Struggle and Hope: A Week on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana
A volunteer program on the Native American reservation provided some insight into a people and their history that I was never taught in school
They started arriving before the food bank opened at 9:30 a.m. Throughout the day, they came in an uneven flow, sometimes four or five at a time, sometimes just one or two. There were intervals when there was no one, but they never lasted long. In mid-afternoon, suddenly, there was a crush of people, filling the half dozen chairs while some waited outside in the punishing heat, others in their vehicles. Some of the late comers appeared to be high on drugs or alcohol.
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We had come there as volunteers with the Minneapolis-based Global Volunteers organization (www.globalvolunteers.org). That morning, four of us helping at the FAST food bank on this first day of our one week of service. Altogether, 11 of us had come to Browning, the largest city — really, the only city of any size — on the Blackfeet native reservation, which encompasses over a million acres of land in northwestern Montana. About 12,000 people live within its borders, roughly two-thirds in Browning. A smaller band of Blackfeet resides on an adjacent parcel of land just across the border in Canada.
Before the food bank opened, we stocked the shelves with canned goods. Peanut butter. Corn. Chili. Beef stew. Tuna. Tomatoes. There were refrigerators packed with fruits, vegetables, chicken, pork loin, hot dogs and hamburger meat. There was milk, flour, pasta, packages of soup, even shampoo. All of it was donated.
As we waited for the clients to arrive, I noticed a poster affixed to the wall above the line of plastic chairs where people would wait their turn. The poster showed a Native American in traditional attire on horseback with two much fainter versions of the same image right next to it. Below it said that two out of three Blackfeet live in food insecurity. They don’t know when or how they will get their next meal.
Once the food bank opened, we volunteers were assigned to accompany each person up and down the three aisles, help them select what they wanted and place it in a box stashed in a small shopping cart. Each person was allotted an amount based on household size.
Michael, the manager of the food bank, told me, “Our people have a lot of pride. That they can even come here is a big thing.”
Some of the clients seemed uncomfortable, even embarrassed to be there, fidgeting nervously or not looking at me. I noticed that in several of the cars that pulled up out front, the man would remain behind the wheel while the woman went inside. Still, most people were open and friendly, chatting easily as we moved through the line.
“Where are you from?” one woman asked me.
“New York City,” I said.
She went, “Oooh.” Then she said, “Why are you here?” Her tone was curious, not confrontational.
I didn’t know how to answer in a way they wouldn’t sound patronizing or ridiculous. Finally, I said, “I like it here!” I paused. “Where are you from?
She said, “Browning.”
“Why are you here?”
She laughed. “I like it here.”
“Well, there you go,” I said,
Later, another woman I was with stood before the vegetable case. She chose some lettuce, some tomatoes, and a few other items. She had one more selection but didn’t know what to get. I suggested an avocado.
“What’s an avocado?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure how to explain.
“It’s a super-food,” I said.
“What’s a superfood?”
I said I meant that it has lots of vitamins. She nodded.
"Okay, I'll try it," she said. It felt like a small victory.
I met an older man. He was tall and lanky, wore a large cowboy hat and walked with difficulty with a cane. He said he was 69 but he looked older. He lived in a household of six. We shopped, filling his box to overflowing. I asked him how he would get it home. He said he didn’t know. He didn’t have a car and because he needed a cane, he couldn’t carry it.
“Where do you live?” I asked.
“Two streets from here.”
I said I’d wheel the cart to his home. We started out, walking side-by-side in the middle of the street. The man explained that he was hobbled from decades of bronco busting. He had two daughters, one of whom had just given birth to a premature baby girl who weighed just two pounds. She was in the hospital fighting for her life.
I carried the box inside and was immediately hit with the powerful aroma of cigarette smoke. A obese woman in the living room got up from the lounge chair where she was watching television and pleasantly directed me to place the box on the counter by the sink. Another person lay on a couch, asleep, entirely wrapped in a blanket.
The man thanked me. We shook hands and I left.
Browning is a poor community. The average income is half that of the U.S. population. Its official unemployment rate is around 9%, but no one I spoke to believed that. Over 99 percent of the school children qualify for free or subsidized lunches. There’s little economic activity. There are few stores and a lot of boarded up storefronts. Browning has four restaurants — a hamburger place, a Subway, a Taco John outlet, and the restaurant in the casino. Alcoholism and drug abuse are rife. Meth and fentanyl are the rage. The residents suffer the health consequences of poverty: inadequate nutrition, poor diet, obesity and diabetes.
Two weeks ago, the National Center for Health Statistics reported that the average life expectancy for all Americans had declined from 2019 to 2021 from 79 to 76, largely due to the coronavirus epidemic. For Native Americans and Native Alaskans, it decreased by six-and-a-half years to 65, what it was for the general population back in 1944.
The New York Times reported that that rate "is now 'lower than that of every country in the Americas except Haiti, which is astounding,' said Noreen Goldman, professor of demography and public affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs."
Almost everyone I spoke to at any length sooner or later mentioned alcohol as one of the biggest problems among their people. Almost all of them told me they too had had to overcome alcohol dependence.
But when I spoke to Cameron, the head of maintenance at the elementary which shares its campus with the local HeadStart program, he described the time before the drug plague as comparatively benign.
“You could pay an alcoholic a dollar or two and they’d clean up your yard or something,” he said. “Now, with all the meth and fentanyl, those people are” — he pointed to his head with the forefingers of both hands. With the scourge of those powerful drugs, he said, crime has soared.
Cameron pointed to his home in the distance and said he has seven German shepherds to guard his home, “and behind that, I’ve got guns."
The name Blackfeet is said to have come from their moccasins blackened by long marches. The Blackfeet called themselves Piegan. For centuries, they roamed the vast land from the Saskatchewan River in Alberta, Canada to the Yellowstone River in present-day Montana, living off buffalo which provided them with food and clothing. There were as many as 40,000 Blackfeet tribe members and they were a powerful tribe of fierce warriors.
In the 19th century, white people arrived.
“The irresistible advance of the white race was like the invasion of a hostile army,” wrote Walter McClintock in his 1910 book, The Old North Trail/Life, Legends and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians. McClintock was a white Forest Service officer who lived among the Blackfeet for four years. "It brought smallpox, measles and other diseases and the seductive poison of alcohol, each in turn undermining the vigor of the Indian race.
First smallpox ravaged native Plains tribes, and then decimation of buffalo led to mass starvation.
The Blackfeet signed treaties giving up an enormous swath of their former territory, retreating to the land that roughly encompasses their current reservation, east of Glacier National Park.
But the new Americans weren’t done with them. Next came a systematic effort to extinguish their culture by banning many of their customs, then forcing many of their children into boarding schools where the first thing done was cut their hair. Some were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Special attention was devoted to eradicating their language. There was slogan behind this twisted agenda: KIll the Indian Save the man..
Yet despite these depredations, many Blackfeet who are holding onto, or reclaiming their identity, their history, their heritage. They are proudly exerting their culture.
The Blackfeet largely adopted Christianity, but some merge it with their traditional spiritual beliefs and legends. Many people continue to practice age-old rituals.
Each July, the Blackfeet celebrate Indian days in a field near the casino. For four days, there is music, dancing, stick games and horse riding. Years ago, people would stay on the grounds in teepees. Nowadays, there are more campers than teepees, but it is still an important cultural event. Throughout the year, Blackfeet gather for smaller powwows.
"What happens at a powwow?" said Linda Old Person when I asked as we rode around Browning distributing meals on wheels. She smiled. "Everything happens at a powwow."
Dan Wippert, with sage he just collected
Dan Wippert, who I met on the reservation and who became a good friend, smudges every morning. Smudging is a ceremonial purification ritual involving burning a sacred herb.
"I have to do it everyday," Dan told me. "It's that important to me. It's that important to have this comfort in my body.
Dan burns sage or sweet root, sometimes adding licorice root or bear root. As the herb smolders, he leans into the smoke and wafts it to face, then slowly spreads the fumes over his head with both hands. I watched Dan smudge several times. It was a solemn ceremony. Afterward, he appeared emotional, contemplative.
"I've had healing in my life from utilizing it," he said. "The ability to pray for myself, for the things that bothered me in my life I didn't understand. I've tried different types of healing. I've tried Western psychology. I've tried Buddhism -- that was good -- but I found my traditional ways and when I feel negative or feel hurt, I can use this smudge and I feel that going away."
Jesse Derosiers, teacher and alumus of Cuts Wood school
One morning, our Global Volunteers team visited Cuts Wood School, a private academy (they say they take no government or tribal funding) where first to eighth graders are immersed in the Blackfeet language. In recent years, there were only a few dozen people who grew up speaking the language and had fluency in it. Little by little, those numbers are growing.
"Without language, there is no culture," Jesse Derosiers, a teacher at Cuts Wood and a 2002 graduate of the school, told me. "Language isn't just a new vocabulary. It's a look into the existence, the experience, the universe of that culture's perspective. Without the language, there is no way for any culture to have a voice. There is no way for any culture to have any relationship with their environment. So, losing a language, you lose that connection. You lose that history, that science, that knowledge, that culture."
Derosiers left the reservation to serve in the U.S. Marines. Afterward, he came back. Dan Wippert was in the Navy, but eventually returned. I met an 86-year-old man, Leroy Devereaux Bacon, at a facility for the elderly. He once lived in Chicago, working for the Burlington National Santa Fe railroad. He too went back to the Blackfeet reservation. For many Blackfeet, there seems to be an irresistible pull that draws them home, despite its many difficulties.
Sunset on the Blackfeet reservation
This summer, a new biography of the great Native American athlete, Jim Thorpe (he was not Blackfeet), Path Lit By Lightning, by David Maraniss. What Maraniss said about Thorpe's life, I think, could also apply to the Blackfeet.
"There is a temptation to view his story as tragedy ... It is a story of perseverance against the odds," Maraniss wrote. "For all his troubles, whether caused by outside forces or of his own doing, Jim Thorpe did not succumb. He did not vanish into whiteness. The man survived, complications and all."
In the reception area of the Head Start office, on the wall was a poster and, below it, a flyer. The poster announced a reward for information about a little girl named Arden "Ardie" Pepion, who was missing. The flyer was for a vigil for Ardie on May 14th. It read, in part, "We will find baby Arden as a community. We will never stop looking for you."
Next week, I write about missing and murdered Indigenous people, a problem that disproportionately affects many Native American tribes. So many of these cases are never solved. I will also report on the Indian Child Welfare Act, the 1978 law that makes it a priority to place Native children without parents with extended family or their tribe before placing them in non-Native foster or adoptive homes, according to The Hill. It was meant to reverse the decades-long practice of placing Native American children in boarding homes, often taking them from living parents. This fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case challenging the constitutionality of that law. Supporters fear the conservative court could overturn the law.