People on the Crow Indian Reservation in southern Montana had long suspected their drinking water was contaminated.

Now, Montana State University graduate students Mari Eggers and Crystal Richards have confirmed their worries.

The pair, according to this Billings Gazette story, found coliform and other bacteria that can cause a variety of serious health problems:

The project started while Eggers was teaching environmental science at Little Bighorn College. As her class was looking at local issues confronting the Crow Tribe, she noticed that many of the issues were environmental health problems.

Eggers, who is married to a tribal member, was told by community members that water quality was a high priority concern. She teamed up with IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence to create a hands-on water monitoring program for her students.

At the urging of community members, Eggers expanded her work on the project and is now doing so as a doctoral student in microbiology at MSU. She also has a master’s degree from MSU and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford University.

Richards, who is working on a soctorate in microbiology at MSU, started on a separate project that has now been combined with Eggers’ work.

That work provides valuable information to the tribe as it applies for grant money to upgrade its water and sewer systems.

Gwen Florio

Here’s the entire story from the Associated Press:

BILLINGS (AP) — The chairman of Montana’s Crow Indians says the tribe is seeking a $1.5 million bank loan to make up for a sharp decline in revenues.

Crow Chairman Cedric Black Eagle said Monday that the tribe has a $2.1 million deficit for 2010, out of a budget of about $25 million.

He says it is the second year in a row that the tribe dropped into the red, following a 2009 deficit of about $1 million.

A drop in royalties from coal mining and the declining value of some outside investments were blamed. Without the loan, Black Eagle said 165 of the tribe’s approximately 900 employees could lose their jobs.

It seems to be archaeology day at Buffalo Post (see previous post here). This story is about 17 Crow Nation students looking into their own past during an archaeology field school in a remote part of the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area on what is now the Montana-Wyoming border.

They’re helping excavate a site that National Park Service archaeologist Chris Finley stumbled upon a year ago while surveying the area in advance of a plan plan by the Western Area Power Administration to rebuild transmission lines through the park, according to this Billings (Mont.) Gazette story by Lorna Thackeray:

Four-poled tepees, unique to the Crow, would have stood tall on the sparsely vegetated campsite, their hide skirts held down by heavy stones gleaned from the rumbling landscape in the foothills of the Pryor Mountains. Whirls of smoke would have been rising from lodges of varying size. There would have been tepees for families large and small. Some may have been used to protect their dogs against brutal weather blowing down the canyon. Dogs were an integral part of nomadic life. Before horses, they were the primary beasts of burden. They barked warnings of an enemy approach and, in times of hunger, provided a food supply. The largest of the tepees may have served communal or ceremonial purposes.

“It really sparks your imagination,” says James Vallie, who last year was part of the first Crow field archaeology school funded through a grant from the National Park Foundation.

Gwen Florio

Earlier today, we posted about the Arlee Celebration and Powwow held this past weekend on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. This coming weekend brings a new event, the Crow Skills and Trade Fair in the southeastern part of the state. Lorna Thackeray of the Billings Gazette uses this story, on one family’s beading tradition, as a preview.

Each row of tiny beads that Angela Hill painstakingly stitches onto leather carries a piece of her heart.

Generations from now, her children’s children and their grandchildren will marvel at the intricate patterns and precise lines of hundreds of thousands of beads she has lovingly fashioned into traditional Crow regalia for her family.

“My mother, Mary Bear Cloud, taught me,” Hill said at her Billings home as she sewed beads the size of the head of a pin onto a pipe bag for a relative participating in a Sun Dance later this month.

“All my family are beaders,” she said. “My mother is 80 and she still beads for her grandson.”

And Hill wants her 16-year-old daughter, Elonna Stewart, to carry the tradition forward.

“I don’t think she’s very interested yet,” Hill said, shrugging. “I want her to help me make her outfit. She has a jingle dress, moccasins and leggings. She wants fully beaded leggings now. We’re going to do that, too.”

She’s not pushing the pretty teenager too hard. Hill didn’t take up the art until she was in her mid-20s. Now she is one of the premier beaders in a tribe known for its skilled artisans.

That is why she is among the artists and craftsmen who have been asked to participate July 9-10 in the first Crow Skills and Trade Fair at Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area headquarters in Lovell, Wyo.

For more of the stories and also more photos about the Hills, as well as the fair schedule, click here.

Gwen Florio

Here’s how Susan Olp’s story of the Billings Gazette begins:

The Battle of the Little Bighorn is known around the world.

On Friday afternoon, about 500 people from as far away as England came to the Real Bird Ranch, adjacent to the Little Bighorn Battle Monument, north of Garryowen, to see the battle for themselves. The Real Birds, members of the Crow Tribe, have put on the re-enactment for about 17 years.

Visitors sat in bleachers overlooking the Medicine Trail Coulee, near where Lt. Col. George Custer and the 7th Cavalry met decisive defeat on June 25, 1876. The brown Bighorn River drifted along lazily in the background.http://buffalopost.net/wp-admin/post-new.php

Authenticity is critical to the success of the re-enactment of the battle, said Ken Real Bird. Members of the cavalry wear uniforms and use firearms similar to the ones fired in the battle.

Those who portray the Cheyenne and Sioux warriors are only permitted to wear breechcloths and moccasins. Most paint themselves and their horses with symbols of red, white, yellow and black.

Between 70 and 80 people re-enact the roles of the soldiers, the warriors and tribal members. Friday’s presentatoin of the battle was choreographed by retired Lt. Col. Bobby Jolley, from Fort Lewis, Wash.

Steve Alexander, from Monroe, Mich., portrayed Custer. Frank Knows His Gun, a member of the Ogallala Sioux Tribe, portrayed Crazy Horse.

Want more? There’s a whole photo array, a schedule of events, and of course the rest of this most excellent story. Click here.

Gwen Florio

There’s a crying need for more and better housing on many Indian reservations. The shortage is acute and the quality of existing homes is shameful. And don’t get us started on the unemployment problem.

A new federally funded home-building project on the Crow Reservation in southern Montana takes aim at both those issues. Not only will it provide 27 news homes, and put 25 people to work, those homes also are being built by the tribe’s own Good Earth Lodges program.

Good Earth Lodges both makes the blocks for the homes, and then puts up the houses.

Cedric Black Eagle told Billings Gazette reporter Susan Olp, here, about the project and the problems it will address:

On the Crow Reservation, he said, homelessness exists, but it is masked by overcrowding. Often, multiple families live in the same single-family dwelling.

The tribe’s Housing Authority has 1,800 applications for housing. Each year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development allocates funding enough to build five houses.

The compressed earth block and housing program is the culmination of a research and development project funded by the Division of Energy and Mineral Development, Office of Indian Energy and Economic Development. The goal was to determine if the raw materials needed for the blocks could be found on the Crow Reservation, if the blocks could withstand Montana’s climate, and if a work force could be put in place to carry out the program.

The answer was yes on all three counts, said Larry Lee Falls Down, project manager of the Good Earth Lodges.

“We all know the saying – if this was easy, everyone would do it,” Falls Down tells Olp. “This hasn’t been easy, not everyone is doing it. But we are doing it, and we are going to continue doing it. We will build these houses, and we will continue to build more houses.”

Both the University of Colorado Boulder and the Mortenson Center for Engineering and Developing Communities also are involved with the project.

Gwen Florio

Those of us who live and work in Montana are already privileged to be familiar with the work of Adam Sings in the Timber. So we’re glad to see it appreciated in the New York Times.

Click here to view a slideshow of Sings in the Timber’s gorgeous work.

The Times’ Lens blog homes right in on what makes Sings in the Timber’s work so special. As Adam Stoltman writes:

It often seems as if America has only two frames through which to view its native culture: ceremony and pageantry or poverty and addiction.

“They are both opposite ends,” Adam Sings in the Timber said. “There is so much more in the middle.”

Thanks, Adam, for showing everyone the middle.

Gwen Florio

The first interpretive project ever to take place at the Fort C.F. Smith site in southern Montana took place this week as part of a collaboration between the Crow Tribe and the National Park Service.

The site — now deonated only with a stone and metal marker — was built by the U.S. Army on the Bozeman Trail along the Bighorn River to protect people traveling to Virginia City’s gold camps, Brett French of the Billings Gazette writes here.

“Anywhere else in America, this would be a really big site,” says Col. Berris Samples, leader of the Lodge Grass Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, who brought Crow students there this week. He also took the students to the site of the Grapevine Creek battle between the Crow and the Blackfeet.

The sites, on the Crow reservation, are typically closed to anyone other than Crow tribal members, but because of a collaboration with the Junior ROTC group, Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area staff was able to accompany the group and give presentations to the students. (Watch a video of the day’s events, here.)

“This is the first interpretive program ever given at the site of Fort C.F. Smith,” Chris Wilkinson, chief of interpretation for the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, tells French.

Wilkinson told the group that the fort — the most isolated along the Bozeman Trail — was built in 1864 to protect white emigrants from raids by the Sioux and Cheyenne:

“Your ancestors, the Crow Nation, were stuck in the middle of this,” Wilkinson told the JROTC students.

Without the help of Crow Indians acting as scouts, mail carriers and providing food to starving soldiers in the winter of 1867, Fort C.F. Smith might not have lasted two years.

“I do not believe there is any greater example of hospitality to the U.S. Army,” Wilkinson said.

“Why do I tell you this today?” he asked rhetorically. “By celebrating your legacy, you are following in your ancestors’ footsteps and extending hospitality. We thank you for allowing us to visit your sites.”

At the site of the Grapevine Creek battle, where the Crow defeated a Blackfeet band, students raised a tepee.

Theo Hugs, who retired last year from the Bighorn Canyon NRA, tells French that the interaction between the tribe and the National Park Service is long overdue.

“I think the kids need to know their heritage,” she says.

Gwen Florio