New West Feature

On the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, Be Advised: Don’t Drink the Water

By Kate Whittle, 4-19-11

	The Crazy Head spring outside Lame Deer, Montana, one of the few places that Northern Cheyenne tribal members can get pure, fresh water. Photo by Kat Franchino.

Since moving to her home more than 20 years ago, Laveta Killsnight has never drunk her tap water.

“My water’s plum orange,” she says.

Killsnight, a diabetes technician with long, graying hair and a wide grin, lives in Muddy Cluster, a small town on the Northern Cheyenne Indian reservation in southeastern Montana. The reservation, home to about 4,800 people, is dotted with small housing clusters separated by dozens of miles of rolling plains and curving two-lane highway.

Hard water is a problem in much of this territory, but it’s a particular problem on the reservation, which often lacks the equipment and funding to put in better water systems. The tribe’s administration operates on less than $2 million a year, and the money is spread thinly among housing, health and education services.

The Northern Cheyenne tribe is known nationally for its environmentalism and pristine landscape. But for a tribe that fought for and succeeding in getting Class 1 air status—the same air quality standards as a national park—what they don’t always have is good water.

So Killsnight, like many other reservation residents, hauls her drinking water from nearby tribal capital Lame Deer or fills buckets at nearby springs. She washes her clothes with her tap water, but won’t dye her hair with it. The “rusty” water also destroys coffee makers and turns sinks and tubs yellow.

She’ll laugh about how hard her water is, but she’s still frustrated. “You live in a third-world country when you still have to haul your water,” she said.

That might change for Killsnight this year. Plans are in the works to install a pipe to take Lame Deer water about five miles west to Muddy Cluster. It’s the first part of a process to solve water problems on the reservation.

Northern Cheyenne Utility Commission General Manager Winslow White Crane is one of the people behind the project to get better water to Muddy Cluster. Outside Lame Deer, where water comes from a good-quality aquifer, good water is hard to find, he said. Other aquifers are often tainted with iron, manganese and sometimes coliform bacteria, which can make people ill.

Work is set to begin on the nearly $4 million project to pipe water about four miles from Lame Deer to Muddy Cluster in May. Barring acts of God, White Crane hopes the system will be working by this fall. Andrew Mattie, an engineer with construction company DOWL HKM, said it’s the first major improvement to the reservation’s water system since the 1970s. About 70 households will be receiving chlorinated city water for the first time, and Lame Deer residents will have a more reliable system. “Right now they just have one well, if it goes out, it’s out,” Mattie said.

Next on the utilities’ agenda is tackling water problems on the rest of the reservation. White Crane said next year, they’ll be starting a rural water appraisal study.

For now, many tribal members continue to fill buckets and rely on several springs, most of them just a pipe stuck in the ground marked by multicolored prayer cloths, since many Cheyenne consider the springs sacred places.

Shanny Spang Gion works for the tribe’s water resources administration. Her office is in an old Mormon church on a hill overlooking Lame Deer. She explained that the springs are filtered naturally by the seams of coal underground, like giant charcoal filters, and tests have shown that water is pristine.

The groundwater, though, is another story. Legally, public drinking water on the reservation passes the necessary standards for potability, but not the “aesthetic” standards of taste and smell, Gion said. The Indian Health Service, which is in charge of water, doesn’t have to find sources that taste good or appear clear, as long as other standards are met.

To make matters more complicated for rural residents, the IHS requires that a new home have electricity before putting in a well. (On the Cheyenne, tribal members don’t technically own plots of land, but have home sites designated by tribal housing authorities.)

Gion said it’s a problem because the IHS needs assurance that the tribal member will go through with putting in a new home, but tribal members first need to know if their water will be any good. Her office is working on a well inventory to map out where good water can be found.

Tribal authorities hope to someday address the entire reservation’s drinking water. So while the pipeline will help the residents of Muddy Cluster, many people, like Gion’s aunt Judith Spang, will be dealing with water quality problems for the indefinite future. Spang works in the same room as Gion for Indian Resource Management Plan data entry. “The system is failing people and their water problems,” she said.

After her well collapsed at her rural home in 2007, she spent one year without any running water while struggling to get help from the Indian Health Service. After being referred back and forth among different authorities, the housing program finally offered her a house in Lame Deer.

“After you live like that, you feel like nobody cares,” she said. Spang thinks older generations, including her own and her mother’s, often tolerate poor living conditions. “It’s these young ones, like Shanny, they got more gumption to say, ‘Hey, this isn’t right.’”

Updated 5:15 p.m. 4/20/11

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