Blackfeet Housing on Shaky Foundations

In Browning, some residents want the government to fix their houses — homes they say are making them sick

Story by Adam Weinacker
Photos by Mike Cohea

Gary Grant is convinced his home is slowly killing him.

The 57-year-old member of Montana’s Blackfeet tribe is not a healthy man. He takes 22 pills a day to control his health problems, which include diabetes, high blood pressure, kidney problems and Meniere's disease, an ear affliction that throws off his sense of balance and gives him dizzy spells that last for hours.

But his internal bodily struggles are not as noticeable as the empty void that was once his left foot. Grant’s leg was amputated below the knee at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle in February, and he is waiting for a prosthetic limb to help him walk again.

“I took care of it the best I could,” he says, referring to the small crack on his heel that turned into a bone infection doctors were unable to reverse. “I kept it clean, and I used antibiotics on it. I was taking antibiotics intravenously, and it still got infected.”

As his body has broken down over the years, Grant has suspected that his problems aren’t all genetic. Yes, he has diabetes, which often contributes to kidney failure and frequently is associated with lower-limb amputations.

But his house, he says, seems to generate sickness, and it’s not confined to him.

His home was built with a foundation made of pressurized wood treated with formaldehyde and chromated copper arsenate, a pesticide the Environmental Protection Agency has banned from lumber used to build homes. His shingles and flooring contain asbestos. The radon readings in his home are three times the limit EPA suggests is safe. The white paint on his walls is lead-based. The outer walls of his home are bowing from the buckling wood foundation and have little insulation, making the frigid, tempestuous winters along Montana’s Hi-Line even colder for his family.

“I really blame this home for getting me this way,” he says. “It could be from some of the toxins in these homes, I really believe.”

Grant was once a tall, solid man who played basketball and served as a private first class in the Army. Now he can’t go outside without assistance from his wife, Mary Jane, and his daily cycle is governed by a blue box that divides his medication by day and time.

He sits in his wheelchair at his kitchen table, talking about all that is wrong with his home, his tribe, his life. A multi-colored paper turkey is taped to the display case behind him. His granddaughter, Kaelee, made it. On its tail feathers are written things Kaelee is thankful for: her family, her grandpa, her grandma.

But Gary Grant is not thankful for his house. He wants a new one. He wants a home that won’t fall apart after 25 years, one, he says, that won’t make his family sick.

And he wants the federal government or the tribe to pay for it.

Grant and others who live in wood-foundation homes built on the reservation are suing the Blackfeet Housing Authority and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to fix or replace the homes, which are operated under HUD’s Mutual Help Homeownership and Opportunity Program to help low-income families become homeowners.

Blackfeet Housing constructed more than 150 such homes using wood foundations between 1977 and 1980, and many residents insist they are substandard. Water, in an area where snowfall is measured in feet, has seeped under many foundations and into basements. Septic tanks regularly back up, causing toxic black mold to grow in the walls or under the carpets of some houses.

Tom Towe, a Billings lawyer representing the residents, says he is asking only for the government to fix the homes. The United States has a trust responsibility to provide safe and sanitary housing for the Blackfeet Indians, he says. HUD required that the houses be built with wood foundations, he says, which makes it liable for the substandard housing. HUD has maintained that it only approved Blackfeet Housing’s plan and supplied money for the houses.

“HUD takes the position: ‘Oh no, they were just the money lender,’ to which I say, ‘Nonsense,’” Towe says. “Our request is to fix it (the homes). We don’t care how you fix it, just fix it.”

But Federal District Judge Sam Haddon of Great Falls dismissed the case against HUD and Blackfeet Housing in mid-January, finding that HUD has no trust responsibility to fix the houses and that the lawsuit belonged in the Court of Federal Claims. He also dismissed charges against Blackfeet Housing on the basis of “sovereign immunity,” which means the housing authority, as an arm of the sovereign tribe, would not open itself up to being sued.

“Tribes have a right to defend themselves using whatever tools are available to them,” says Stephen Doherty, lawyer for the housing authority. “The question of tribal immunity and jurisdiction are vital to the tribes as sovereign governments.”

The plaintiffs are appealing Haddon’s decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which will likely not make a decision for two more years.

But Judge Haddon’s dismissal of the case frustrates the Grants, who don’t understand how the housing authority can simply claim sovereign immunity without having to fix the homes.

“How can you use sovereignty against your own people?” Gary Grant asks, as Mary Jane nods her head in agreement.

Mary Jane Grant is a small woman who mostly lets her husband talk. But when she chimes in, her soft voice lets loose staunch opinions and a sense of frustration.

How can her tribe be sovereign when it relies so much on the federal government’s money to get by? she asks. The sovereign status of her tribe, she argues, allows it to take money from the government and mismanage it, such as paying people to do shoddy work and using millions of dollars to build cheap houses on unreliable foundations.

To straighten things out on the reservation, she would like the government to cut ties with the tribe.

“I’d like to see termination,” she says. “We’d be better off. You won’t have the thieves. You won’t have the wrongdoing. There’ll be justice.”

But the main question for the residents of the Glacier Homes is, who is responsible? Is the tribe sovereign and responsible for its own housing or does the government have a trust responsibility that extends to individual tribal members? Those are questions left to the courts to answer. Meanwhile, people living in Browning experience the reality of living in homes that some have called “less than shacks,” homes that may be unsafe.

“I’ll stick to my guns till I go to my grave that these were built wrong,” Gary Grant says. “What we’re talking about is the God’s truth, and I’ll stick to my guns.”

Martin Marceau remembers the smell of his house from when he first moved there in 1977.

" It was the first time I had owned a house, and I come in here — it smelled new," the 56-year-old says. He and his wife, June, had been living in a trailer home without running water. Marceau was a young man then and says he didn't know much about houses.

" It looked nice," he recalls. "I thought, 'Boy, I got the deal of the century here.' I didn't know I had nothing but problems."

Those problems have developed over the years. One side of his home is bowed because the foundation settled out of plumb. His walls are thin and were built using 2x4 studs placed 3 feet apart instead of the usual 2x6s at 16 inches. When kids bounce balls off the outside wall, his hanging pictures fall to the floor.

" This is the Taj Mahal," he says. Only, in this palace the toilet water swirls when the wind — which can reach speeds of more than 100 miles per hour — blows outside.

As Marceau talks at his kitchen table, sipping green tea he has made using bottled water because he doesn’t trust what comes from the tap, he tells of the health effects he has experienced while living here.

“We have headaches and our hair falls out,” he says, though he looks healthy. “What it really is, is a death sentence overall. We don’t really know the prognosis of our health.”

June Marceau runs a day care from the home. They’ve warned the children’s families of the problems with their house, but the kids still come. The Marceaus’ niece comes to the day care and the family says she and three other children who attend the day care have developed kidney problems. Martin Marceau can’t say for sure it’s the house that is causing it, but he can’t shake the feeling.

Marceau is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against HUD and Blackfeet Housing, and many people who live in the wood-foundation homes rely on him to keep documents safe.

" Oh, Hot Dog knows about that," is a frequent response among the residents when asked about their homes. Most everyone calls Marceau "Hot Dog," a name he received when he was young because he couldn't properly pronounce his Indian name, "White Dog."

And it's true. Hot Dog knows about these houses, and his involvement has led him into politics. He is a candidate for the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, running against Earl Old Person. Marceau insists that Old Person, a council member almost continuously since the 1950s, and an honorary tribal chief, has been on the council for too long and the reservation has seen too little development, especially in housing.

“There’s high poverty here, really a lot of poverty,” he says. “Every one of our homes here are substandard.”

Thirty-four percent of the people on the Blackfeet Reservation live at or below the poverty level, according to the Northwest Area Foundation.

Old Person says he’s heard comments like Marceau’s before, but he hopes that after 50 years he’s done positive things for the tribe.

Marceau says he doesn’t see many positive developments on the reservation. He and others don’t see anything positive in the wood foundations, which have the potential to rot. People don’t understand why wood foundations would be used in a snowy, windy climate such as Browning’s.

In fact, inspectors did reject the foundations initially. Minutes from a May 1977 housing committee meeting state “all the materials here was (sic) rejected.” The committee brought in a second inspector, and the plywood used in the foundations was rejected again.

But handwritten minutes from a meeting two months later read that the rejected materials were discussed and “HUD stated they, the wooden foundations are acceptable.”

It’s those foundations that have created most of the problems in the houses, especially those with basements, residents say. But just who required that wood be used is a tougher question.

The housing authority says that when the foundations were first built it recommended that the homes “should be rejected and the contractor held liable for the replacement of the wood foundation,” according to a report issued in April 2002. The report accuses HUD of forcing Blackfeet Housing to agree to the use of wood foundations.

Chief Old Person says he and the tribal council had reservations about the houses at first. But he says he remembers the housing authority assuring the council that the foundations would hold up fine. That hasn’t been the case.

Another of Marceau’s main concerns is that the 80 acres on which the Glacier Homes were built was mortgaged in 1973 to Farmers Home Administration for $1 million. Under the Blackfeet Charter, the mortgage was supposed to go to a referendum to be approved, but enrolled members were never allowed to vote on it. The mortgage papers were signed in September 1973, and the mortgage won’t be paid off until August 2013.

For Marceau and his neighbors who have been renting to own their homes, this means they won’t truly own their houses even when they’ve paid in full. The mortgage could always go sour and FHA could foreclose on the houses. Neither the Blackfeet Housing director nor Old Person knows where that money goes, what it is used for, or even why there was a mortgage to begin with.

Outside, the wind blows as always, and Marceau surveys his house and neighborhood. His was once one of the most powerful tribes in North America. They were the “Lords of the Plains.” Now they live in a community where dogs roam in packs and trash is almost more common than grass. All around are floating plastic bags, crushed cans, busted glass and rotted mattresses.

HUD reports that it gave the tribe $41.3 million between 1993 and 1999 for housing. Marceau can’t fathom where that money might have gone.

“You can see for yourself this shit hole that we live in here, which it is,” he says. “We have plenty of Uncle Sam’s money coming in here to do the job, which they aren’t doing.

“We don’t have to live like this. The Indians are supposed to be the landlords of this country. We’re supposed to take care of this. This is what they believe in, Mother Earth. You know, it’s sad. It’s really sad. I myself am just as guilty as the rest.”

The plywood blocking Lucky Edwards’ stairwell to his basement is used to keep the “poison” from getting upstairs.

Despite his name, Edwards wasn’t lucky when it came to his house. As he removes the board to enter his unoccupied basement, he is quick to say that his home is the worst of the 153 houses built on wood foundations. It has been condemned two or three times—he can’t remember which—but he still lives there because he has nowhere else to go.

“You can see them houses in town. They’re nothing like this,” he says.

His house was part of the housing project that used wood foundations, though his is on a scatter site in what is called the Star School area, about 7 miles north of the Glacier Homes. It is a house separate in location, but not in situation.

Edwards walks downstairs, past the empty water jugs and BB handgun lying on the stairs, and makes a left. He opens up a closet door to show the inside, which is splotched with pink and black toxic mold lining the bottom 3 feet of Sheetrock.

“That’s your poison right there,” he says.

The wind from outside whistles through the windows in the bedrooms, no doubt circulating the mold spores around the basement.

“That stuff, you can’t see it,” Edwards says. “It’s in the air.”

In 1997, workers from Stat! Disaster Restoration in Kalispell came to collect samples of the mold from Edwards’ house but wouldn’t venture into the basement without protective suits, he says. One employee told him he couldn’t believe Edwards wasn’t dead after living in the house for more than two decades.

Daniel B. Stephens & Associates, an environmental assessment group from Albuquerque, N.M., tested multiple wood- foundation houses in 2002. In Edwards’ basement they found epicoccum spores, commonly considered a contaminant, and stachybotrys-like spores, which have been linked to pulmonary hemorrhaging in infants. Edwards says he always gets a sore throat when he goes downstairs. It’s a dry, scratchy feeling that he tries to avoid.

“My throat just doesn’t feel right when I come out of that place,” he says.

When Edwards and his family first moved into the house, before the mold appeared, they got nosebleeds and headaches, which are problems many residents in the Glacier Homes say they’ve experienced. His ex-wife also developed kidney problems and asthma when there was no family history of those diseases, Edwards says.

“This house has caused it,” he insists. Although he has no proof, he says he thinks that people living in the wood-foundation homes have a higher incidence of health problems.

The mold in the basement didn’t start to grow until the irrigation canal behind Edwards’ house overflowed. Gushes of water ran down a small hill and seeped in through the foundation, into his basement. The water also filled his septic tank, which overflowed and backed up through the drain in his basement. The moisture got into the walls, creating a conducive environment for the mold that has overtaken his basement.

“When it floods, it’s like a lake down here,” he says.

Aside from the mold, a study of Edwards’ house by Stat! Disaster Restoration found even more problems.

“Extensive septic back-ups and resultant contamination of the soil … renders the well technically unsafe for use,” according to the report. Edwards still drinks from the tap, though he calls it “toxic water.”

Stat! also recommended the house be demolished, a process that would cost about $16,300. Full repair of Edwards’ house would cost $116,000, according to the report. That’s money Edwards doesn’t have.

In the early ’80s, Edwards went to Blackfeet Housing and the tribe to complain of the problems in his home. He says he was promised a new house after the mold was discovered and his house was condemned.

After two decades of complaining, two years ago it looked as if he would finally get a home. Edwards says he made an agreement with members of the tribal council and the housing authority whereby he would get a prefabricated
house from Centennial Homes in Missoula and $5,000 for new furniture.

He got the $5,000, but he never got his new house.

“They just forgot about me,” he says. “They’ve been promising and promising me a new house, to get us out of here. All they do is lie.

Ray Wilson, director of Blackfeet Housing, says he doesn’t have information about Edwards’ proposed new house. However, he questions whether the damage in Edwards’ basement is due to the structure of the house or the location near an irrigation canal, which he says was not Blackfeet Housing’s choice.

“I obviously couldn’t award him a new house,” Wilson says.

But Edwards feels a sense of injustice about living in a condemned house that workers won’t enter without protective gear. He didn’t request a wood foundation. All he wants is a new house, and when he came so close to getting one after 20 years, the unraveling of the deal made him lose hope.

“It makes a guy sick because of how many times they lied to us, promised us,” he says. “We’re about ready to give up on it. It’s just disgusting.”

The new red paint job on James Bird’s house hides what is inside.

Blackfeet Housing renovated his home a year ago in what Bird calls a “Band-Aid” operation. The exterior was painted; he got new siding and windows. But despite the sleek outside, the black mold that grows in his condemned kitchen tells the truth: his house needs more than a paint job.

“I got a good renovation, but still it’s below par,” he says.

Wearing a cap that says “Native Pride,” the tall 55-year-old goes outside to where the ridge cap installed last year is already falling off his roof. Then he points with his foot to the wood foundation on one side of his house.

“It’s just a matter of time before that starts falling in there,” he says. “Ever since they built these houses, that’s how they did it—shoddy workmanship … They should have never used wooden foundations on this house.”

Housing Director Wilson says the residents of the Glacier Homes signed contracts that explicitly state the housing authority won’t provide maintenance. If homeowners have paid up and have a positive balance, however, they are eligible for renovations.

Bird’s new siding and windows have helped cut heating costs, and a new stove helps on the cold winter nights. His house, like many others, originally had a fireplace that pumped out little heat and had a tendency to force smoke into the house.

Inside, it looks as if a large cocaine cartel left the house in a hurry. But the white powder on the unlevel floor and countertops is from Bird’s stone sculpting. On the floor sits a 2-foot-high white sculpture of two people embracing, called “Man and Woman Wrapped in a Buffalo Hide.” Sculpting helps Bird get by financially, although he trades most of his artwork instead of selling it.

On the reservation, he says, it’s hard to find meaningful work. Jobs tend to offer minimum wage, but when you’re 55 years old, what fulfillment does that offer?

“They keep us so goddamn poor and unemployed here that we can’t do anything,” he says. “We can’t go ahead and build our own foundations.”

And so, he lives in his house, which he says is substandard, and he lacks the money to fix it. He and his son complain of respiratory troubles, but he is unsure whether it’s from the mold in the house, their smoking or the rock dust he creates while sculpting. He notes, however, that his sister, who lived in the house before he did, had cancer, though he doesn’t know what kind.

“I want a house that’s decent and safe and that’s not going to make me sick,” he says. For that reason, he joined the lawsuit led by the Grants and Martin Marceau.

“If they’d just fix the foundation and my kitchen, and take all the mold out of here and make this house safe, I’d be satisfied with that,” he says. “If they can’t do that, I’d be satisfied with a new house.”

Across the street sits a home with rickety steps and a wood porch with loose planks exposing rusty nails underneath. It belongs to Candice LaMott, a single mom with a 3-year-old boy named Keshawn, a chubby little guy who doesn’t speak, but knows he’s cute.

LaMott, who opts not to work so that she can care for her son, doesn’t have the money to fix her unstable porch or the wheelchair ramp that the wind tore loose from her house and deposited 10 yards away on her lawn.

“I’ve got no money to maintain it at all,” she says.

She walks to her kitchen and moves a loose wall panel she uses to block the door to the basement.

“We don’t let nobody come down here no more,” she says as she descends the stairs, passing holes in the stairwell walls.

After hearing about toxic chemicals in the wood foundations, LaMott didn’t want Keshawn to wander downstairs to play.

The main toxic chemical she refers to is chromated copper arsenate, or CCA, a chemical mixture containing arsenic, copper and chromium.

Although the EPA has not yet found any concrete link between CCA-treated wood and detrimental health effects, it banned the use of CCA-treated wood for residential uses in 2004. Because CCA contains arsenic, a known carcinogen that can leach out of the wood, it would be safer to discontinue its use, the EPA found.

James Sipes, a U.S. Forest Service worker from Indiana, twice vomited up copious amounts of blood directly after building picnic tables with CCA-treated lumber in 1983 and 1984. A jury awarded him $100,000 in damages and Sipes settled out of court for $667,200 with six lumber companies. The EPA has issued warnings to wood workers about taking care to not breathe in the wood dust or burn excess lumber, which would release chemicals into the air.

For reasons like these, LaMott keeps her basement pretty much empty. There are only exposed foundation walls, a concrete floor and remnants of spray-painted, kid-size basketball court lines on the floor.

LaMott is not happy with her house. She believes her oldest son rarely comes to visit because he’s ashamed of its shabbiness.

The people who built the houses backfilled against the foundations with dirt from the house site instead of a gravel mixture called for in the plan. Spring thaws have caused the dirt and clay mixture to expand, putting pressure on the foundation. As a result, some of LaMott’s kitchen-cabinet doors have fallen off because the house settled wrong and twisted in odd ways. The result is also seen in her outside door, where the frame settled so badly the door cannot latch. It is instead held shut by a wood-handle knife lodged in the molding.

In the setting sun outside, LaMott stands gazing at her yellow house, with its spots and shaky porches. Keshawn, wearing one rubber boot, one shoe and no shirt, is handling a pile of lumber with exposed nails, and she calls to him to cut it out.

Because LaMott is poor and because she has no other place to live, this is her home.

“I feel like sometimes, light a match to it and let it go down,” she says as orange sunlight reflects off her spotted siding and the sun makes its descent behind the towering mountains of Glacier National Park.

“Big breath! Keep blowing till every bit is blown out of your lungs, then suck it all back in,” nurse Judy Marn tells 13-year-old Jenna Rattler as she breathes into a long tube connected to a spirometer, a machine that tests lung capacity and function.

Jenna, a healthy-looking girl dressed in a black sweatshirt, forces all of the air out of her lungs as Marn watches a computer screen monitoring her lung capacity.

Jenna and her mother, Julie, have driven more than two hours to visit the Great Falls Clinic for a check on Jenna’s asthma. Julie Rattler says it’s only been three months since they’ve come to see physician’s assistant Dewey Hahlbohm at the clinic. The visits are becoming more frequent because Jenna’s asthma has gotten worse, Rattler says.

During one episode a few months back, Jenna was running and had such trouble breathing, her lips and fingers turned blue.

Jenna’s asthma problems mostly kick in when she’s exercising, such as doing “the boards” during volleyball practice. For the boards, Jenna must push wood wrapped in damp towels across the gym floor. She thinks it’s fun, even though asthma attacks typically ensue.

The exercise-induced asthma occurs even when she uses her albuterol inhaler prior to each practice, and the two-a-day doses of Advair and single dose of Singulair should be clearing up her problems, Hahlbohm tells her during the visit.

“It’s not fitting quite right,” Hahlbohm says. “What you’re describing is really quite profound.”

Jenna didn’t develop asthma until she and her family moved into a wood-foundation home in 1993. Jenna and her mother both developed asthma at that time, Jenna’s being the worse of the two.

When the Rattlers moved in and ripped up the shag carpet, they found black mold within a foot of the walls.

“I started getting sick right after we did that,” Rattler says.

That year, Rattler went to the hospital, where the doctors thought she had leukemia or lymphoma. They never did find out what was wrong with her lymph nodes, she says.

As for her family, her son Leo had nosebleeds when they first moved in that lasted until he was about 11. Jenna still gets nosebleeds, which could be from the dry weather, Rattler says, but when she applied Vaseline to her children’s noses, as per doctor’s orders, the nosebleeds continued.

But Rattler is reluctant to point to the mold as causing Jenna’s asthma. Asthma is caused by a variety of things, and can often be started by a respiratory infection, says Hahlbohm, who doesn’t believe that mold causes asthma.

Jenna has had respiratory infections before, and they always cause her asthma to be worse.

Also, Indian reservations tend to have higher instances of asthma among children. A study published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that Native American children living in northeastern Montana had 2.5 times the national average rate of pediatric asthma.

But mold byproducts can trigger asthma attacks, according to Don George, a former service unit sanitarian with Indian Health Services in Browning. In a letter to Martin Marceau, he wrote that houses with wood foundations can develop moisture and “create an environment for mold and mildew to grow.” George added, “asthma attacks can be ‘triggered’ by mold and mildew growth.”

In the end, Rattler says, it’s hard to say that Jenna and Glacier Homes residents afflicted with various cancers and kidney problems are sick because of their houses. To show that the housing conditions are contributing to bad health, there would have to be an epidemiological study.

And that’s exactly what Marceau, Gary Grant and their lawyers asked the tribal council to support.

Marceau says they have gone before the council four times to gain support for the study, which would delve into health records of Glacier Homes residents and other members of the tribe. The study, which would cost about $150,000, would be funded by a grant, Marceau says, and would provide jobs for Blackfeet members.

But the tribal council did not support the epidemiological study.

“The tribe never wanted to do it,” says Jeff Simkovic, the plaintiffs’ lawyer. “And without the tribe’s approval we couldn’t get a grant to do it.”

Whether the houses are causing sickness is the “$64 million question,” Simkovic says, but without a study it will go unanswered.

Gary Grant might have health problems because he has diabetes. His kidney failure and leg amputation can be explained by statistics. Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney disease, and 20 percent of people with Type 1 diabetes develop kidney failure, according to the International Diabetes Federation. People with diabetes are also 15 to 40 times more likely to have a lower-limb amputation than is the general population.

But Grant can’t believe all his troubles come from diabetes. His whole family has sinusitis. His granddaughter was born a healthy baby, but as a 1-year-old she developed asthma when she moved in with them. One of his daughters lived in the basement for nine months and has recently found she can’t bear children.

For him, the health problems are too coincidental. Is the CCA doing it? Is it mold? Radon?

“When you get out of these homes for a few hours a day,” he says, “you feel good. You breathe good, you feel good. And you come back into these homes, and you go sleep here, you’ve got no place else to go, no place to move.

“You come back in here and you feel the same rotten way you did before. So that’s telling you something.”

So the logical question for the residents is: “If you hate your house, why don’t you move?”

Julie Rattler answers the question simply: “The reservation is our home. If you want to stay on the reservation, there is no other place to go.”