Story by Alex Sakariassen
Photos by Russel Daniels
Hemi-44 vibrator trucks thunder across the dry prairie grass of Fort Belknap Reservation in northcentral Montana, two boxy behemoths on tractor tires. Each lumbers to a halt, and the lead truck lowers a tabletop-sized metal plate to the ground from a hydraulic vibrator mounted in its middle, sending seismic pulses into the earth.
A few miles down U.S. Highway 2, between Fort Belknap Agency and Dodson, the thrum of native drums and throaty vocals of three young tribal singers shift the dirt underfoot. The round-dance music is symbolic of a culture that some tribal members say is being neglected.
The vibe trucks belong to Polaris, a Canadian company hired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs map a path for nine new natural gas pipelines in the northwestern sector of the reservation.
The round-dance group is led by Nakoa HeavyRunner, a key player in an Indian-operated oil company on Fort Belknap hoping to take the lead in energy exploration on this 650,000-acre reservation.
Each represents two competing entities working to plot a course for oil and natural gas development in Indian Country.
“We’re getting criticized and we’re getting chastised by the bureau for getting into their business, but that’s their problem,” says Donovan Archambault Sr., vice president of First Nation Petroleum LLC.
First Nation is a fledging oil company based in Lodgepole, a small town near the southeastern corner of Fort Belknap defined mainly by a scattering of buildings. Since its creation, First Nation has been vying with the BIA at the local level to fulfill what it considers its responsibility to the native people on Fort Belknap Reservation.
Though employees of the BIA say the federal agency has no quarrel with First Nation, critics say the BIA is continuing a long tradition of being an obstacle in the path toward full tribal sovereignty.
“The bureau … is something that’s 100 years past its time,” Archambault says.
An hour drive northwest of Lodgepole, in Fort Belknap Agency, Grant Stafne, the deputy superintendent of the Fort Belknap BIA office, leans dangerously far back in his office chair. He patiently outlines the history of mineral exploration on the reservation.
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, seven or eight oil wells around Fort Belknap were drilled and later capped. Apparently the deposits weren’t large enough to warrant production efforts.
But, Stafne says, energy companies at the time were focused solely on oil, not natural gas.
Stafne says the recent wave of interest in development grew almost overnight, between 2001 and 2003. Hoping to fulfill its role as trustee of tribal members’ lands and bring a wave of economic development to Fort Belknap, the BIA held its first mineral auction in November 2005.
Five oil companies bid for leases on lands held in trust by the BIA. One well was drilled near the northern border of the reservation last November. The Polaris seismic crew blazed trails for nine natural gas pipelines in the northwestern corner of Fort Belknap this spring for $600 to $900 a mile. And on April 24, the BIA hosted a second auction.
“We’re hitting the rest of the reservation as well as the tribal tracts,” Stafne says. Between 85 and 90 percent of land on the reservation is held in trust by the BIA.
Unlike the auction in 2005, the auction in April brought to the table land owned by the tribe, and not just individual tribal members. According to Peggy Doney, tribal natural resources director, the tribe had advertised its minerals in past oil and natural gas expos, but with no success. Consequently, the Fort Belknap Tribal Council reached out to the BIA for assistance in advertising and auctioning tribal lands.
“Personally, I would promote collaboration with the BIA as long as … we remain cognizant of the fact that we are both here for the enrolled members and their benefit,” says Fort Belknap Tribal President Julia doney, who prefers her last name not be capitalized.
Aside from the profits future production could bring, mineral development holds the promise of at least some jobs on a reservation plagued by unemployment. In the latest statistics available, the BIA calculated a 70 percent unemployment rate on the reservation. And among those who are employed, 9 percent have incomes below the poverty level.
“They (oil companies) have to hire enrolled members for any qualified jobs they have,” says doney.
This requirement stems from the Tribal Employment Rights Office ordinance, created to protect the employment interests of enrolled tribal members. But employment isn’t the only aspect of the reservation that the tribal council is concerned about protecting. A history of exploitation has made the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples of Fort Belknap sensitive to abuses of their land.
In the 1890s, prospectors discovered gold in the Little Rocky Mountains inside the southern border of the reservation. Though it was on tribal land, BIA agents found it impossible to keep prospectors off the reservation and asked the tribes to sell a strip of land seven miles long and four miles wide, arguing that the Indians didn’t have the capacity to mine the gold. The tribes balked, but finally agreed in 1895 to sign the Grinnell Treaty that gave them $360,000 for the land that held the gold.
Gold mining continued, but large-scale efforts didn’t begin until the 1970s when Pegasus Gold dug the nation’s first large open-pit cyanide heap leach mine at Zortman-Landusky. Their operations ultimately leveled a mountain and poisoned the surrounding land. Today the mine sits like a brown blister in the center of a lush mountain range. Water from the mine that reaches the reservation will need treatment in perpetuity.
“I know in previous councils they’ve chose not to develop any oil or gas exploration because it could damage the lands, and it came about the time of the Zortman-Landusky mines,” doney says.
With a history of ecological disaster on Fort Belknap, the tribal council is wary of the environmental impacts of modern oil and natural gas pursuits. But Vice President Raymond Chandler says the council is confident enough in current development practices to put the tribe’s land up for auction.
“They made quite a leap in how they used to do things … how they used to just go and dynamite something regardless of if there was any historical significance to the land,” he says.
Back in Lodgepole, the effects of poor decision-making on the mineral development front are an everyday reality. The home of Loren Lewis, HeavyRunner’s uncle and president of First Nation, is nestled in the bluffs just north of the Little Rocky Mountains. A large window in the First Nation office looks south, where an ugly tan hump marks the site of the former Zortman mine. No one visiting First Nation can overlook the catastrophe.
“They took the damn mountains, wrecked them, tore them down,” Archambault says. “All we wanted them for was ‘cause they were nature.”
Lewis says his company wants to do more than just make money.
“We have a vision or a philosophy that we want to try to take some of that money and put it back into the language,” he says. “As nations here in Montana, we’re dying, as far as our language goes.”
His company is working out a formula with its partner firm, Neo Exploration Inc. of Calgary, as to a percent of profit that can be put aside for a language center.
Lewis runs First Nation out of his home in Lodgepole with the help of his brother-in-law, Archambault. A middle-aged member of the Assiniboine tribe with a brightly colored pearl-snap shirt and twin jet-black braids, Lewis speaks in an authoritative tone on matters of the land and the people. He is a spiritual leader on the reservation, working as a Sundance maker in the Sundance ceremony, and hopes to use modern development to preserve the dwindling traditions of his culture.
“If we can bring a generation, a young generation up speaking the language, then I’ve accomplished my goal,” Lewis says.
First Nation Petroleum officially got off the ground in November 2006, when Lewis and HeavyRunner traveled to Calgary to negotiate a partnership with Neo Exploration, which has interests in Canada and northern Montana.
The president of Neo Exploration, Roger Baker, says he admires Lewis’ goal of trying to build a language center using money from mineral development, and appreciates Lewis’ enthusiasm despite his lack of experience in petroleum.
“I think that’s a terrific goal,” Baker says.
Neo Exploration is acting as First Nation Petroleum’s financier. It has fronted all the money necessary to build Lewis’ office and outfit the company’s members with pickup trucks. The two companies remain in constant contact, building more than just a working partnership.
“We have a good relationship and a good friendship with them,” Baker says.
Lewis says First Nation has already obtained lease agreements from several trust landowners. The company is also entertaining offers to work with other reservations, including the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.
Archambault says First Nation’s leases guarantee landowners 17 percent of the profits of production, money that will be deposited into the owner’s Individual Indian Money accounts. First Nation will receive 8 percent, and Lewis is currently working with Neo Exploration to negotiate the percentage that will be held for the language center.
“This thing we’re trying to do is something we think will help lots of other people, not just us,” Archambault says.
At 68, Archambault is 21 years Lewis’ senior. He is short and his hair is gray but his stature is hard as a rock, due to a lifestyle that he says comes from 31 months of boxing in the Army throughout Europe in the early 1960s. In his spare time he carves pipestone pipes and pipe stems, which he gives as gifts or sells.
“We’re artists,” he says. “Every Indian I know is an artist.”
Both Archambault and his father worked for the BIA and Archambault was a member of the Tribal Council from 1990 to 1991. To him, there are really only two resources to be developed on Fort Belknap.
“We need to figure out how we’re going to develop our resources,” he says, “our natural resources — our people — and our land.”
Archambault says his family has lived on and worked the same plot of land since the early 20th century. He left in the 1950s to pursue an education in forestry in North Dakota. He returned in the late 1970s after taking what he calls the “long way around” to reach his dream of developing his family’s land.
“I’d already walked this fence,” he says. “I knew it all.”
The BIA holds in trust about 666,000 surface acres, some off the reservation, for the enrolled members on Fort Belknap. In addition, the agency has trust responsibility for 47,938 mineral acres. And according to a mineral development pamphlet released by Peggy Doney, “Fort Belknap is a prime opportunity for shallow-well natural gas development.”
But few pipelines exist on or near the reservation, something that Stafne says the BIA is working to change.
“Right now, the closest pipeline to the reservation is right north of Harlem, which is a couple miles away from here,” he says.
Results of the 2005 BIA auction are already tangible. The seismic crew from Polaris spent nearly two weeks in March testing ground density and petroleum deposits through the use of high-tech equipment, like the vibe trucks. All the data collected from their efforts are used to map the best path for nine new pipelines, which will crisscross each other through the northwestern section of the reservation near Fort Belknap Agency.
Todd Walton, Polaris recording crew manager, says that the crew covered 60 miles of pipeline on Fort Belknap, operators Manuel Robles and Ronnie Reyes stopping the vibe trucks every 50 feet to shoot shockwaves into the ground.
The small camper-style vehicle that serves as the crew’s recording outpost sits on a hill in the distance, orange cables plugged into its side trailing off in all directions like endless extension cords. Inside this lonely outpost, observer John Abbott hunches in front of three flashing computer screens and two laptops, monitoring the incoming data. For this crew, natural gas development is a nonstop job.
“There’s times when we work 100 days straight,” Walton says.
Despite the BIA’s strides in mineral development since 2005, Archambault seriously doubts the bureau’s ability to function for the betterment of tribal members, firing off a quip that BIA officers “don’t know whether they’re on foot or horseback.”
For example, he says he recently received a bill for $1,270.95 from the BIA for water charges on a leased tract of land. He chuckles as he explains that he cancelled the lease in 1995.
“I don’t know who’s been using that all these years,” Archambault says. “This is the first one I got since then.”
Archambault says he took the bill to the BIA office to sort out the matter. Records show he had cancelled the lease in 1995, but the BIA has no idea who is leasing the land now, he says.
“They’ve become an albatross to us as people who have gone to school and came back and tried to help,” he says.
Even Chandler, who supports working with the BIA on oil and natural gas development, says the BIA continues a tradition of standing between the tribe and its status as an independent nation.
“We’re trying to exercise our sovereign government and it seems like a losing battle sometimes,” he says.
Rounding out the trio at First Nation Petroleum is HeavyRunner, land/lease manager and Archambault’s son. A mixture of the new and the old, the 27-year-old dresses in baggy jeans and a white tank top and totes a traditional rawhide frame drum branded with the name “Brown Sugar.”
Like the rest of his family, HeavyRunner says he wants to make sure his people get what’s coming to them, which is why he helped Lewis reach out to Neo Exploration.
“We told them that we wanted to be an active partner in developing our resources,” he says. “We told them that these are our people.”
HeavyRunner is a singer, a drummer and an enrolled member on both Fort Belknap and the Blackfeet Reservation. He jokes that he’s a “rock star” on reservation radio stations throughout the Pacific Northwest. His round-dance music, recorded in a modest home studio called Eagle Calf Records, captures the rhythmic traditions of his people in digital form for preservation and dissemination across the nation’s reservations.
“My CDs have got even clear up in British Columbia, and I ain’t never been up there,” HeavyRunner says.
Of the three principal players in First Nation, HeavyRunner speaks the least about the BIA. He hasn’t had the long experience — or many frustrations — that Lewis or Archambault cite.
Senior BIA officials emphasize, however, that they are trying only to fulfill their jobs as trustees of Indian lands. They aren’t trying to snuff out reservation entrepreneurship, but are merely seeking to offer tribal members a variety of choices when energy is developed.
“We don’t have a problem with you (tribal members) dealing with them (First Nation),” says Darryl LaCounte, assistant area director with the BIA’s regional office in Billings. “But we’re going to advertise to explore what the market has to offer.”
LaCounte says the bureau’s goal in advertising mineral tracts across the reservation is to hunt down the best deal possible for landowners, then lay out the choices for each individual.
“That doesn’t commit a piece of land to a lease,” he says.
In the end, the final say on which oil companies will pursue development on which tracts of land belongs to the owner. First Nation and the BIA are in agreement on that point.
“If all the tribal members wanted First Nation to develop their lands, there’s nothing that the tribe or the BIA can really say because it’s individual choice,” Lewis says. “That’s the legality.”
But Lewis claims that hasn’t stopped the BIA office at Fort Belknap from trying. He says he’s heard from several individuals on Fort Belknap who have been approached by BIA employees and asked to sign papers stating they will not lease their trust lands to First Nation Petroleum. A senior official at the Fort Belknap BIA office, who refused to be identified, denied the accusation.
Lewis says the landowners who have chosen to work with First Nation Petroleum believe they can trust a neighborhood oil company more than one from off the reservation.
“I think we present ourselves as a security blanket for our tribal members so we don’t get ripped off,” he says.
First Nation Petroleum is rolling steadily along with the confidence of its partner company, Neo Exploration. Lewis and Archambault say they’ll have their first test well drilled by May, though that’s a goal Neo Exploration’s Baker calls unrealistic. Conceding that although Lewis and Archambault are a bit eager, Baker says they’re learning the ropes of the oil industry quite quickly.
“We stumbled on a very fantastic group to sort of act as our partners,” he says.
For Lewis, Archambault and HeavyRunner, First Nation is a chance to operate a successful company and also fulfill their obligation as tribal members to the preservation of their heritage. Carrying the tribe into the future requires initiative, and history has shown that such initiative doesn’t typically come from government offices, Lewis says.
“We have to crawl out of the system,” he says. “And I don’t really foresee the BIA or the tribe ever taking a major step in that direction anytime soon.”.
