the Tohono O'odham Nation, whose ancestors watched Spanish missionaries build churches on top of sacred sites, now explains how the simple act of protecting Indigenous students from institutional violence became grounds for termination in Patricia Prelock's brave new administrative order.
"This morning when I got to MLK, I was notified that I was being discharged from my duties," Juan says, his words cutting through the camera lens like obsidian blades.
His calm demeanor barely contains the righteous fury underneath—the same fire that burned in his ancestors when they faced down conquistadors and cavalry alike.
"I'm being let go because I did not schedule a meeting by mid-May, even though I was told I was offered a chance to invite my tribal leaders. And I was told that they would accommodate their schedule."
Órale, the absolute audacity of these people astounds me. They'll hold a land acknowledgment ceremony in the morning and fire the land's original inhabitants by afternoon tea. It's colonialism with a liberal arts degree—more sophisticated perhaps, but no less violent in its outcomes.
The February Incident: When Speaking Truth Becomes a Contact Sport
To understand the depth of this institutional betrayal, you have to rewind to February 19, 2025, when a Navajo and Jicarilla Apache law student named Jacquelyn Francisco committed the unforgivable sin of speaking truth to power at UA's 4th Annual Tribal Leaders Summit.
Francisco, serving as president of the Native & Indigenous Law Students Association, had discovered that her own university had quietly stripped the phrase "committed to diversity and inclusion" from its land acknowledgment—changes made in the dead of night without consulting the tribal leaders who had originally helped craft the statement back in 2021.
Because nothing says "respect for Indigenous sovereignty" like unilaterally editing agreements you made with tribal nations, ¿verdad?
When Francisco attempted to address the assembled tribal leaders about this betrayal—you know, doing exactly what law students are supposed to do when they encounter injustice—Tessa Dysart, the Assistant Vice Provost for Native American Initiatives, physically prevented her from reaching the microphone.
Video from the event shows Dysart and Kari McCormick, executive director for Native American Advancement and Tribal Engagement, literally tugging at papers in Francisco's hands like playground bullies fighting over lunch money.
One administrator can be heard declaring, "You're not speaking," as if Indigenous voices needed permission from colonial gatekeepers to challenge institutional racism.
But Francisco—¡qué chingona!—refused to be silenced.
Stepping away from the podium where these bureaucratic colonizers were trying to muzzle her, she addressed the room full of tribal leaders directly, her voice carrying the authority of centuries of resistance:
"Does this mean everything I stand for, including a commitment to diversity and inclusion, can be erased without my knowledge, consultation or consent? Does this signal that I will be omitted one day despite being a member of one of Arizona's 22 federally recognized tribes?"
University President Suresh Garimella, displaying the kind of leadership courage that would make a turnip proud, left the summit before Francisco could finish speaking. Classy move, chief. Nothing says "we value Indigenous voices" like literally walking away when they get uncomfortable.
This was the "incident during the Tribal Leader Summit" that Julian Juan referenced when explaining why Native students felt unsafe around Dysart.
Students had watched one of their peers—a law student who knew her rights, no less—get physically manhandled by senior administrators for the crime of asking uncomfortable questions about institutional hypocrisy.
When you've seen your university put its hands on Indigenous students for speaking the truth, every subsequent encounter with those same administrators carries the threat of violence.
Feast Friday: When Safe Spaces Become Battlegrounds
Fast-forward to April 11, and what should have been a routine Feast Friday at the NASA center. These weekly gatherings represent everything beautiful about Indigenous community-building—sharing food, stories, and solidarity in a space designed to help Native students survive the often brutal experience of navigating a predominantly white institution built on stolen land.
But when Dysart—the same administrator who had physically obstructed Francisco just weeks earlier—showed up unannounced, students' responses were immediate and visceral. Juan describes looking up from his meeting preparations to see "the faces of distressed students looking into my office." These weren't dramatic teenagers overreacting to authority figures. These were Indigenous students who had literally watched their university put their hands on one of their peers for speaking out of turn.
"Leading up to this, I've had so many students come to me, so many concerns for their emotional safety, for their physical safety, their mistrust in the institution," Juan explains, his voice heavy with the accumulated weight of students' trauma.
When your job is creating safe spaces for communities that have survived centuries of institutional violence, and the institution itself becomes the source of that violence, what do you do?
Juan's response was direct but professional: he asked Dysart to leave due to student safety concerns. Her reply?
"This is an open campus; I can go anywhere I please."
¿En serio? As Juan points out with devastating precision:
"As native people, we don't say that. As native people, we know there are places we can't go or there are places we need to respect."
That phrase—"I can go anywhere I please"—drips with the same colonial entitlement that justified Manifest Destiny. The same settler logic treats Indigenous spaces as inherently accessible to white authority.
The Retaliation Machine: Bureaucratic Terrorism in Academic Drag
What followed reads like a masterclass in administrative terrorism—the kind of sophisticated retaliation that makes old-school Indian agents look like rank amateurs. These modern colonizers don't need cavalry charges when they have organizational charts, performance evaluations, and the kind of procedural violence that slowly strangles resistance to death.
The timeline reads like a carefully orchestrated execution:
April 30: Interim Provost Ron Marx (nominative determinism at its finest) sends Juan a memo demanding a meeting between NASA and Native American Initiatives, along with an apology to the tribal leaders who witnessed the Feast Friday incident.
May 5: In a meeting with supervisors, Juan is explicitly told he can invite tribal leaders to the required meeting. Audio recordings capture his supervisor promising they would "accommodate the tribal leader's schedule" and "push it back if we need to."
May 13: While Juan is literally running NASA's graduation celebration—you know, actually doing his job of supporting Indigenous students—the university emails demanding to know why steps haven't been completed.
May 15: Juan responds, explaining he's coordinating with tribal leaders as instructed, because apparently, respecting Indigenous sovereignty takes time.
May 27: Juan was terminated for not completing tasks by the flexible "mid-May" deadline.
¿Cómo que flexible deadline? This isn't bureaucratic bungling—it's deliberate institutional murder disguised as performance management. They set him up to fail, then acted shocked when he couldn't meet impossible standards they'd deliberately created.
The Digital Uprising: When Students Fight Back
Despite UA's cowardly timing—dropping this bomb over Memorial Day weekend when students are scattered—the response has been swift and brutally honest. Juan's Instagram post announcing his termination has become a lightning rod for Indigenous rage and solidarity, with comments pouring in from across Indian Country like digital war paint.
"Without NASA, I wouldn't have reached the academic achievements I've been blessed to attain," writes one former student, their words carrying the weight of dreams deferred and barriers overcome. "NASA, Native American students at UA, and our Indigenous community deserve better!"
Margaret Zavala, a first-generation American Indian Studies major, captures the brutal irony with surgical precision: "As an AIS major and a JEDI minor, it's disheartening that due to the current Trump administration's blatant racism, we will be put on the back burner once again."
JEDI—Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Even the acronyms are being weaponized against the very communities they were supposed to serve. The empire doesn't just strike back—it co-opts the rebellion's language while crushing its leaders.
The comments reveal the depth of trust Juan had built and the safety he'd created: "I've been the most comfortable in that space under your watch," writes one student. Another adds: "These spaces saved me & kept me enrolled during my time there." This isn't just about losing a job—it's about destroying lifelines for students navigating hostile institutional waters.
Most tellingly, prospective students are reconsidering their choices: "I just graduated from Diné College and was hoping to come back. Now that NASA is ending, idk if I wanna come back now." The university's short-sighted cruelty is already costing them the very students they claim to serve.
Perfect strategy, ¿no? Destroy the programs that actually help Indigenous students succeed, then wonder why enrollment drops. It's like burning down the bridge while complaining about the lack of traffic.
Land Acknowledgments and Liberal Colonialism
Every University of Arizona event begins with the same ritualistic performance: a land acknowledgment so routinely delivered that most people treat it like elevator music—pleasant background noise before the real business of extraction begins.
"We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples. Today, Arizona is home to 22 federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to the O'odham and the Yaqui."
Qué bonito, ¿no? Pretty words from an institution that just fired a Tohono O'odham administrator for the crime of making Indigenous students feel safe in their own ancestral territory. They read this acknowledgment while Julian Juan cleans out his office, and somehow everyone pretends this isn't the most grotesque performance of cognitive dissonance since the Doctrine of Discovery was dressed up as legal theory.
UA's leadership operates with the kind of breathtaking audacity that makes you wonder if shame is a foreign concept to them. They've perfected the art of looking Indigenous students in the eye while systematically dismantling every support system that keeps those students from dropping out.
It's institutional gaslighting elevated to an art form —the kind of sophisticated psychological warfare that would make Joseph Goebbels take note.
Land acknowledgments without action are just another form of spiritual colonialism—a way for institutions to absolve themselves of actually treating Indigenous people with basic human dignity. The University of Arizona has turned them into a ritual cleansing that somehow exempts them from honoring Indigenous sovereignty in any meaningful way.
The Broader War: From Oak Flat to the Provost's Office
While Juan's story unfolds on campus, another battle for Indigenous rights is reaching its climax just miles away in the Tonto National Forest, where the Supreme Court recently refused to hear Apache Stronghold's desperate plea to protect Oak Flat from corporate destruction. The parallels are stark—in both cases, Indigenous people are being told that their spiritual and cultural practices must give way to institutional priorities, whether mining company profit margins or university administrative convenience.
It's almost like there's a pattern here, ¿verdad? Whether it's Resolution Copper turning Chi'chil Biłdagoteel into a crater or UA turning cultural centers into generic "multicultural" spaces, the message remains consistent: Indigenous rights are expendable when they conflict with colonial convenience.
The fact that Resolution Copper is owned by foreign corporations—Rio Tinto and BHP, with significant Chinese investment—makes the betrayal even more bitter. We're allowing foreign entities to destroy Apache sacred sites while firing Native administrators who try to protect Indigenous students on campus. The colonizers have gone multinational, but the logic remains depressingly familiar.
From Grief to Action: Building the Resistance
For those ready to move beyond outrage toward action, here's how you can support Julian Juan and the broader struggle for Indigenous rights:
Support Juan Directly: Share his story using hashtags that center Indigenous voices, not institutional damage control.
Pressure the University: Contact UA administrators and the Board of Regents, demanding the reinstatement of Juan. Alumni should consider withholding donations until the university demonstrates a genuine commitment to Indigenous students.
Support Indigenous Students: Donate to Indigenous student organizations that often face underfunding but provide crucial support for students navigating hostile institutional environments.
Connect the Struggles: Link Juan's firing to other Indigenous rights battles, from Oak Flat to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. Attend Indigenous-led actions in your community.
Electoral Accountability: Hold elected officials accountable for their positions on Indigenous rights. Support candidates who understand that tribal sovereignty and environmental justice are interconnected struggles.
Seeds of Hope in the Desert
As I write this from the borderlands where the Sonoran Desert meets centuries of resistance, I'm reminded that Indigenous communities have survived 500 years of attempts to destroy them. They've survived boarding schools and termination policies, uranium mining and forced relocation, broken treaties and stolen children.
Julian Juan's firing is devastating, but it's not the end of the story. Indigenous students at the University of Arizona are organizing with the kind of sophisticated resistance that gives me hope for the future. They're combining traditional values of community protection with contemporary tools of organizing and communication, understanding that Juan's firing isn't just about one administrator—it's about whether Indigenous people will have any voice in institutions built on their stolen land.
The same strength that carried Geronimo through the Apache Wars now carries Indigenous students through hostile classrooms. The same wisdom that sustained communities through the darkest periods of colonization now guides efforts to decolonize education. The same love of land and people that has always defined Indigenous resistance now motivates fights for Oak Flat and against administrative racism.
In Juan's words, spoken with quiet dignity despite his pain: "I feel sadness. I feel anger. I also feel a little bit of relief, believe it or not." Relief comes from speaking the truth, even when it costs everything, as it is better than silent complicity. Relief because the truth is finally out there for everyone to see.
The University of Arizona can fire Julian Juan, but they can't fire the truth he represents. They can consolidate cultural centers, but they can't consolidate the communities those centers serve. They can silence individual voices, but they can't silence the collective call for justice that echoes from every mountain and desert in this stolen land.
La lucha continúa—the struggle continues. And as long as there are people willing to stand up for what's right, willing to protect the vulnerable, willing to speak truth to power despite the consequences, there is hope blooming in the desert like ocotillo flowers after the rain.
Stay Connected and Keep Fighting
The fight for Indigenous rights, environmental justice, and educational equity requires sustained attention and collective action. To stay informed about ongoing developments in Julian Juan's case and other critical issues facing our borderlands communities, consider supporting Three Sonorans by subscribing to our Substack.
Your support helps us continue providing independent coverage of the stories that mainstream media too often ignores—because when corporate media treats institutional racism as a both-sides issue, somebody needs to tell the truth.
What Do You Think?
The powerful interests that fired Julian Juan and are destroying Oak Flat count on public attention moving elsewhere. They count on outrage fading and people moving on to the next crisis. But justice requires persistence, and change requires the kind of sustained pressure that only organized communities can provide.
How do you see Julian Juan's firing connecting to broader patterns of institutional racism in higher education? Have you witnessed similar retaliation against advocates for marginalized communities in your own workplace or community?
What would meaningful accountability look like for universities that claim to value diversity while systematically silencing Indigenous voices? How can we move beyond performative land acknowledgments toward genuine respect for Indigenous sovereignty?
Drop your thoughts in the comments below—because the conversation doesn't end with the article, it begins there.
Quotes
"This is an open campus, I can go anywhere I please" - Assistant Vice Provost Tessa Dysart to Julian Juan when asked to leave student event due to safety concerns
"As native people, we don't say that. As native people, we know there are places we can't go or there are places we need to respect" - Julian Juan responding to Dysart's colonial entitlement
"You're not speaking" - UA administrator to Jacquelyn Francisco while physically preventing her from reaching microphone at Tribal Leaders Summit
"Does this mean everything I stand for, including a commitment to diversity and inclusion, can be erased without my knowledge, consultation or consent?" - Jacquelyn Francisco addressing tribal leaders about land acknowledgment changes
"I'm afraid of retaliation... I'm afraid for the safety of these students. And I'm also afraid for my professional safety" - Julian Juan in reports following incidents
"Without NASA I wouldn't have reached the academic achievements I've been blessed to attain" - Former student responding to Juan's termination
"We did not and do not want her in our spaces nor any involvement in decisions that involve our lives" - Student commenting on Dysart's presence at events
People Mentioned
Julian Juan - Tohono O'odham Nation member, former director of Native American Student Affairs at UA. "This work, this being able to support students, our Native students, to help them achieve their goals, to help them feel like they belong in this campus has been the most rewarding and beautiful I've ever had the privilege of being a part of."
Jacquelyn Francisco - Navajo and Jicarilla Apache law student, president of Native & Indigenous Law Students Association. "Does this signal that I will be omitted one day despite being a member of one of Arizona's 22 federally recognized tribes?"
Tessa Dysart - Assistant Vice Provost for Native American Initiatives who physically prevented Francisco from speaking and later showed up at Feast Friday event
Patricia Prelock - UA's new provost who confirmed plan to consolidate cultural centers into single multicultural center
Suresh Garimella - UA President who left tribal summit before Francisco could finish speaking
Ron Marx - Former interim provost who sent memo demanding Juan schedule meeting and write apology
Kari McCormick - Executive director for Native American Advancement and Tribal Engagement, helped physically obstruct Francisco
Nathan Levi Esquerra - Senior vice president for Native American advancement and tribal engagement
Winona Little Owl-Ignacio - Fellow law student who supported Francisco at tribal summit. "What we need from your tribal officials, from our tribal officials, is for you to stand with us"
Margaret Zavala - First-generation AIS major and JEDI minor. "As an AIS major and a JEDI minor, it's disheartening that due to the current Trump administration's blatant racism, we will be put on the back burner once again."
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Looks like the UA did not get the memo from Harvard… Stand up to this “new” blatant colonialism under the Trump regime! So disgusting; that’s the ending of any love I’ve had for UA from my past years in Tucson. Thanks for exposing the corruption running more and more rampant these days.