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The big brown building on the outskirts of Browning on the Blackfeet Reservation stands next to a picturesque red barn. It doesn't look like a juvenile justice facility. There are no bars and no police officers. The scene might fit better on the pages of a children's book, except the children that it shelters have endured less than a storybook life.
Inside the house dozens of children down steaming bean soup, anxious to get outside where they can play and ride horses. Once dinner's done, the kids run hollering and laughing out the front door, past the barn and the silhouettes of jumping sheep, cows, cowboys and horses that are painted on its side. Staffers smile as they approach with horses already saddled.
Back inside children color pictures of elk, or ponoka in their native language. Floyd Heavy Runner tells them the Blackfeet names of deer and bear. In Blackfeet the ranch's name, po'ka, means child, Heavy Runner says, explaining that the "p" takes a "pb" sound. Heavy Runner, whom the kids call "Tiny Man," is one of few tribal members who still speak the language fluently.
The Po'ka Ranch is the Blackfeet tribe's most recent attempt at combating juvenile delinquency. It fuses Blackfeet culture with incentivebased prevention and education programs to rehabilitate high-risk children at the first sign of trouble. Though the program is still developing and has only been taking clients since November, it represents a glimmer of hope on a reservation with a troubled history in juvenile justice.
Each day after school lets out, Browning school bus No. 5 fills with children headed to the Po'ka Ranch. It carries them through downtown Browning, past the town's only grocery store and past the bright lights and crowded parking lot of the Glacier Peaks Casino. The bus squeals to a stop at the old homestead, just out of sight of the boarded-up windows and abandoned cars that litter the small town.
Each of the more than 30 children who step off the bus have some "need" that has been identified by a staff member.
"It might be that they're behind in school, it might be they're in foster care, it might be that they have a death in their family," says Po'ka executive director Francis Onstad. Sometimes children are admitted because they abuse drugs or alcohol. Program staff only have to identify one "need" to admit a child. And once enrolled in the program, a child's family and siblings are encouraged to take part in activities, celebrations and counseling.
Although Po'ka has about 70 clients, it provides services to more than 100 people, counting family and siblings. All of the clients are there by choice. Free food and activities help to keep them coming back every weekday and children and parents alike are drawn to the culture-centric curriculum.
After a hot meal and a few hours of horseback riding, language lessons, or life skills classes, staff round up the children at the Po'ka Ranch and herd them into white 15-seat vans, and deliver them to their homes. But the learning doesn't stop there. Heavy Runner has recorded hundreds of Blackfeet phrases into Phraselator language software. Children and families can check out a computer from Po'ka to practice the language at home. They can also take home LeapFrog educational software, which Po'ka uses to improve reading and writing skills for children who may be behind in school.
Po'ka is funded by a slice of a $9.5 million federal grant intended specifically for Indian country that requires Native American culture be integrated into every aspect of the program. It mandates that Po'ka incorporate a child's family in the rehabilitation process. This is a radical departure from earlier Blackfeet juvenile justice efforts that focused little on rehabilitation, and often took the form of week-long stays in the reservation's juvenile detention facility.
Ben Yellow Owl remembers what things were like before Po'ka. He works on the ranch now — sometimes in the kitchen, sometimes with horses. Wherever he's needed.
He's wearing a stained, gray sweatshirt with blue cuffs that match the color of his faded jeans, marked by an oil stain just above the right knee. In his arms he holds a child with dark curly hair and a curious smile. Bright brown eyes look up at Yellow Owl as he takes off his baseball cap, and introduces himself.
"I'm Benjamin Ray Yellow Owl. I'm 17. I'm a dropout, a teen parent, and this is my first child, Bryson Benjamin Alexander."
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.
"Sometimes they'll transport two or three times a night," says Tribal Judge Don Sollars. "It's just such a waste of taxpayers' money. It seems to me that for what the bureau is paying to transport these kids, they could build a facility."
When youth are released from the Busby facilities, the BIA doesn't drive them back to the reservation. Instead, parents have to make the eight-hour trip to retrieve their children.
"Not everybody has the money to run and get 'em," Sollars says. " A lot of times they'll have to borrow money to go get 'em, and I think that's wrong."
The Tribal Council and juvenile justice system are working to reopen the White Buffalo Home on a limited basis, and they're also lobbying the federal government for money to build a new juvenile detention facility. So for now, judges and prosecutors are wary of imposing jail time for minor offenses. They're more likely to sentence a juvenile to house arrest, probation or drug treatment classes than a jail stay in Busby.
Officials say reopening the White Buffalo Home would be something of "Band-Aid." What the tribe really needs, they emphasize, is a new juvenile detention center that is adequately funded and staffed with trained therapists and correctional officers.
Tribal officials remember all too well the history of the White Buffalo Home. They remember the congressional hearings and FBI investigations into abuse. Echoes still reverberate down the hallways of the old building when doors of cells, now used for storage, slam shut. And horror stories still send shivers down the spines of former White Buffalo employees.
In 2003 the BIA assumed control of tribal law enforcement responsibilities, including the White Buffalo Home. Law enforcement officials say juvenile crime rates soon jumped on the reservation. At White Buffalo, reports of abuse began to surface. A 2004 congressional investigation noted that a White Buffalo employee had been charged with raping a 17-year-old inmate while transporting her to the hospital.
Corrections officers at the home also made extensive use of what they called the "resister chair." Unruly kids were shackled to the chair, then hooded and left for hours or even days on end, former tribal Police Chief Fred Guardipee says. The Tribal Council outlawed the practice in 2004, but not before the device left psychological marks on young Blackfeet children.
Guardipee was on the Tribal Business Council's law and order committee, which in theory had oversight of White Buffalo. He says simply locking children in a jail cell does little to deter them from reoffending.
"It was a real form of punishment," Guardipee says. "Everything was a form of punishment; rather than looking at trying to rehabilitate our children, we were punishing them. And our children were being made (into) criminals."
Freda Vielle was a correctional officer at the White Buffalo Home before it closed. She says most staff tried to improve the lives of kids who ended up there. The staff therapist helped with homework and conducted counseling sessions for the young inmates. But the facility was underfunded, overcrowded and did little to keep kids out of trouble.
"I don't think it helped them," Vielle says, while showing visitors through the old facility. "A lot of them were depressed being in here. They were always wanting to get out."
The home's biggest failure, she says, was that it didn't incorporate parents into the healing process. On the reservation, family can offer the moral support of hundreds of cousins, aunts and uncles. But when the family isn't there to stand behind a child, it can be devastating.
"I witnessed a lot of parents calling up here and saying, 'Oh, just keep my kid in there,'" Vielle says. "Parents wouldn't even want to come see 'em. It made them feel unwanted."
Ben Yellow Owl never sat in the resister chair. He never stayed more than 24 hours, but he knows the White Buffalo Home well. If you don't believe him, go look in cells 3, 4, 5 and 6 where his name is carved into the walls.
As a 13-year-old entering the home for the first time, he was scared.
Subsequent visits, especially when he was arrested for drinking alcohol, were worse. He remembers the drunk tank, an empty room painted white that held intoxicated children for close supervision. Inside, there was no bed, no chair—nothing a child could use to injure himself. During the Blackfeet's annual Indian Days celebration, the tank would be crammed full of intoxicated children. Now it holds filing cabinets and old computer parts.
"Sometimes when I'd go in there drunk I'd freak out," Yellow Owl says. "I'd just act dumb. I'd do anything to get out of there—act sick, and just puke all over, gag myself."
Sitting in the White Buffalo Home gave Yellow Owl time to think about his actions and the direction of his life. But those thoughts floated away as he walked out the cramped double doors that serve as the home's only exit.
"It never stopped me," he says. "I was dumb. Right when I got out I'd try calling my friends. 'You guys want to get a bag?' It was pretty much a routine."
As a 15-year-old, holding his son Bryson for the first time, Yellow Owl says he thought about how things had to change. The birth of his second child, Kaydan, reinforced the point. "After I had my kids it just kind of woke me up," he says. "I realized I can't be hanging out with my friends every day getting weed and getting high and acting dumb."
But intentions aren't always followed by actions.
It wasn't until Yellow Owl enrolled in substance abuse classes and started working with the Po'ka Ranch that his life began to turn around, though even then its path hasn't always been a straight one.
Yellow Owl isn't just an employee at the ranch, he's also a client. His work only earns him a small stipend, not enough to feed his two children, but the program is helping him study for his GED, providing books and practice tests.
"I want to go to school and take classes at the college here, pretty much like everybody else," he says.
Things are getting better, but Yellow Owl still struggles. He still argues with his girlfriend. Sometimes it gets physical. Sometimes he gets high just to escape. Earlier last year he stopped coming to work for nearly seven months. Most of that time was spent drinking and smoking. But Yellow Owl is back at work. He knows his kids are counting on him.
"I want them to be the kind of kids who talk about their dad," he says. "I just want to stay on the right track and not do wrong—because of my kids."
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