Story by Jessica Mayrer
Photos by Kristine Paulsen
Rolling hills, like Goliath’s sloping shoulders, stretch across the landscape of Montana’s Fort Peck Reservation. U.S. Highway 2 marks the deep groove in the giant’s spine. Along the two-lane road cars speed next to Burlington Northern boxcars on tracks that roll toward Wolf Point.
Rusty Stafne lives just off Highway 2. An Assiniboine, he grew up on this land, in the shadow of grain elevators and water towers. Although he’s traveled, living in California for awhile, he has always called the reservation home.
“This is what I wanted to do all my life, be a farmer,” Stafne, 71, says. But that dream is in jeopardy.
Maneuvering his truck over train tracks, Stafne points to the 70-year-old Bureau of Indian Affairs irrigation system. It is, literally, crumbling. Irrigation ditches are covered with weeds, the concrete in the main canal has deteriorated, pipes have rusted and pumps need replacing.
The cost of bringing water to parched crops over a decade of drought is one of many forces pushing Indian farmers off of their land. Growers hooked up to the aging BIA irrigation system on Fort Peck pay about $20 an acre, whether they want water brought to their land or not.
For Stafne, the cost of irrigating hay and alfalfa on some 200 acres is about $4,000 a year. But paying that price doesn’t guarantee the water will actually get to his land.
Unable to pay for the operations and maintenance charges on the BIA system, Stafne cut his operation from 200 acres to about 65 this year.
“I couldn’t afford to,” Stafne says. “It was hard to get water on it to begin with, and even if I watered I could only maybe get a ton, or ton and a half of hay” per acre. Stafne charges about $65 for a ton of hay.
The irony amid all of this is that the Fort Peck tribes have one of the best water compacts in the nation. They are entitled to millions of dollars worth of water that rushes along the Missouri. But they have only bits of rusted pipe to bring it onto fields.
Tribal water agreements with the federal government go back to the 1880s. A Supreme Court ruling from 1908, the Winters Doctrine, said that “to become a pastoral and civilized people,” tribes would be allotted as much water as they need. The court also said that agricultural lands such as these, “without irrigation, were practically valueless.”
The BIA has a legal responsibility, but not the funds, to take care of reservation irrigation projects. Some doubt help will come from the federal government. The construction costs of the irrigation system, which was built in the 1930s, have yet to be repaid to the federal government, or be waived by Congress.
That debt runs in the neighborhood of $7 million to $8 million, says BIA irrigation director Richard Kurtz.
But that’s just the start. “Our entire project is in deferred maintenance because we don’t have the money to fix it,” Kurtz says.
Kurtz acknowledges the BIA’s responsibility to the reservation irrigation project, but says if they aren’t given the resources to deal with problems, there’s not much they can do.
In mid-April, however, Congress gave the Fort Peck tribes $700,000 to replace a broken pump and clear irrigation ditches this summer. They expect an additional rehabilitation grant of about $1 million next year, says Thomas “Stoney” Anketell, a tribal council member trying to drum up money for a new irrigation project.
“It’s not going to fix it and make it new; it’s a 70-year-old project,” he says. It’s “10,000 year-old technology. There’s better ways of doing things.”
But Kurtz says there is so much more that must be done.
“We just don’t receive enough money to do it,” he says. To enclose the system, increasing its capabilities, would cost about $6 million. “As far as funding, rehabilitation, reconstruction, or even operations and maintenance, it is a huge problem, but there’s just no money,” he explains. “And if you don’t have the money you might as well just forget it.”
Fort Peck’s main industries are farming and ranching. Unemployment, typical of most reservations in the state, runs about 50 percent. As Native Americans are increasingly unable to earn a living in farming, future generations on Fort Peck will have even fewer options.
The Fort Peck Reservation is about 40 percent non-Indian. At last count, the United State Department of Agriculture reported the Fort Peck Reservation had 548 farmers, 94 of them Native American.
Some tribal members question whether the BIA and Congress are living up to their promises.
“If the United States government is tired of throwing money at Indian reservations, they’re getting nothing in return, how about living up to some of your agreements and protecting our Indian lands so that we can develop and create our own jobs and self sustain ourselves?” asks Otto Cantrell, a member of the Fort Peck Landowners Association.
The association is a fledgling group of Fort Peck farmers looking for solutions to the stifling economic conditions of the reservation. “We have to go against the powers that be in Congress,” Cantrell says. “It’s about saving the reservation.”
A new irrigation system could enable Fort Peck to produce high value crops, he says, which would bring jobs and a better standard of living to everybody on the reservation. “It all boils down to this irrigation infrastructure,” he says.
Stafne notes that he tells young farmers to “stay out, stay out of it.” “They’re shutting them down every year,” he explains. “People are going out of this business.”
Large agribusiness is increasingly gobbling up the family farm on Fort Peck. “Eventually I see it being taken over by the white man,” Stafne said.
Farmers everywhere struggle, but Native Americans face unique challenges such as multiple owners on small parcels, and because the United States government holds title to their property, Indian owners have a tough time getting business loans, unable to use their land as collateral.
But if Fort Peck could build a better irrigation system there may be hope, Cantrell says.
Until then, the people of Fort Peck will likely keep their place at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.
“There should be no reason on earth why we should be the poorest of the poor. There is no reason on earth why we shouldn’t be able to manage our own affairs,” Cantrell says.
“If Khadafi could grow vegetables in the desert why can’t we grow something here on the rez?” he asks.
Stafne worked for the BIA irrigation system for about seven years as a mechanic and equipment operator. In the ’80s, he fixed BIA’s machinery and ran a backhoe. It helped him subsidize his farming operation, he says.
He believes the BIA is wasting his irrigation fees on salaries for people who maintain the irrigation system. “I think if a company was doing it, or the water users,” he says, “they could probably cut that in half, at least.”
“Why, if they have the congressional responsibility to take care of this project, why aren’t they funding these workers?” Stafne asks. “Why are they making us pay for their salaries?”
The irrigation staff consists of three ditch riders and a supervisory ditch rider who are responsible for clearing irrigation canals and system maintenance. A laborer, an accounting tech and Kurtz complete the crew, which Kurtz says is insufficient. They are in charge of about 23,000 acres of irrigation.
Cantrell is not persuaded. “That thing is Third World; it’s only operating at 17 percent efficiency and on a good day 20 percent,” he says.
Kurtz disputes Cantrell’s estimate. “Most of our project is functional, at what rate is subjective. We do have a lot of maintenance problems. It’s a 70-year-old project. I mean, it’s breaking down,” he says.
The system runs solely on money collected from farmers and the occasional grant, just a little more than $300,000 this year. Collecting the money is a challenge. “It’s a moving target as far as how much money we’re going to collect every year,” Kurtz says with a chuckle. “For a long time now, these projects have not been able to operate based on collections. We just don’t collect enough to do what we have to do.”
But Stafne charges that because of multiple owners on individual properties, some Indians are billed for the service and don’t even know what they are being charged for. And “if you don’t have any money, that acts as a lien on your property forever,” he says.
This problem is not unique to Fort Peck. In a Government Accounting Office report put out in 2004, the authors pointed to similar challenges for 16 other BIA-run irrigation projects across the country.
Kurtz says that private investment in new infrastructure could be a less burdensome way to develop Indian lands and bring new jobs.
As it is now, the system is going largely unused, because of the cost, Cantrell says. In turn, land is left to grow weeds and sagebrush. Tumbleweeds clog the irrigation pumps and cause them to overheat. The irrigation system and the land are irreversibly tied.
“Every year that this system is in operation it’s killing the land,” Cantrell says. Seepage from irrigation ditches is causing saline to pool in the soil, he says, and saline is toxic to crops.
Farmers will struggle until something changes, Stafne says.
The responsibility, Kurtz says, lies primarily with Congress.
“We’re trying to do our trust responsibility as best we can under very grievous circumstances,” he says.
