stories about finding shelter
2
Book #2 examines how each contributor has worked within systems of land tenure, citizenship, poverty, and education to create a home for themselves and their extended families. Each contributor tells a particular story about finding home and that story is framed by a series of maps and captured satellite imagery displaying those places: -First, a composite map of satellite imagery over Montana, pixellated at the edges, sits under a network of highways that connect all the places each person has ever lived. In this vast state with a population just over one million, everyone drives distances much longer than those considered normal anywhere else, making a highway map the most accurate plan-view expression of this network in motion. -Next, that network is removed from the satellite context and mapped according to how long each place was home, and how frequently the route between places was used. For example, many Blackfeet students at the University of Montana go home every weekend, over 200 miles each way. These frequencies demonstrate the pull of each home point and belong to a pattern of Blackfoot movement through their homelands since time immemorial. -Finally, the network is coded according to a person’s reasons for moving. Most left the reservation for education or work (either theirs or a parent’s) and returned immediately after. This approach reveals some complexity in the surrounding interviews as everyone describes ‘home’ in terms of family as well as land and lineage, and many Blackfeet families have moved away from the Blackfeet Reservation.
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I have my two girls so I want them to grow up how I did. I mean it’s fun for them to walk to the library and stuff but it’s even funner for them to walk to the creek. And when my girls are at my mom and dad’s they want to stay there—they don’t want to come with me—so it’s the same feeling I think. -jt
4
Tatsey Road on the Blackfeet Reservation
Google Earth
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DDR
Where are all the places you’ve ever lived?
6
adapted from: Montana Cadastral
7
How long did you live there? 5+ years 1-5 year(s) <1 year
St Mary East Glacier
Missoula
88
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
9
It has to start with my parents, right? My dad grew up in Browning, my mom grew up in East Glacier. She lived in some old housing right in the middle of town. She has six brothers and sisters, so she has a huge family. Quickly outgrew the house; there was not even close to enough room for all of them. I don’t know the whole backstory on it, but they were able to find a piece of property three miles out of town near Firebrand. They were somewhere in grade school at that time. My dad grew up right in Browning.
My grandparents helped finance this piece here and they bought this lot, oh 30 years ago. It used to be a gas station, as you can see from the garage. There was this main house behind the garage and it hadn’t been a gas station for a number of years before they bought it. This is where I started out living, all the way through high school, until I moved to Missoula when I went to university. In Missoula I mostly lived with family off and on. I mean lots of friends too but actually a lot of family. And I jumped around quite a bit; I think I lived in eight or nine different places, which I feel like isn’t that many compared to a lot of people moving every couple months or however many times.
Two summers in between I stayed out at my grandparents’ cabin in St Marys while I was working for the park. After I moved back from Missoula I moved in here. One, because there’s really no great affordable options in East Glacier or around here. Not even really good places to rent. I ended up moving back in with my mom and Derrick did as well. Reunion! And I’ve been living here for about a year. -ddr 10
Ideal plan, obviously, I would love to build my own house. I basically made it a point as soon as I started to work that, I’m going to save money so someday I can buy a piece of property because there really aren’t any good houses to buy here…ie, zero. So if you want to actually invest in a house you’re probably going to have to build it. In the short term, I want to find a lot—hopefully around East Glacier because most of my family is here. I like the community, it’s close to the park and not a long commute to Browning. So find a lot somewhere around East Glacier or somewhere out of town. I think I might end up buying my aunt’s mobile home. It’s in decent shape, it’s got new windows, and it’s a pretty affordable, inexpensive option. She and her husband have been building their house on the side, it’s taken like five or six years. Once they’re done, which may or may not happen this year—I have no idea. If it does, I’m really going to need to find a place to move the trailer because I’m pretty sure that’s my plan. Ideal option would be for me to purchase a lot that is a place I want to invest in long-term. Have it forever, whether I’m living there or not. Have a trailer on there for a while until I have the ability or means to actually build a place. That would be awesome. -ddr
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JT
Where are all the places youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever lived?
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adapted from: Montana Cadastral
13
How long did you live there? 5+ years 1-5 year(s) <1 year Browning
Cut Bank
Havre
Badger Creek
Missoula
Billings Bozeman
14 14
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
15
I was always trying to get a tribal lot and my grandma said no. She said, don’t do it; she said, because what if they want to build something there you got to move your house. If you own the house but you don’t own the land they can kick you off if they really wanted to.
I’m selling that trailer. I’m kind of afraid [my ex] is gonna wreck it up; even if he wrecks it up they’ll still give me $6000 for the shell. I don’t care I just want to get rid of it. It’s just been a pain in my ass since I bought it. It’s been a fight, you know? And then I mean it’s a FEMA trailer, it wasn’t meant to last, honestly. They even told us it was meant to be for 2-3 years. Even the cupboards like—you can go poke the wall in my trailer and knock it out. They said it’s good if you reside, reroof, basically redo everything except the shell. But you couldn’t beat the offer. Well my brother in law is a carpenter so he resided part of it, just a small portion that came loose. And then my other brother in law is a roofer, so I got these connections and it’s like, well I’ll halfway pay you! I thought about keeping the trailer too; it’s gonna cost a lot to move it and repair whatever he did to it. A lot of energy is in there that I don’t want. I guess I lived in it for maybe two years, because I was in Havre most of the time and came home in the summer. -jt
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Google Earth
FEMAville on the Blackfeet Reservation (built as a campground in the 1950s but never opened; now a neighborhood outside of Browning
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RH
Where are all the places youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever lived?
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adapted from: Montana Cadastral
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How long did you live there? 5+ years 1-5 year(s) <1 year
Boarding School Browning
Missoula
20 20
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
21
Always moving back home, always. Whether it was back to Boarding School or the house we live in now along the train tracks. From 2005 to 2011.
If I ever get a trailer or build a house, I’d put it right by my dad’s house. Other than that I’d have to be on the rez because the occupation and skill set I have require me to be here. -rh
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Hallville outside Browning on the Blackfeet Reservation
Google Earth
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My dad said, when he was on the bus—he grew up in Boarding School—four or five years old, he told someone “someday I’m gonna own that corner” and then he bought it 30 years later or something. So the plan was to sell this type of house to the tribe and fill that whole corner with housing for the tribe, and the Tribe rejected the deal because my dad was involved. They’re just really jealous people and nobody ever wants my dad to succeed, plus there are all kinds of grudges people hold cause of things he did on the basketball court, and that tells you how the Blackfeet feel about the Blackfeet Tribe.
So that fell through and that house is just sitting empty. I moved back here so my dad said well why don’t you live in this house. But I had nothing. There was no way to uncover the windows so I lived in a house with no light. There’s no oven in there or anything still so I had to use a hot plate. Lived there for two years. –shwm
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C-Store (bottom right) and North Browning on US Highway 89 (Duck Lake Rd) and Starr School Rd
Google Earth
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HRC
Where are all the places youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever lived?
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adapted from: Montana Cadastral
27
Browning
How long did you live there? 5+ years 1-5 year(s)
Missoula
<1 year Bozeman
28 Denver, CO
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
29
The biggest reason we moved back was because I found out I was pregnant. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re here for the next five years at least.
I want our kid to go to school somewhere else at some point. I definitely want them to have roots here though. -hrc
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Bearpaw trailer homes near Boarding School on the Blackfeet Reservation
Google Earth
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32 East Glacier Park on the Blackfeet Reservation, with the tourist side (left), the Indian side (right), and the Great Northern Railroad (center)
Google Earth
The oldest buildings in East Glacier were all built by the railroad, which includes this house here. These houses were living quarters for guys working on the railroad. The wiring needs to be completely redone, a lot of work needs to be done and nobody can afford to do it. I don’t know what the future of this house is to be honest. I didn’t start to figure out how to use money until my late 30s. My mom uses money responsibly but my dad doesn’t; he’s only like the third generation to use money and he never really taught me to use it so I basically didn’t learn to save money or use it until I started working at Blackfeet Community College two years ago. Even though I’m financially and educationally in a totally different position than most people in Browning, I’m weirdly still in a situation where I don’t have the skills and can’t afford to do anything for this house, so I’m still just sitting in here and living in it. -shwm
If you look at a lot of those old houses they were very beautiful when they were built, but if you look at them now the only ones that look good belong to carpenters who were able to maintain them. The other ones would probably be condemned anywhere else. -kh
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KE
Where are all the places youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever lived?
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adapted from: Montana Cadastral
35
How long did you live there? 5+ years
â&#x20AC;&#x153;outsideâ&#x20AC;? Starr School Havre Browning Two Medicine Missoula Lolo
1-5 year(s) <1 year
Edgewood, NM
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Honolulu, HI
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
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Google Earth
KEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family land in Two-Medicine below the buffalo jump
We live here because there’s a huge lack of options when it comes to housing on the reservation. It’s pretty challenging because as we plan on moving out, our only option is to buy land or get a homesite lease on some land of my family’s and build a house or buy a prefab home, a mobile home trailer, a Tough Shed that can be turned into a home, or a log cabin kit. I feel like that’s our only option; we can’t really look for rentals. I always see people on Facebook looking for rentals and we tried looking for rentals before, when we were going to move back home after my daughter was born but after a couple months trying to look for a rental and nothing coming up…Now we’re saving for a house and it kind of changes things. It makes it hard as a family trying to navigate the lack of housing. It puts more pressure on you. I think about it every day. I think it motivates me. It’s more motivating now because I have a plan on how I’m going to save to build a small house or buy a small house kit. If there were more housing options, if we could rent for a while then it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Now it motivates me to actually plan my life around it financially. -ke
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All the housing I ended up in was random and last-minute. Sometimes it was my responsibility to find it but it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t ever just for myself. It was always people from here tooâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;those nine people in that first house, we were all from here. -nr
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Firebrand Food & Ale and Rink family land on US Highway 2 within the current boundaries of Glacier National Park (along the highway and railroad easements)
Google Earth
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NR
Where are all the places youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever lived?
42
adapted from: Montana Cadastral
43
How long did you live there? 5+ years 1-5 year(s) <1 year Browning East Glacier
Missoula
Bozeman
44
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
45
This place had been vacant for maybe a year because my grandma fell and broke her hip. It was still full of her stuff, she just kept everything. She has seven kids and none of them wanted to get it cleaned out. So I’m living next-door to a perfectly good apartment gathering dust, and I pushed ‘em and pushed ‘em for three months. When we moved in there was still a ton of stuff in here but there was just enough room for Scarlett and I. They can’t decide who owns it and haven’t decided on rent—so right now I’m living here without paying rent because they won’t talk about it—and I’ve approached them saying I would feel a lot more comfortable paying rent, I’d feel like I had some ownership. It makes me nervous.
We’ve sort of taken ownership by working on this place. After everything was moved out, I did all the cleaning. We’re painting; I did some plumbing work, and I’m probably going to replace the water heater—we had rusty water for a few months. They wouldn’t let me do anything about it at first. I approached every one of them and said please let me fix the shower, I can pay for the work, and they said, no we need to figure things out first. So they prevented me from doing any work like that at first, and finally I said I can’t live in a place like that so we started doing the work ourselves. I’m hoping when they start asking for rent, we can deduct this work. -nr
46
My grandpa just passed away and my grandma has a big house to herself and she asked me if I wanted to move in with her and live with her. I think that that would be awesome, but that came right after Hannah threatened to take Scarlett to Helena. In fact, demanded that Scarlett come with her to Helena and go to school there because of the drama I was facing and having to get kicked out and all that. So I proposed that idea to Hannah and she said, well if you’re gonna do that you might as well just give her to me so she can live in Helena because we’ve got it all set up down there. I’d probably have moved in with my grandma if she hadn’t said, ‘if you do that I want Scarlett.’ I think it would have really helped my grandma feel stable and secure, and have a purpose. Her definition of herself is how she supports other people that she loves, and so I know it would be really life-giving for her, and it would be so close for me to work. It was too much to think about at once. That’s what all the drama is over. All this collective land was my grandparents’ but I never saw any lines dividing it my whole life. And not only that, this land borders the railroad tracks and then there’s the tracks and on the other side is Glacier National Park and it just goes, like 60 miles to the border. And then on the other side of the road there’s some fences and some concept of land over here, but just right up here is national forest all the way down to Lincoln; that’s 100-some miles! So we just went wherever we wanted when we were kids. Then when my grandma died we found out that it had been divided among three of her seven kids without any of the other four knowing; then it was all about the land. Just like my uncle said, ‘stay out of my yard,’ and that was such a weird thing for me; I was like, this is all my land, all our land together. I never had that separation. -nr
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48 Central Ave, Browning. Powwow arbor, Charging Home Stampede Park, Glacier Peaks Casino, and the Mueum of the Plains Indian
Google Earth
My contingency plan—which isn’t really a plan—is like, my mom is hoping her mom and dad leave her their house in Browning. Because of the drama here there’s bad feelings and she doesn’t want to live out here anymore. All of her siblings have good places to live already, good places to live the rest of their lives. So in the back of my mind I’m thinking, maybe I can buy the house I grew up in. –nr
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KH
Where are all the places youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever lived?
50
adapted from: Montana Cadastral
51
How long did you live there? 5+ years 1-5 year(s) <1 year Boarding School Havre
Browning
Billings Bozeman
52
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
53
You’re 100 people behind everybody else. Every so often houses are built, but they’re already filled because there are families living with families, so they’ll get it first. And there are families living in condemned houses so they’ll get it before you. My old girlfriend, that’s how they were. They lived in an apartment and it was a shit apartment and finally those North Fork Estate houses were built and they were the first ones to get one, but I know they were always last in line with other houses being built. There were I think three housing complexes built in that time and they never did get one. -kh
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North Browning housing projects off US Highway 89 (right)
Google Earth
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SHWM
Where are all the places youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever lived?
56
adapted from: Montana Cadastral
57
How long did you live there? 5+ years 1-5 year(s) <1 year
Browning East Glacier
Everett, WA Seattle, WA Puyallup, WA
Missoula Florence
Portland, OR Salem, OR
Madison, WI
Pocatello, ID
Ann Arbor, MI Iowa City, IA Elko, NV
Sacramento, CA San Francisco, CA
58
Why did you live there?
Family School Work Other
59
I’m 38. I’m living in the house I grew up in and now my sister and her kids live in this house with me. My parents, mostly because of my dad, don’t ask us to pay rent; we pay utilities but we don’t pay rent. Even though we’re not living in tribal housing I still feel like there’s something fundamentally like tribal housing in this. If I’m gone for three years, I might not be able to move back. Who knows what will be going on with this house? At the same time, if there were a decent place to rent I might prefer that because living in a semi-communal space like this where most everyone in the family has a key and people move in and out and people’s stuff is here that I wish wasn’t here…If I wasn’t thinking about leaving, I’d consider renting because I would have my own space. But there are hardly any options and the rent prices are out of control.
Most non-Indians in their late 30s would not be thinking about doing what I’m about to do, which is uproot myself, leave a stable job, and do something for a few years that guarantees me nothing, to get a degree that is superfluous from which I will emerge in my early 40s with no job. It’s clear to me that I have a different sense of what’s appropriate given where you are in life. When you grow up here and you’re native, the social expectations that most Americans deal with don’t exist here. It makes it easier for us to follow different routes through life, but it also makes it far more likely that in middle age you have no retirement, you just don’t have the stability that most non-Indians do by the time they’re in their mid-40s at least if you’re middle class and up. -shwm
60
There were relatively specific expectations placed on people in the pre-smallpox culture. Very specific roles people were supposed to play and an incredible amount of personal meaning that comes from fulfilling a role. Even though I don’t think most Americans would think of it this way, that’s because those roles are available to them. The role of being a homeowner and having jobs and families are structurally available and you can step into them relatively easily with the necessary criteria because the infrastructure is in place for you. Here, the old roles don’t really exist anymore because of colonization and the things we’ve gone through, but also because we still don’t have an economy that would be anything but skeletal at best, and because of the way that land works here and how hard it is to acquire land and how few people have money to acquire land—which is almost no one—and how housing has worked to this point where people can’t even get loans, we’re in a situation where those markers of meaning are absent. We don’t have the old markers and we don’t have new markers so we’re in limbo. It does something to peoples’ heads when there are no roles to be played and it has a really detrimental effect on people’s psyches. -shwm
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