The storm hit right after Christmas and didn’t let up until late February. Residents of the Fort Belknap Reservation — a 1,152 square-mile rectangle south of Highway 2 in northcentral Montana — say the 2004 storm was the worst they had seen in 20 years.

Wind ripped across the wide, rolling landscape, gusting to 120 mph, pushing and packing the continuous stream of snow against the earth and any structures that could stand it.

Residents scrambled, working 12-hour days and sometimes around the clock to get to Indian elders in remote areas. Because no truck could plow through the heavy snow, men delivered food, propane, and even diapers on foot.

The Fort Belknap Fish and Wildlife Department rented heavy equipment from Great Falls to get feed to the 700 buffalo in pastures around Snake Butte — the landmark tiered table of rock and sage just short of the reservation’s western boundary. Still, distributing hay across 14,000 acres of pasture, says game warden Mark Azure, took time.

“With the weather conditions the way they were it was almost impossible,” he recalls. “And when those animals are hungry no fence—not even a brick wall—can stop them.”

No fence, no wall and last winter, not even 5 feet of snow.

The buffalo were starving. And moving.

According to Dustin Hofeldt, the 25-year-old son of a neighboring rancher who lives southwest of Snake Butte, some 200 buffalo walked over the snow-drifted fences onto his family’s property. Hofeldt says they called the tribes many times about the animals.

“The buffalo spent considerable time in our White Bear pasture and eventually traveled on to our feed grounds,” Hofeldt wrote in a letter to the tribal paper in March 2004.

While the tribes had some success rounding them up, as soon as the hay was eaten they strayed again. Plus, added Azure, getting provisions to elders was a bigger priority.

One day in February, flustered and fed-up, Hofeldt shot and killed five buffalo.

Tempers on both sides of the blown fences flared and the tribes filed formal complaints with the county. Hofeldt faced an obstruction of justice charge, but the tribes weren’t satisfied.
The tribes were not reimbursed for the buffalo, each valued at about $2,000.

“There was a lot of talk here about an eye for an eye … but the tribal government talked people down,” says Azure. “Thank God cooler heads prevailed.”

In the same issue of Fort Belknap News that featured Hofeldt’s letter, tribal members spoke out.

“If it were an Indian … doing this, they would really fix him,” wrote Betty Jo Longknife from Fort Belknap Agency.

“…If a Native American would have done it, the Native American would have been fully prosecuted under the white man’s law,” wrote Warniky Hoops.

And finally, Duane Buck Sr. asked: “Was the matter really about the buffalo or the Indian?”

In Blaine County, where roughly 45 percent of the population is Indian, it is — as it always has been — about the tribes more than their buffalo.

It is about the schism between the whites and Indians that for most of the last century was reinforced, in part, by the Blaine County political system.

Never in the county’s 107 years had an Indian been elected to a county office.

But on Dec. 31, 2002, Dolores Plumage took the first step toward change when she was sworn in as Blaine County’s first female commissioner — the first woman and first Indian.

“My knees were literally shaking,” Dolores Plumage says, laughing now, more than two years after that swearing-in ceremony.
She and her husband, Jack, were driving the 20 miles from their home on the Fort Belknap Reservation to Chinook, and she had forgotten her granddaughters’ traditional dancing shawls. She remembers thinking she couldn’t be late.

“I had to go back,” she says. “I promised my grandkids that they would dance and they couldn’t dance without their shawls.”

Her husband turned the green and white Ford pickup around. This time, looking out the passenger-side window, Plumage saw the Bear Paw Mountains piled along the southern horizon, gradually tapering into the earth toward the direction of their home.

After their third crossing over the Milk River, which marks the reservation’s northern boundary, Plumage carried two shawls—one for 2-year-old Sage and one for 4-year-old Danielle.

The Plumages weren’t late. And at the ceremony, tribal leaders, representing the reservation’s Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes, presented the county with the Fort Belknap flag, a black and white bison skull circled by red earth, yellow sun, and green mountains. Two members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes presented their flag as well, honoring Plumage’s birthplace and tribal membership. It would be the first time tribal flags had hung in the county courthouse.

Chris, one of the Plumages’ four children, beat his red, yellow and green drumstick against a taut canvas surface. His steady thumps were joined by four others’, all beating the shared instrument in the center of their seated circle. They sang an honor song, then a victory song. Indians and non-Indians lined up and shook hands, exchanging wishes of good fortune and prosperity.

“The songs and celebration [were] meant to alleviate a different kind of drought that has existed between the county and reservation,” Plumage says. “It was time to sing our song.”

The 4,226 square miles of Blaine County lie just east of Havre. Highway 2 runs east to west across the county, dividing mostly small clusters of homes and cattle ranches. More hay bales than houses dot the pale, brittle earth, striped in the faded hues of repeated growth and harvest. The hay is rivaled in density only by a continuous stream of wire that dips between telephone poles along the highway — that and the Bear Paw and Little Rocky mountains in the south, which huddle their rounded backs together like a gang of turtles seeking reprieve from the wind.

Of the 7,009 people who live in Blaine County, 45 percent are Indian, 80 percent of whom live on the Fort Belknap Reservation, which —minus a small sliver in the east — sits wholly within the county.

Indians are just barely a minority here, and their population, unlike non-Indians, is increasing, increasing along with unemployment, which was 71 percent in 2001, the latest estimate available. Blaine County’s off-reservation unemployment registers at 4 percent. This disparity extends to income: the off-reservation median income in Blaine County five years ago was $28,241, while the reservation’s was $21,152.

And until Plumage’s election, the disparity extended to politics.

Low Indian voter turnout, and the county’s use of an at-large voting system — historically used in the South to dilute the black vote and often deemed racist — prompted the U.S. Department of Justice to file suit against Blaine County in 1998. The charge was a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race. At least three other counties in Montana and 71 nationwide have faced similar charges. Of those counties that have resisted and gone to trial, none has won.

But Blaine County, says its attorney, Scott Detamore, from the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation, did not intend to discriminate. And intent, he says, must be proved in order to violate the 1965 law. Intent, however, was replaced with results in when Congress amended the act in 1982. The result, lawmakers reasoned, is what matters.

Detamore also argues that Indians weren’t elected because too few bother to vote.

The foundation, a nonprofit, public interest legal group based in Lakewood, Colo., believes big government is bad government. And this, in Detamore’s view, is a perfect example of that equation.

In an at-large election, all county constituents can vote for each of the three commissioners, regardless of where the voters live. In single-member voting districts, each commissioner is elected only by those people who live within their district.

Redistricting, Detamore says, has created an unfortunate irony: Gone are any incentives for commissioners who do not represent the tribal district to interact with the tribe.

“Any polarization and racial tension that did exist,” he says, “has only been made worse.”

However, in 2001 and despite the county’s arguments, a district court judge ordered the county to implement a new voting system. The court found proof of discrimination, racially polarized voting and dilution of the Indian vote. The combined effect, the judge said, prevented Indians from participating equally in the county’s political process.

The court gave the county one month to come up with a new system.

While commissioners Don Swenson and Art Kleinjan, and then-commissioner Vic Miller drew new lines to ensure that one district had an Indian majority, they simultaneously appealed the decision to the U.S. District Court.

In the following year, after Plumage was elected to represent District 1, a judge denied the county’s second appeal and, for the time being, the new system stuck. Last fall, two of the county commissioners — with Plumage casting a dissenting vote — voted to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In late April the high court refused to hear the case.
After the court rejected Blaine County’s appeal, Kleinjan said he was not disappointed.

“It’s over with,” he told a Great Falls reporter. “We’re going to go forward from here and treat everybody alike and patch up the wounds.”

Click Images to Enlarge

Tom Jones, a game warden at Fort Belknap Fish and Wldlife, closes the gate to the bison range, where in 2004 five bison escaped to neighboring land during a snowstorm.

The Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes manage a 700-head bison herd. After a neighbor shot bison that had escaped the range, the tribes sought reimbursement, but were unsuccessful. Range managers put the loss at $10,000. The neighbor was charged with obstruction of justice.

Family plays an integral role in Plumage's life. Her granddaughter Sage, 4, jumps at any opportunity to spend time with her grandparents, Dolores and Jack. Plumage's work in Blaine County seat is laying the groundwork for future generations of Indians, such as Sage.

Road maintenance is the responsibility of the tribe because Ft.Belknap is considered a closed reservation. Only a little less than 4 percent of the land, which includes 10 miles of state highway, is the responsibility of the county.

Don Swenson is 1 of 3 county commissioners in Blaine County. After a redistricting in 2001, a small square of land of the reservation previously in Don's district was lost to District 1, now Dolores' district. As a result, Done no longer travels to the reservation to work with the Indians.

A sign in Lodge Pole welcomes visitors to the small community on the Ft.Belknap reservation, where Dolores serves as the Blaine County Commissioner.

Tribal President and Vice President, Julia Doney and Raymond Chandler both agree that there is a lack of a working relationship between the county and the reservation.