Photos by
Russel Daniels
(Click to view gallery)
Information
Name: Blackfeet
Tribe: Blackfeet
Population: 10,100
Native: 91%
Counties: Rosebud,
Big Horn
Like many of the children on the Blackfeet Reservation, Yellow Owl grew up fast. He didn't have a choice.
As a 12-year-old, he learned to drive the family car, shuttling his father home after late nights at the bar.
Yellow Owl started getting in trouble when he was 9, escaping his turbulent home life by spending time with older friends next door. They taught him to smoke cigarettes. Yellow Owl says he smoked only to look cool.
Soon cigarettes turned to marijuana, alcohol and eventually harder drugs.
There's not much for adolescents to do in Browning. There's no movie theater, no arcades. The bowling alley recently shut down. The jobless rate on the Blackfeet Reservation nears 80 percent. For young people, jobs are hard to come by, and drugs are easily accessible.
Yellow Owl remembers hanging out with his friends in middle school. Everywhere they went, they brought a bag of marijuana.
"Get a bag, go swimming, get a bag, go fishing, get a bag, go into town and play ball—it was like our job," Yellow Owl says.
Like any 11-year-old, Yellow Owl built forts and played with toy guns. But unlike most kids that age, drugs had become the center of his life. Those toy guns he was playing with were actually pistol-shaped marijuana pipes, he says.
Before the Po'ka program, there were few family services on the reservation. There were no parenting classes, no anger management classes and no substance abuse services for adolescents, Po'ka director Onstad says. The only resource for children on the reservation was the tribe's juvenile detention facility, the White Buffalo Home.
Known to local kids as "White Buff,'" it was built in the early 1970s as a drug treatment center and group home for troubled youth. The facility was underfunded, but it was better than nothing, tribal officials say. In 2003 the BIA took over the dilapidated building and converted it to a juvenile detention facility. The BIA installed thick steel doors and put steel grates over the windows. The facility held kids as young as 11, often for curfew violations and possession of alcohol.
The dull yellow brick building is sealed so tight that outside air seems to have a difficult a time getting in. The White Buffalo Home was shut down in 2008 in the midst of a fiscal crisis as the Tribal Council decided it could no longer afford it's $1 million annual budget. Though the structure has been condemned by the federal Department of Corrections and the foundation and walls are crumbling, the building is now
used as an administrative office for the tribal police. Meanwhile, juvenile offenders are sent to detention centers outside the reservation.
The closure of the White Buffalo Home left a gaping hole in the Blackfeet juvenile justice landscape. Federal law mandates that juveniles be held in facilities separate from adults. So when kids get in trouble on the Blackfeet, police drive them to the nearest juvenile detention facility in Great Falls, more than 120 miles away. The children are held there until trial. If sentenced to serve jail time, they're taken to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation's juvenile detention center in Busby, more than 500 miles from the Blackfeet Reservation.
Icy roads and blustery conditions typical of long Montana winters can make the trip treacherous. In any case, tribal members say it's wrong to take youth off the reservation. Long commutes also eat up valuable police resources, but since the youngsters can't be held in the tribal jail, they must be transported immediately after arrest. Officer salaries, gas and vehicle maintenance are paid for by the BIA.