Story by Timothy Ratte
Photos by Tyler Wilson
Jay Jarvey stands at the base of a scrubby, leafless tree, among the wood and tarpaper of the collapsed remains of the shack his grandfather built decades ago. He picks up a board. It’s eroded grain is dry, pocked by the elements, and weather-bleached gray. On it are clinging faded remnants of paint that might have been red once.
“This is what most people used to build their houses up here,” he says, his gaze scanning the windy, cold and colorless landscape of Hill 57 on the outskirts of Great Falls. “They’re the boards from old railroad boxcars.”
Jarvey lived on Hill 57, named for the sign in whitewashed rocks that advertised Heinz sauces, until he graduated from high school in 1966. He says he was the first Hill 57 Indian to graduate from high school.
“Up until the mid-’50s, there was no electricity at all and I never did have running water when I lived up here,” he says. “We had to dig toilet holes, chop wood and the houses were pretty ramshackle.”
Jarvey talks about the Hill in a rapid stream-of-consciousness flow — his sentences have few pauses when he speaks, as if his words won’t catch up to all the memories if he hesitates too long.
“It was a tough son of a bitch growing up here,” he says. “In a lot of ways, living up here was like living in the 19th century.”
But still, tough as it was, Jarvey becomes wistful and nostalgic when he talks about the home his grandfather built out of boxcar wood, and the dozens of other Little Shell Chippewa Indian families that squatted on the Hill, and the life they made there.
He is still drawn to the place where he grew up, the past that he remembers on the land that never belonged to him — or his people.
The non-federally recognized Little Shell band of Chippewa Indians were landless for more than a century, until April 5, when Gov. Brian Schweitzer signed a bill that grants the Little Shell a 10-year lease on several acres of Fish, Wildlife and Parks land, as well as a building, on the Morony Dam site. The property is on the Missouri River, 15 miles northeast of Great Falls, where a large concentration of the Little Shell’s widely scattered population lives.
For more than 20 years the Little Shell have tried to persuade the Bureau of Indian Affairs to grant them formal recognition as a tribe and to secure the federal benefits that go with official recognition. It’s a process that has seemed close to closure many times, yet they still await a formal ruling. Securing the Morony lease is a rare success.
The chief architect of the plan to acquire the Morony property is tribal member James Parker Shield.
“I discovered Morony four years ago when I was just driving around,” Shield says. “I walked around it one summer day, saw that the building was abandoned, and there were tall weeds everywhere, and I thought, it’s a shame no one is putting this to use.” Immediately, he began thinking about how he could convince the state of Montana to let the Little Shell use the land.
The site’s somewhat austere brick building, constructed in the 1930s to house workers of the 48-megawatt dam, is sturdy, but in need of some repair. One corner of the front porch is sagging. There’s graffiti. The property features the trailhead to Sacagawea Springs, where Meriwether Lewis fetched the sulphur-infused water that healed the ailing Sacagawea. The trail requires routine maintenance. The park has a noxious weed problem.
“Morony is the poor stepchild of the parks system.” Shield says. “We want to adopt it and give it a good Indian home.”
Having a home is a step closer to helping the Little Shell achieve the federally recognized status it has been seeking for 115 years.
In 1984, the band petitioned the Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Federal Acknowledgements for recognition. In 2000, the Department of the Interior signed an order that granted preliminary recognition of the tribe by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, following a period for public comment.
“Everybody was celebrating that it was finally done, finally accomplished, but nobody paid attention to the rest of the language of that regulation that said, during that six-month public comment period, the Department of Interior can request any additional information on any of the criteria they so desired — which they did,” Shield says.
The DOI asked for more research on tribal enrollment, genealogy and address information about tribal members. “They were constantly throwing more stuff at us,” says John Gilbert, who was tribal chairman at the time. “We’d answer one question and they would throw another one at us. It was just a vicious cycle.”
“Stall tactics is all it was,” he says.
Last year, the Native American Rights Fund,
Shield, undaunted, contacted attorneys in Washington, D.C., about drafting language for a bill seeking recognition through Congress, rather than the administrative path. In March, Montana’s Congressmen — Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester and Rep. Denny Rehberg — introduced the legislation, where it sits, waiting for the hearings that Shield anticipates will meet some resistance from the Department of the Interior and the BIA.
“I expect they will testify against the bill,” Shield says. “The BIA doesn’t like it when you try to go around them.”
Shield currently holds no official position in the Little Shell tribe, but he is one of its fiercest advocates. Unofficially, he’s the tribe’s ambassador — the mayor. His engagement in local business and politics, and his dexterity in navigating “the white mans’ world,” are his unofficial keys to the city.
He’s used those keys to open a few doors for the tribe.
When Gov. Schweitzer took office, one of his first acts was to meet with the state’s tribal leaders.
“I told our council, other governors have done this too,” Shield says, “and it’s usually a dog and pony show.”
But Anna Whiting Sorrell, the governor’s family policy adviser, says that she knew when Schweitzer was inaugurated that he was going to be different.
She urged Shield to draft a wish list for the governor. He made a list of 20 items. Sorrell asked Shield to pare his requests to a more realistic three. “Let’s prioritize,” she says. “I know that the well has been dry a long time, but we can’t flood it right away.”
One, two, three, Sorrell ticks off the things that came out of those negotiations: a formal declaration of state recognition for the Little Shell, the first ever mention of the tribe on the Montana state map, and the state’s help in completing the Little Shell tribal history.
Montana’s Little Shell trace back to Chippewa tribes historically located around the Great Lakes regions in the United States and Canada. Some bands migrated to North Dakota.
The Chippewa traded with French, Scottish or Irish fur traders, many of whom married Chippewa women. Their descendants came to be called “ Métis,” French for “half-blood.”
Many Chippewa and Métis settled in the Turtle Mountain region of what is now North Dakota. Chief Little Shell and Chief Red Bear were two principal chiefs who in 1863 signed a treaty establishing a 10 million-acre reservation. After white homesteaders continued to establish settlements, the government moved in 1892 to renegotiate the treaty. The new agreement called for the tribe to sell nearly 10 million acres for about a million dollars, in what came to be known as the “10 cent treaty.” Chief Thomas Little Shell, son of the signatory of the 1863 treaty, was away hunting with 112 families and a Pembina Chippewa chief signed the new treaty in his absence.
Russell Boham, Little Shell tribal executive officer and chairman of the tribe’s cultural committee, says a government agent tried to convince Little Shell to sign, appealing to his respect for elders.
“He made a statement, something like, ‘The winds of 50 winters have blown over my head and turned my hair white,’” Boham says, “the point being to Little Shell was that, ‘I’m not a young man, I have some wisdom, and I’m advising you to take this deal.’”
“Little Shell said, ‘Well, the winds of 50 winters have blown over my head too, and they have turned my hair white too — but they haven’t blown my brains out.’”
Little Shell refused to sign the treaty.
Chief Little Shell and his people were excluded from the tribal rolls and the reservation. They wandered, many settling on Montana’s Hi-Line and Front Range communities. The Little Shell who wound up in the Great Falls region first took refuge in a tent colony along the banks of the Missouri River, but the town eventually burned down the colony, scattering the Indians among several poor communities, including the notorious Hill 57.
Cousins Rose Sides and Pablo Komiotis have a yellowed newspaper photo from 1957 of Sides’ family standing outside the house her grandfather built on Hill 57, where she grew up.
“Our room was small and had nothing but beds in it,” Sides says. “I didn’t even know what a sheet was. We used a blanket and a lot of old clothes to lay over that to keep warm at night. We had beds, beds, beds all over. And we had a big pot-bellied stove right in the middle of the room and Grandpa would get up all hours of the night keeping that going, keeping us warm.”
It was boxcar wood, Komiotis says. “It was pretty springy and hard to chop. And then when you ran out of wood, you used to cut up old tires and burn them. We had to break up old batteries and burn them in the stove to keep warm.”
Sides dreams of buying all of Hill 57 some day. “I want to go home,” she says. She wants her ashes spread there when she dies. “I want them spread right in Grandpa’s potato garden. I loved it; it was my freedom. We had our own little world up there. When you came into town, everything was so different.”
Komiotis and Sides recall growing up together on the Hill — how people used to go to the town dump and get rags to cut up and sell to garages in town for shop rags, and how the only fruit Sides ever had in her diet was fruit she found at the dump, cast-off produce from local grocers. “It was a bit ripe, but I ate it,” she says.
Komiotis remembers the nurse, Miss Moran, who drove a green car. “Whenever we would see that car,” he says, “we knew we were going to get shots or something, so all us kids used to run and hide.” But Miss Moran would keep coming back until all the children got their shots.
A train used to run along the bottom of the Hill. Sides didn’t know where the train went, or came from, but the brakemen used to throw candy as they passed. And the kids would hear the train coming from far away, and rush to put nails on the tracks so the trains’ wheels would crush them to make tiny swords.
All the Hill 57 kids went to the Franklin School, which no longer exists.
The white kids were separated from the Indian kids at recess. “Mostly the kids didn’t have problems with each other,” Sides says. “It was the parents, who thought the Indian kids would give their kids ‘cooties’ or that the Indian kids would teach their kids bad things. We weren’t allowed to be outside with them. When I went there, there was a red side of the building and a white side of the building. I can remember I had a friend who used to peek around the white side and cry because she wanted to play with me, but she had to stay on her side.”
Komiotis got off the Hill in September 1954. “My dad got in the Air Force,” he says. “He sent for us and we went to Germany. We escaped the Hill.” He never regretted his time on the Hill.
To the Hill 57 Indians, the memories are indelible. But now, the numbers on the hillside have been replaced by the letters G and F, and many people in Great Falls have no idea what Hill 57 was.
Shield says few people know about the unmarked landmarks of history or culture of the Little Shell.
“We need to overcome our invisibility,” he says. “That’s the struggle we have — there’s nothing tangible to look at.”
Shield knew he wanted to be two things when he grew up: a history teacher and a basketball coach. He has always played basketball, but not always well.
“I was the guy that was never any good — the guy that they picked last for the team; I was the skinny kid that didn’t play well,” Shield says. “But I was also the guy that was out there at 9:30 at night, in the dead of cold winter, with an area shoveled off the asphalt court outside and the gloves with the tips of the fingers cut off — I was bound and determined to become a better player.”
He plays pickup games at the Great Falls Community Recreation Center several times a week, when his schedule allows it. At 5 feet 8 inches, he does not exactly command the court like some of the guys he plays with.
No, Shield plays basketball like a Jack Russell Terrier — all heart and relentless tenacity. James Parker Shield has oodles of tenacity.
“James has done more for this tribe than anybody I know and I been with the tribe since 1937,” says Henry Anderson, chair of the Helena Indian Alliance, and former Little Shell cultural committee chairman. “He goes out and gets it done and gets it done fast. A lot of people don’t like him. I mean, his wife don’t even like him,” he jokes.
But Shield’s tenacity would be directionless without his vision. Shield sees things that aren’t there. Yet. When he looks at the Morony building, he sees new tribal offices. The tribe’s current headquarters are in the back of a mall in Great Falls. When it rains heavily the roof leaks and empty wastepaper baskets are set out to catch the water. He envisions a Little Shell cultural interpretive center. When he looks at a large, weed-infested open patch of land on the Morony property, he sees an arbor for powwows. He looks around and imagines a place for a cultural immersion camp for Little Shell children.
Shield knows that many of his visions may never come to fruition, but this does not stop him from constantly scribbling his ideas — his “pet projects” — onto yellow notebooks as he drives. Morony was one of those “pet projects.”
He refuses to believe that his dreams for the tribe can be scuttled by the mere fact that the tribe is nearly penniless. “Money is out there,” he says. “There are all kinds of grants.”
Shield doesn’t hurry, but he doesn’t waste time. He puts his over-easy eggs on top of his pancakes, then adds syrup and salt and pepper and eats the whole mess together, as if eating them on separate plates is too inefficient. He doesn’t like inertia. He speeds up slightly for yellow traffic lights. He always drives five miles over the speed limit.
He is adept at politicking; his involvement with local Republican Party politics has made him essential connections. “I was also on the state executive board for the Republican Party, so I know legislators from around the state, which helps in many situations,” Shield says.
Indeed, Shield navigates the Statehouse in Helena like a pro. Senators and representatives, pages, secretaries, lobbyists say hello — if Shield passes 12 people in the capitol hallways, eight will know him.
State Rep. Shannon Augare (D-Browning) introduced the Morony bill. “I think Morony is a good step,” he says. “I think it’s a step that should have been taken a long time ago, and it really shows the government-to-government relationship we’ve all been talking about for years.”
State Sen. Joe Tropila (D-Great Falls), who lived for years near Hill 57, helped shepherd the Morony bill through the Senate.
“Morony might help them gain recognition. I hope it does,” he says. “At the very least with the tribe’s presence out there, they can have their sweat lodge out there, they can have their ceremonies out there, they can put a tepee ring or anything they wanted to.”
Shield remains concerned about the tribe’s past, and its future. But mostly, he is troubled by the tribe’s legacy.
Because they lack federal recognition, services like healthcare, housing, federally assisted education or child welfare don’t exist for them. But they also feel the need for the preservation of their own culture, which is slipping away, as the few elders that speak the old languages are dying off, and the lack of a land base means tribal members scatter themselves farther from their history.
“That’s the disadvantage to being immigrants,” Shield says. “We’re latecomers; we can’t turn around and tell you any legends. Our sacred sites would be our graveyards.”
