Story by Mary Hudetz
Photos by Devin Wagner
At the heart of Martin Killsnight’s house in Lame Deer is a wood stove that is his only heating source because he suspects some of the wiring in the place could start a fire.
He uses the stove for cooking too, although on this warm, spring day in late March he is likely to opt for the hotplates he uses in the summer.
“That’s a good stove,” he says. “Throws a lot of heat.”
When the sun goes down, and he returns from saying prayers in the sweat lodge at his brother’s house 10 miles away, the air that seeps through the cracks of his log home won’t bite like it has on colder, winter nights.
His full-size bed occupies the southeast corner of his square, two-bedroom house and leaves just enough room for walking at its foot and right side. Two pillows, white sheets and a flannel blanket, fitted tightly over his mattress, meet a military standard he was held to when he was in the Army.
He is a Korean War veteran, discharged in 1954 after four years of service. He counted his days in Korea and still remembers the duration: 14 months and eight days.
Lame Deer has been his home ever since and his house was given to him by his aunt 30 years ago. After his first 15 years of owning of it, Killsnight filed an application with the tribe’s Housing Improvement Program. For 2008, President to receive assistance for repairs.
HIP is contracted by the Northern Cheyenne Indian tribe and funded through the Bureau of Indian Affairs Housing Department Bush’s budget proposes to cut all funding for the program. Congress has yet to vote on it.
The 2007 national budget for HIP is $19 million and the budget for the seven reservations under the BIA’s Rocky Mountain Region, including the Northern Cheyenne, is $2.1 million. Lewis Martin, who administers the program from Billings for tribes throughout the region, says his office’s budget will cover only 38 of 743 documented eligible applicants, one of whom will be Killsnight.
“HIP is the only program in the country that provides assistance to the poorest of the poor and neediest of the needy on reservations,” Martin says.
The 75-year-old Killsnight, who has arthritis, will be one of two people who will have his home repaired through HIP on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation this year. Last year, HIP repaired one home on the reservation.
Renovation costs for Killsnight’s home are expected to total $35,000, a price tag that includes labor, supplies and administrative costs.
A point system based on income, family size, disabilities and age determines who is qualified for HIP assistance and who will receive it, although applications must be updated annually to be considered for a project. Both Killsnight and his daughters, Event Killsnight and Claudine Cano, say they did not resubmit an application. They are not sure who did, but they are grateful for the help.
On a recent day, Micheline Bearcomesout, the tribe’s acting director of the program, walks with a contractor down the dirt road that runs between the HIP office to Killsnight’s house, no more than a 100 yards away, to survey its need for repairs.
“Is he gonna have a place to go?” Bearcomesout asks Killsnight’s granddaughter Julia Killsnight.
“He needs to know when the work’s gonna start,” the 31-year-old answers.
“In a month.”
One month. Killsnight received news that HIP planned to remodel his house two weeks earlier and he has his own list of repairs that he sees as needed to bring it to standard, all of which are likely to be fixed.
“What we do is go into a house and when we leave, it looks like brand new,” Martin, the Billings housing director, explains. “We do everything, whatever is needed.”
Killsnight also wants to see the walls cleaned or repainted. The wood stove in the living room has darkened the white ceiling in his bedroom and added a layer of black film to the walls.
They’ve tried without success to scrub it off with Lysol, Julia says.
Still, he plans to stick with the wood stove for cooking and reject a more modern one that HIP has offered him. “I don’t want that electric stove,” he says.
The linoleum floors near his kitchen and bathroom sinks need work, too. They cave when Killsnight, who is the height of a jockey, places his weight on them, and spring like a tiny trampoline when he bounces up and down.
After improvements are made, new wooden boards will run under his floors, replacing the older ones that became rotted over the years from leaky pipes.
He doesn’t speak of finding another place to live, though.
He doesn’t speak much at all, actually. He is hard of hearing and when a question isn’t understood he turns to Event, who raises her voice and repeats what went unheard the first time, adding Cheyenne words at the end. When he has questions of his own, sometimes he’ll choose to ask them using Indian sign language.
Beyond his front porch, his grandsons push toy construction trucks through the dirt. There is no grass. His niece Cornelia Clubfoot says there never has been.
Across the street are the tribal government’s offices, and at 5 p.m. cars pour out of its parking lot and onto Cheyenne Avenue, the town’s main street. The door of the Lame Deer Trading Post, one of the town hubs, swings open and barely closes before another customer walks in or out.
From Killsnight’s front porch you can see and feel the pulse of Lame Deer.
“It’s a good place to look around,” he says.
Granddaughter Julia and her family lived with him until a rental unit became available.
During that time, one of her sons suffered a burn from a water heater near the kitchen sink that stands as exposed as his kitchen table, two couches and television set.
While she lived there, she says, six other family members also crowded into the house with her and her two children. Killsnight’s second bedroom was filled and one corner of the living room had cots. “It was really hard for all of us to get a house,” Julia says.
Now, only one of Killsnight’s granddaughters, Crystal Abel, lives there and she stays in the spare bedroom with her 4-month-old son, Carlos. Like Killsnight, they will have to find someplace else to go.
Not much will have to be cleared, however. His furniture pieces are few and his decorations fewer. Besides some family photographs on the wall, he has a framed print of DaVinci’s Last Supper hanging over one couch.
“He lives a real simple life,” says his niece Laurie Clubfoot.
