Angela Watts started a Rapid City-based job as senior curator for the U.S. Department of Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board in December 2024. She was one of the thousands of federal employees abruptly fired by the Trump administration in February 2025. Photo by Seth Tupper / South Dakota Searchlight
There aren’t many people in the U.S. who do what Angela Watts does.
There were fewer than 13,000 who worked in museum curation in 2023, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Only 330 of them were federal, state or local government employees.
From mid-December until February 14 — a day of mass firings across the federal workforce — Watts was one of them.
Watts’ expertise is in a specific type of curation: Native American art. That background helped her earn the job of senior curator for the U.S. Department of Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board, a little-known division that promotes Native American art and artists, preserves that art and its cultural heritage for the public, and polices counterfeit Indigenous artwork presented as authentic.
The board operates the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, as well as the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana, and Southern Plains Indian Museum in Anadarko, Oklahoma.
Watts’ job was in Rapid City, which is geographically centered among the three locations, has the biggest population, and has the Journey Museum, which houses the Sioux Indian Museum. Watts “moved to South Dakota in the middle of winter,” she said, to start a job that felt perfect for someone with a specialty in tribal art curation.
“You go into museum work to serve communities, and so to be able to contribute to work that’s helping communities in Browning and Anadarko and Rapid City, and helping support Native American artists, all of that was really exciting,” Watts said. “I cared about the mission, but it was also a really good move for me career-wise. And so it kind of felt like a win-win.”
The winning feeling didn’t last long.
On Valentine’s Day, Watts was among the thousands of probationary (newly hired) federal employees across the U.S. dismissed from duty, ostensibly for performance issues or their relative inexperience in public service.
‘Cruelty was the point’: SD federal workers, programs feel the pain of Trump firings and freezes
Those firings and thousands of others since the start of the second Trump administration came by way of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an entity created through an executive order and led by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk.
It’s unclear how many federal employees in South Dakota were impacted by the administration’s moves to shrink the federal government’s 2.3 million-strong workforce.
Around 10,000 federal employees lost their jobs nationwide in the February 14 purge, and around 30,000 have lost them so far. The administration sent buyout offers to federal employees before then, and later said 75,000 people took them.
The Indian Arts and Crafts Board and its three museums are a blip on Interior’s budgetary radar compared to the 20,000 employees working in some capacity on the 85 million acres of land managed by its National Park Service. The park service lost around 1,000 employees in the February 14 downsizing.
Journey Museum Executive Director Conor McMahon formerly held the job Watts was hired for. At its largest, McMahon said, he had around two dozen coworkers nationwide with the Arts and Crafts Board. It’s “a really unique” federal agency, he said, and one that fills an important role.
“They do work that is not duplicated by any other government agency, and is not done in the private sector,” McMahon said. “The easiest way to think of it is that they are an economic development agency for Native American artists.”
Watts hadn’t been with the government long enough to have an official performance review.
“I didn’t actually have any bad feedback on my progress to that point,” she said.
Trump may put hundreds of federal buildings up for sale, including two in South Dakota
Watts may have been new to the position, but a case for inexperience would be difficult to make.
Her first high school job was in a museum in Salt Lake City, where she grew up. She has a graduate degree in museum anthropology and an undergraduate minor in Native American art history. Before taking the job in Rapid City, she spent 17 years at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.
Her specialty there? The preservation, cataloging and, when necessary, repatriation of Native American arts and artifacts.
“People hear the word ‘probationary’ and they think that it’s some kid who just finished school as their first job or something like that,” Watts said. “But this was a job I had been working toward for literally my entire career.”
She applied in August, accepted in October and moved to Rapid City from Lawrence, Kansas, to start the job shortly before Christmas.
Another board employee, Travis Braveheart, whose duties included leading tours for school children, was also let go by Interior on February 14. While McMahon was chief curator, he hired Braveheart as an intern for the board.
Braveheart did well, especially in his outreach role, and had recently secured a full-time position as a museum technician. He was the only Lakota employee of the Sioux Indian Museum.
Watts, meanwhile, came to a long-open position with what McMahon called a strong and needed skill set.
“Losing them, losing her, is a real loss to both the Indian Arts and Crafts Board as well as the Sioux Indian Museum, and for the Journey Museum,” McMahon said.
Just one of the board’s three employees at the Rapid City location remains.
It’s unclear what the losses mean for the Journey Museum long-term. Without Braveheart, McMahon said, it will be a lot more difficult to get Native American kids through the door for tours, during which they’d learn about their own history. In the near term, it will mean longer hours for the employees who remain.
He’s saddened that the federal job cuts have sliced into part of Rapid City’s cultural history. The Sioux Indian Museum’s first exhibitions highlighting living Native American artists opened in the 1960s and ’70s and featured the work of artists including Oscar Howe, Arthur Amiotte and Don Montileaux.
“They would go on to become probably the three most famous Native American artists in South Dakota,” McMahon said. “And so I think that just shows the importance of these federal programs, these federal museums, and federal investments in our local arts, culture and economy.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
This story originally appeared on South Dakota Searchlight on March 7, 2025. It is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 4.0).
South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com.
