Hill 57

By Kevin Stevens

As a boy, I would accompany my father once or twice a year to Hill 57, a rural slum two miles north of our hometown of Great Falls, Montana. When the weather was really bad – three feet of snow, forty below zero, with an arctic wind blowing in off the high desert plain – we would bring food, clothing and fuel to the settlement’s dirt-poor residents, mostly landless Native Americans.

More than four decades later, I vividly remember conditions on the Hill: junked cars and piles of old tires covered in snow; derelict shacks made of scrap wood, cardboard and tarpaper; ankle-deep trash covering frozen alleyways. The treeless, grassless village was situated next to a dump, from which residents scavenged scrap metal and rags. Two hundred people shared a single water pump and were crowded fourteen or fifteen to a room. There were no telephone lines and no bus connections to the town. Social problems were rampant, the children often malnourished.

This squalid settlement was part of history’s bitter legacy to the Native American. The families who lived on Hill 57 descended from two intermingled refugee groups who came to Montana in the latter half of the nineteenth century: the Little Shell band of Chippewa, who migrated west from the Great Lakes region, and the Métis, a mixed-blood tribe descended from French and Cree fur traders in central Canada. Both tribes had been driven from their homelands by white expansion: the Chippewa herded onto reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota so that whites could exploit copper and timber resources; the Métis suppressed and dispersed by the British after the Dominion of Canada was formed in 1867.

Moving to the high plains of Montana did not end their problems. The last of the brutal “Indian Wars” occurred over these years, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 and further displacement of Native American tribes as the reservation system of enforced settlement consolidated into its final form. In 1916, the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation was set up in central Montana for displaced Chippewa, but the Little Shell/Métis were excluded because of their mixed-race status. Landless and destitute, the tribe lived a semi-nomadic life, hunting and trapping during the good weather and wintering in sterile spots like Hill 57, which eventually became their largest permanent residence.

When I was in the third grade, my family moved to the south side of Great Falls, and I enrolled as a day student in St. Thomas Orphans Home. Most of the orphans were American Indians, and many came from the Hill – because of their French heritage, the Little Shell/Métis were predominantly Catholic, and the Sisters of Providence, who ran the home, had long been active in providing aid to the tribe and drawing the attention of state and federal officials to their awful living conditions.

Two of the orphans, brothers Lee and Joey Falcon, befriended me at the beginning of the school year, and we would hang around together after classes finished, playing basketball and throwing rocks at the prairie dogs that emerged from their burrows in the fields beside the home. At the time, I wasn’t aware that the Falcons were not true orphans, or that they were Catholic boys who had grown up on the Hill. I discovered these facts a year later.

At breakfast one morning, my dad got a phone call and returned to the table grim-faced, telling us that a diesel heating stove had exploded and burned down several shacks on the Hill. When I got to school I learned that the Falcon family home had been among those destroyed, and that Lee and Joey’s younger sister had been killed. Returning from recess, I saw the brothers being ushered into the principal’s office, and as the door opened I glimpsed Sister Superior consoling Mrs. Falcon, her head bent down so that her long black hair covered the side of her face.

In 1988, the US Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which recognized the right of American Indian tribes to establish gambling facilities on their reservations. The act was intended to “promote tribal economic development, self-sufficiency, and strong tribal government”. Much has been made of the benefits of this new, five-billion-dollar industry, which has created pockets of wealth in a few reservation economies, and in some cases diminished tribal unemployment and dependence on welfare.

However, the vast majority of Native Americans have not benefited. Montana’s large American Indian population continues to experience an appalling quality of life. Eighty percent live below the federal poverty line. The death rate for infants is 88 percent higher than for white infants, and four in 10 young adults need treatment for an alcohol or drug disorder. Unemployment on the state’s seven reservations runs between 40 and 75 percent, and life expectancy is lower than anywhere else in the United States.

Forty years later, I went back to Hill 57. Most of the families had gone, and the few who remained lived in sturdier housing, with indoor plumbing. I spoke to an old man who remembered the Falcons, but he couldn’t tell me anything about them other than they had left for somewhere else in Montana, still moving, still landless.

Published in The Irish Times, 16 August 2005