The New Trail of Tears. Naomi Schaefer Riley
Property Rights as Native Rights
“IT’S FREE MONEY!” a Crow legislator by the name of Karl Little Owl tells Ivan Small. Small, an older man who has known Little Owl since he was a child, laughs skeptically. “Really? How’s that?”
“We didn’t have to spend a dime of the tribe’s funds on this.”
“A good thing,” Small replies, chuckling, “since the tribe doesn’t have any money.”
We’re standing just outside a tent where a ceremony to mark the breaking of ground on Apsaalooke Warrior Apartments is about to begin. The first development project on the Crow reservation in about a decade, Apsaalooke Warrior Apartments will be a 15-bed veterans’ home perched on a hill overlooking Crow Agency, the reservation’s political center. A couple of miles from the battlefield where Custer made his last stand, the home will no doubt be a reminder of Indians’ Pyrrhic victory here in Montana and the fact that it was short-lived. Soon after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the U.S. Army succeeded in removing the remaining Indians from their land and putting them on reservations. In recent times, the policies that resulted in the mass extinguishment of Indian lives have been replaced by policies that result in their mass impoverishment and an existence circumscribed by violence and tragedy.
Here, under the tent, though, there’s great celebration. Representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the state of Montana, and the tribal leadership are present. One person after another takes the podium to congratulate the individuals who spearheaded this development, applied for the grants, and waded through the bureaucratic morass (though no one dares call it that) to get this project off the ground. After about a dozen speeches, the four tribal leaders don feathered bonnets and sing a traditional song in their native language. Then each takes a golden shovel and turns over a piece of the soil.
At a cost of just under $8 million, the development wouldn’t have been possible without a combination of federal, state, and private donations. The Crow tribe is broke, as Small observes, for a variety of reasons. There’s next to no economic activity on the reservation. In this desolate area in southeastern Montana, the unemployment rate is 47 percent (when you include people who have given up looking for jobs).1 The people who are employed almost all work for the tribal government.
And then there’s this: the tribe, according to its leadership, owes the Department of Housing and Urban Development about $3 million. In the 1990s, HUD built most of the homes on the reservation, and the tribal leadership promised to exact a small monthly payment from each homeowner. Conrad Stewart, who used to work in the tribal housing office and now chairs the Natural Resources Infrastructure Committee for the Crow tribe, says that the payments were to be between $20 and $30 a month.
But then the tribe members, among them people in Small’s own extended family, refused to pay. Instead, Stewart says, “When the tribe tried to go and recoup some of the money, they made threats. They said the tribe should pay for this. And the tribe has been paying for it [ever since].”
Now the situation is getting bleaker. HUD, the tribal leaders tell me, refuses to build any more homes until the money is paid back. And so no homes are being constructed or repaired. Instead more and more people are moving into each small trailer home. The result is that 75 percent of tribal members between the ages of 18 and 40 “don’t have homes,” according to Stewart.
Stewart blames part of this problem on the tribal government’s lack of forethought. “They were thinking about the short term, because a lot of times the administration – they campaigned and then they got that one year to do something. Well, the next year it’s campaign season again.” Tribal governance was no doubt an issue here. And the Crow tribe has taken steps to improve the situation. In 2001, it instituted four-year terms instead of two-year terms for the chair and other executive positions. “Now we have three years of business and one year of campaigning,” notes Stewart with forced optimism.
Even so, when the tribal government attempted to pass legislation that would require people to pay their debt to HUD, Stewart says, the “old-timers” were telling people, “You do this and then they’re going to take all our homes and then they’re going to kick everybody out on the streets. Everyone will be homeless.” Fourteen versions of the financial protection and procedures laws intended to address this situation were reviewed before one was passed. Says Stewart of this legislative ordeal: “These people would cut your throat.”
Of course, for anyone with a basic understanding of economics and political science, nothing in this story is surprising. If your political representative is also your landlord and you don’t feel like paying your rent, you’ll vote him out of office. But when you do that, it’ll affect both your own ability to get credit and others’ ability to convince someone to build them a home.
But what choice do Crows have? Almost no one on the reservation can afford to build a home, because no one can get a mortgage. And no one can get a mortgage because the property on the reservation is held “in trust” by the federal government and most of it’s “owned” communally by the tribe. Which means, effectively, that no bank could ever foreclose on a property, because the bank can’t own reservation land.
Even town centers on many Indian reservations are desolate places. Small says there are fewer shops now in Lame Deer, Montana, the capital of the Northern Cheyenne reservation, than there were when he was growing up. There’s a small casino – the size of a suburban house – just outside of town. Few non-Indians have a reason to come through Lame Deer, however, so the dozen or so customers at the casino are almost all Indians. These gamblers are effectively taking money given to them by the tribal government for food or housing and giving it back to the tribe through its slot machines.
And the leaders in Lame Deer don’t seem particularly interested in bringing more visitors to town. Winfield Russell, vice president of the Northern Cheyenne tribal council, complains to me about the 18-wheelers that use the town’s main road to avoid the interstates. But rather than a rest stop (which would bring the tribe some revenue), he shows me a design for a new traffic pattern that will discourage truckers from using the road at all.
Small and I spend three days driving around southeastern Montana together. The early May scenery is beautiful and yet somehow depressing as the occasional snow flurry falls. But every few miles, we come upon a group of 10 to 30 trailer homes that, as anyone can see, are a blight on the land. Broken-down cars and trucks are scattered outside the homes like crushed soda cans. Many homes’ windows are broken, with only a kind of tarp separating the residents from the elements. (Residents say they’re waiting for HUD to come fix things.) Children’s toys are piled up haphazardly, mixed with lawn chairs and trash. Menacing stray dogs roam everywhere, searching for food.
“A man’s home is his castle,” Small mutters over and over as we survey these neighborhoods. Sometimes he laughs. A big man, with darkened skin and a full head of white hair, Small sometimes seems angry. But mostly he looks tired.
As we drive through the Crow and Cheyenne reservations, Small points out the places he and his extended family have lived. He has spent most of his life here. His mother was Crow and his father was Northern Cheyenne. He grew up with his six siblings on a farm. Their house had no running water. He’s somewhat nostalgic, though: “At least, back then, there wasn’t so much crime.” Violent crime on the country’s 310 reservations is on average about 2.5 times as high as the national average.2 Fueling the crime are alcohol and drugs – methamphetamines, especially. But Small thinks there’s too little law enforcement, both from the federal government and from the tribe itself.
Each morning I set out with Small, he stops in Lame Deer. The town contains a gas station, a half-stocked supermarket, a Catholic church, a school, and a coffee shop. On the first morning we arrive, the woman making Small his latte tells us that the shop was robbed the night before. The culprit stole all the candy in the glass display case, as well as five left flip-flops from a shelf full of gift items. “At least it won’t be hard to find him,” another customer jokes, imitating a man hobbling on one foot.