Story by Mary Hudetz
Photos by Devin Wagner
Hours before daybreak on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Joe Grinsell ends his graveyard shift in Colstrip and starts his 40-mile drive home.
At 4:30 a.m., he doesn’t care much for the commute, which is about four times longer than it was two and a half years ago. But he doesn’t speak of trading the home or horses he owns outside of Busby for the trailer his family of six once rented for $500 a month in Colstrip either.
“I think this is better, you know, just the freedom,” he says on an evening when he’s relieved of the stress of a late-night shift. “Plus this is ours; in Colstrip it wasn’t ours.”
For five years, the Grinsells lived in Colstrip, 20 miles north of the reservation, where Joe, 34, works as a heavy equipment operator for Western Energy. After the first three years, he and his wife, Brenda, started looking for a house in the country despite the likelihood that the move could more than quadruple the time for his commute.
“I wanted a better life for the kids,” says Brenda. “I felt like I was boxed in at Colstrip. Like it was a little square.”
Brenda has a long, red braid that falls behind her back and her soft-spoken voice, which sometimes yields to others, does little to suggest that in her youth she was a tomboy, as her mom, Vonda Limpy, remembers. Once, she was able to ride a horse, not yet broken and with no one watching, only to walk into her grandparents’ house and tell her mom, “There’s nothing wrong with that horse; didn’t buck me off.”
The family looked south from Colstrip to the reservation for the space and outdoors Brenda enjoyed while growing up at her grandparents’ ranch outside Ashland. Brenda, 42, has lived on the reservation or near its borders since she was 11 and spent her earlier childhood summers and Christmases in the area, too.
“It’s always felt like home,” she says.
But on a reservation with a housing shortage severe enough to leave more than 200 people on a waiting list to either rent or own a home, finding a house took the family more than a year, a year in which they moved three times.
And once they found a place it was another year before they had ownership because it routinely takes the Bureau of Indian Affairs at least that long to process the required paperwork.
On a reservation where 99 percent of the land is held in trust by the U.S. government for the benefit of either the Northern Cheyenne tribe or its members, the BIA must oversee virtually every land transaction, including home mortgages. Nationwide, the BIA has oversight responsibilities on 55.7 million acres of Indian land.
While the Grinsells waited, they rented the home they were waiting to buy but none of the payments went toward the purchase of the home.
Maria Valandra, vice president for community development at First Interstate Bank in Billings, which is a lender on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, says two months is the fastest return from the BIA that she’s seen logged. Some housing applications that enter the BIA have taken as long as five years to process, she says.
“Here in Billings or in Missoula, you can close the loan and be in a house in 30 to 60 days,” Valandra says.
The Grinsells’ wait was remarkably shorter than some but as much as 11 times longer than it usually takes if a home is purchased under similar circumstances off the reservation.
“On the part that didn’t have anything to do on the reservation, it went a lot faster,” Brenda Grinsell says. “But through the BIA, that’s when it took a long time.”
In 2004, the BIA, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, identified the need for a more streamlined approval process for reservation home buyers and an agreement surfaced: Certifying status reports on land titles should take no longer than 30 days to complete.
But the BIA’s Land, Titles and Records Office in Billings, which certifies the reports, frequently does not meet the 30-day deadline, says Vianna Stewart, the manager for this office in the Rocky Mountain region. She stepped into the position in October and has discussed faster turnaround times with her staff. But with an office that is understaffed by eight workers, meeting the deadlines won’t be easy.
“Seeing it and applying it are two different things,” Stewart says.
Meanwhile, finding a solution that both fulfills the BIA’s role as trust holders and quickens the bureau’s involvement in the reservation home buying process hangs in the balance.
“The most complicated realty system in the U.S. is Indian title,” says Clark Madison, the realty officer for the BIA in the Rocky Mountain region.
To emphasize his point, he walks to a poster-size diagram that depicts one tract of land with some 80 owners on it, and explains that the fractionated piece of land is one of many found on the state’s reservations.
“Lawyers can’t do what we do,” he says.
As his words flow at a rapid pace, he says that homesite leases are a high priority at the bureau but a set of laws, many dictated by Congress, must be followed when managing Indian trust land.
“We don’t get to cut any corners on that,” Madison says.
Like an assembly line of sorts, applications move through several government agencies. The BIA, however, is where present and prospective home buyers say the process slows to a crawl.
The first government stop for the Grinsells was the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Housing Authority in Lame Deer to get the title for the house.
Requesting a certified report on the status of the land’s title at the BIA agency in Lame Deer came next. At this point, the reservation’s local BIA realty office reviewed the application before routing the Grinsells’ request to the federal building in downtown Billings, 104 miles away. In the meantime, another set of paperwork was sent to the tribal government’s land committee for approval because the house sits on a piece of tribal land.
While inside the BIA’s regional offices in Billings, an examiner in the Land Titles and Records Office made additional evaluations before returning the newly certified document back to Lame Deer for further review and approval.
If any department faces a backlog while applications are circulating, the whole process comes to a standstill with waits lasting a month, six months or years.
“It would sit there when sometimes all it needed was a signature,” Joe says in a tone that reveals his frustration over his family’s one-year wait. “It was like, ‘Can you get this done? Can you get this done? Can you do this?’”
While he worked day shifts in Colstrip one week and nights the next, Brenda tried to track their application through the BIA, making frequent phone calls to the Lame Deer offices and trips to the bank, where she updated a loan application that expired three times during the wait.
“She just about wore herself out,” her mother says.
Homeownership came at the end of a long road for the Grinsells. The first chance at the life Joe and Brenda wanted came in August 2004 when the family found a place to purchase that was surrounded by 38 acres of open land.
The family cleared their trailer to save paying another month’s rent and drove 40 miles from Colstrip to his parents’ house in Busby for a stay that they expected to last a couple of weeks.
“It was way out in the country all by itself,” Joe says, “and we were, you know, jumpin’ at the chance at it.”
When the deal — an oral agreement — fell through, they were left without a place of their own. The “two-week visit” lasted five and a half more months.
“We didn’t even have our own room,” Joe says before explaining that the couple shared a tiny bedroom in the double-wide trailer with their youngest children, Haley and Peach.
Their teenage sons, Justin and Smiley, stayed in a room with no door that they shared with three of Joe’s nephews.
“We just had to try to make space the best we could,” Joe says.
Their next move was to the basement of Brenda’s parents’ house, 16 miles east and a few miles south of Lame Deer.
“I was sick of moving,” Joe says.
Another half of a year passed before they learned the house they now own was for sale. It is three miles from Joe’s parents’ house. They had driven by it countless times.
Like so many other homes that became a part of Indian Country’s national landscape in the 1970s, the house is pale blue, has three bedrooms and was built with HUD funding.
Open land that surrounds the home on all sides and two corrals in front of it are what distinguishes this home from the others. In the past year and a half the Grinsells have taken many steps to make it their own.
Step inside and a picture of the family’s oldest daughter, Terri Jo, dancing at a powwow in a jingle dress hangs an arm’s length away from a table that belonged to Brenda’s grandmother. A Bible and small braid of sweet grass sit on bookshelves in the living room with a collection of gold-bound books by authors like Poe, Thoreau and Shakespeare. Brenda, 42, says the classics are there because they look good — then she laughs.
She is sitting on one of two burgundy recliners in the living room with her back to a picture window that looks out onto more than an acre of land that the family shares with a goat, calf and several horses. One of the horses is a white mare that was called Sunshine until the family changed its name to Killer so visitors could leave bragging about riding a horse with such a daunting name.
Through the front window, Brenda has watched summer windstorms pull black and orange skies over the gently peaked hills of the reservation.
“That’s what I like,” she says about living in this house, on this land. “I can see the storms come in.”
But on this evening, the Grinsells won’t gain any memories of windstorms. The wind is light, the clouds are white and the setting sun’s colors resemble the reddened earth and yellow grasses that bring this land its own distinction, even among the more majestic mountain landscapes to the west.
“If you get a chance to, stop and look,” Joe says. “It’s so beautiful.”
