Resists Assimilation : Crow Tribe: Heavy Price of Tradition

CROW AGENCY, Mont. —  Sharon Old Elk, his wife, Latona, and infant son had just returned home to the Sun Lodge Motel, a shambles of broken windows, warped doors and peeling paint near the hill where an American flag waves over the Custer Battlefield National Monument.

Autumn rains had flooded the motel’s lower level. Broken pipes had leaked sewage and grease on the rugs of some empty rooms. A foul odor blanketed the trash-strewn building.

But the couple, the motel’s only inhabitants, refused to let go of their dream of reviving the place, which has opened and closed many times since it was built in 1971 under a federal program to bring jobs and revenue to the Crow Indian Reservation.

Given Special Permission

It would seem an impossible task for the pair, who were granted special permission by tribal authorities in June to try where others failed. But Sharon Old Elk, 29, an unemployed cement finisher, said there is more at stake than turning a profit.

“In many ways this motel is like us--the Crow tribe,” he said, glancing at his wife for reassurance. “It has so much potential. It is a disgrace to see it this way.”

The Crow live in a vast expanse of grassy hills and river valleys in southeast Montana. On their 2 million acres are some of the best recreational and grazing land in the state. Underground are some of the nation’s richest known reserves of coal--at least 5 billion tons--and potentially great reserves of oil and natural gas.

Yet the 7,500-member tribe is poverty stricken, its modern history told mostly through economic hardship, rip-offs and failures.

The Crow are not alone. Despite decades of federal spending and self-help efforts, American reservation Indians are among the most poorly educated, least employable and arguably most exploited people in the nation.

Federal officials, tribal leaders and Indian scholars agree that much blame can be assigned to federal mismanagement, broken treaties and racism and greed by whites. But also at work are factors deeply rooted in Indian tradition and life that well-meaning whites wish they could change, but cannot.

At the heart of the matter is the fact that Indians were here first, and unlike many immigrants, they did not consider their native attitudes to be the expendable price of living in America. The conquered tribes, to an overwhelming degree, continue to resist full assimilation into white society, making improved economic conditions nearly impossible.

On the reservations “it is almost a contest of values,” says Sam Stanley, a retired Smithsonian Institution anthropologist who studied Indian economic development. White society places great importance on “material possessions and a raging priority around numbers as a measure of success.”

“Indians do not think that way. Their values do not reduce to numbers. They reduce to close, reciprocal relationships between fellow tribal members and the environment in which they live.”

As a consequence, he adds, “they have been paying a very heavy price” for adhering to their traditional outlook.

Joe Jorgeson, a University of California, Irvine anthropologist, said that in the last two decades alone scores of reservations have signed away valuable land, water and mineral resources to non-Indians paying “bargain basement rates.” In other cases, the Indians have seen development projects collapse in failure.

15 Cents for Ton of Coal

While the state of New Mexico was receiving $15,000 an acre for uranium leases a few years ago, Navajo landowners with proven ore reserves were getting only $150 an acre. At about the same time, when American coal was bringing $6 to $10 a ton, the Navajo were getting just 15 cents a ton from a subsidiary of General Electric Corp.

Similarly, the Ute Indians of Utah leased land which produces thousands of barrels of oil and millions of cubic feet of gas for a fraction of the market price; the Klamath Indians of Oregon lost a potential fortune in lumber leases; the Umatilla Indians, also of Oregon, have leased “extremely productive wheat land at 1930 prices,” Jorgeson said.

Nationwide, 40% of prime tribal farmland is leased to non-Indians; among individual Indians, 70% of the farmland is leased by outsiders.

Crow Agency, a village of small homes, reservation and government offices and schools, where 75% of the population is under 34, is a microcosm of the problem.

The reservation is littered with the ruins of failed business developments brought to it over the years by federal officials. A mile west of the Sun Lodge Motel stands the shell of Big Horn Carpet Mills. Behind the carpet factory is a failed electronics plant.

Jobless Rate Put at 85%

Today, the unemployment rate on the reservation is 85%, and the average annual per capita income is about $5,000, tribal leaders say. The death rate from alcohol abuse is 11 times higher than the national average for non-Indians.

In a situation that has been compared to “feudalism in reverse,” the Crow control only 51% of their reservation’s 2.25 million acres. The rest has been bought or leased over the years by non-Indian ranchers, farmers and corporations.

“We have Indians here who are so broke they sell their land to non-Indians at rock-bottom prices just to get a little cash in their hands,” said Dale Old Horn, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and head of the Social Sciences and Crow Studies departments at Crow Agency’s Little Big Horn College.

Money and material wealth is not as meaningful to the Crow as kin ties and clan relationships, Old Horn said. That fact is evident in Crow celebrations where individuals living on federal subsidies give away armloads of clothes, blankets or tools to friends and relatives.

“The Crow Indian child is taught that he is part of a harmonious circle of kin relations, clans and nature,” Old Horn said. “The white child is taught that he is the center of the circle.”

Similarly, he added: “The Crow believe in sharing wealth, and whites believe in accumulating wealth.”

Poor Business Skills

It is a difference of view that results in poor aptitudes for business, and few defenses against whites who have mastered making a quick profit. It is nowhere more evident than in dealings over land, which Indians traditionally see as an intangible, like air and water, and whites see in a more confined light: as real estate.

Before the Plains Wars ever started, the Crow settled for 38.8 million acres of land in Wyoming and Montana in 1851 under the Treaty of Ft. Laramie. In return, the federal government was allowed to build roads and military posts on the land. A gold rush undid the treaty, and a new agreement in 1868 reduced Crow land to 8 million acres.

By the time the reservation was established in 1884, the Crow had lost 6 million more acres of land, the buffalo had been wiped out and half of the tribe’s members had died from diseases carried by white settlers.

Without buffalo, the tribe was forced to survive on government rations of beef and flour. Their society, based on hunting and gathering naturally occurring food over vast ranges, was destroyed. The government tried, and failed, to teach the Crow farming techniques. The horsemen, hunters and warriors considered it an affront to their pride, tribal leaders said.

In the 1920s, attempting to pass on the white concept of private land ownership, the government allotted land to individual Indians. Under the new laws, Crow Indians declared “competent” by the local Bureau of Indian Affairs agency were allowed to lease their allotments as they pleased. As a result, impoverished Indians in droves began leasing thousands of acres to whites at a fraction of their worth.

“They were flat-out giveaways,” said Jorgeson. “Part of the problem was that these people did not understand that land was a commodity.”

“The Indian is poor, he has a lot of needs,” explained David Stewart, a Crow Indian and BIA official in Crow Agency. “The next best thing to having a job is selling his land.”

With the exception of lands under the “competent lease program,” all land transactions here are supposed to occur under the protective shield of the BIA. For example, under a “preferred lease program,” Crow are granted first bidding rights on tribal property made available for leasing. But Crow Indians are routinely paid off to act as “front men” to obtain such leases for non-Indians.

Everett Whiteman, a BIA specialist in surface leases, estimated that more than half of the bids made by Indians under the preferred lease program are for non-Indians.

“It happens a lot. I do it. It is ripping the Indians off,” said Jeff, a 27-year-old rancher who asked that his last name not be used because “it is devastating if you go against the white guys in control around here.”

Jeff described another common type of land swindle. He said an Indian desperately needing $1,500 to make a payment on a pickup truck offered to lease him 300 acres.

“I said I would give him $2 an acre for two years in advance,” Jeff said. “He got the money, I got the lease. I could have gotten five years’ worth for a dollar an acre if I wanted.”

Ties to Corporations

The Indians have hardly done better in their leases to major corporations. With coal prices depressed, most energy companies have simply been able to back out of their leases. Today, only Westmoreland Resources’ Absoloka Mine is generating appreciable revenues for the tribe. But about 60% of these revenues are handed out to individual tribal members in per capita payments amounting to $150 a year.

In 1984, under a previous tribal administration, the tribe entered into a joint venture with an affiliate of O’Hare Energy Corp. of Denver, giving the partnership first right of refusal to explore and drill for oil on 1.5 million acres.

But now the newly elected tribal administration has misgivings about the agreement. Many Crow believe that the agreement allows O’Hare too much control over accounting and disbursement of potential profits.

BIA officials originally recommended that the tribe not enter the agreement on the grounds that “we did not feel it was something beneficial to the tribe as a whole,” said Mack Cole, acting regional director of the Billings, Mont., BIA office. “For one thing, it seems to tie up the entire reservation.”

“We are at a standoff with the present administration,” Everet Makinen, vice president of O’Hare Oil, said. He added that if the issue is not “resolved face-to-face with the current Crow administration, we may have to settle it in court.”

Some Call It ‘a Mess’

Some have compared this reservation to an “economic Bermuda Triangle,” because of its form of government. Some Crows call it a “pure democracy.” Others call it “a mess.”

“Here, every tribal member older than 18 is a member of the tribal council and able to vote on all matters concerning the tribe,” Old Horn said. The council meets four times a year, and each time the tribe’s four elected officials--who serve 2-year terms--are vulnerable to impeachment.

As a result, tribal officials are constantly campaigning to hold their position. The upshot is a “management by crisis” form of government, tribal leaders say.

Defenders of the system say it protects the tribe from making mistakes. “Sometimes no decision is a good decision,” said Janine Windy Boy, president of Little Big Horn College. “We do not make decisions in haste. I realize that bothers people who expect immediate decisions on the economic proposals they bring us.”

Opponents say it hampers business development by frustrating or scaring off potential business partners.

“The tribe’s constitution and bylaws are not worth the paper they are written on,” said BIA official Stewart. “They are outdated and weak, and one of the tribe’s biggest problems.”

The Crow are struggling for solutions. Eloise Pease, 69, and Julia Not Afraid, 64, have spent years digging through libraries, archives and congressional records in search of documents to use as legal weapons in tribal efforts to win the best deals possible on their resources.

Kitchen Headquarters

Their headquarters is the kitchen of Pease’s cramped house in the nearby community of Lodge Grass, where more than 300,000 documents are stored in file cabinets and heaped in precarious piles on the floor, sofa, refrigerator and television.

“If you look in the woodpile you’ll find a BIA official somewhere in every deal that’s gone bad around here,” Pease said. “The BIA always favors the white man. All they have to do is put on a business suit, introduce themselves as Mr. Schmo and the BIA falls all over them.”

But the effort by Pease and Not Afraid holds only long-term promise at best.

Meanwhile, the lack of local employment forces most tribal members to either work at low-paying jobs off the reservation in Hardin, 12 miles north, or Billings, 40 miles west, or simply kill time waiting for welfare checks.

Henry Reed, a 20-year-old local cowboy earning $600 a month, is one of the lucky ones.

“I’ve been doin’ some coyboyin’ and fence repairs,” said Reed, while digging post holes on a reservation ranch with an auger connected to a cleverly converted 1952 Buick chassis. “But I worry about people like my cousin who came home from the Marines last spring. He’s collecting unemployment and looking for a job.”

Holds Out Hope

Tribal chairman Richard Real Bird, like many tribal chairmen before him, holds out hope. Maybe energy prices will rise. Maybe coal will make a comeback.

“See that mountain over there?” he asked, pointing past the cracked windshield of his pickup truck at a snowcapped peak in the distance. “The Crow call it Mountain of the Future.”

It was there, he said, that the First Maker visited a wandering party of Crow in dreams and told them to stay with a promise of finding eternal peace and prosperity.

“We finally found the peaceful existence,” Real Bird said. “But we haven’t been able to find the prosperity.”