Montana’s Crow Tribe May Turn to Zoning to Develop Its Expansive Reservation

The Crow, who once roamed the plains hunting buffalo, are turning to professional city planners to help them protect their vast reservation lands from haphazard development.

That means zoning.

The tribe’s 1.8-million-acre reservation in south-central Montana encompasses the spot on the Little Big Horn River where Gen. George Custer made his last stand. Today, it is home to 6,000 people. Only the 16-million-acre reservation of the Navajo, in northeastern Arizona, is larger.

The Crow lands also are rich in coal and other minerals, the exploitation of which could threaten sacred religious grounds.

So leaders of the tribal council asked Burl Self, an urban and regional planner and professor of geosciences at Southwest Missouri State University, to draft them a comprehensive land-use plan, zoning map and zoning ordinance. Self will present the plan to the council in late February or early March.

“The ability to control the development of land is central to a unit of government,” said Self, an Oklahoma native and a member of the Choctaw tribe.

Tribe Asserting Rights

Richard Real Bird, chairman of the tribal council, hopes that zoning will be of economic benefit, but he said the main motivation is control of development.

“We have not done that in the past, and people have set up businesses, outhouses--anything, anywhere they feel like,” Real Bird said.

“The idea is not really new, but . . . we don’t know of any other tribe that has done it.”

Carl Shaw, spokesman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, said few reservations are zoned, although some tribes have set areas for industrial or residential use, and others are considering zoning.

“Tribes are becoming more sophisticated in their efforts to have a little more control over their own land,” Shaw said.

“I think the Crow are now saying, ‘We do have the right to sovereignty,’ ” Real Bird said. “That was given to us by God, not by the United States government, and what we have left of the sovereignty, we’re going to begin to exercise it to provide a better life for the Crow people.”

Self said that treaties between the government and American Indians gave the tribes a large share of authority over their reservations, but the tribes have been slow to exercise their power.

Indians Run Lands

Reservations are outside the jurisdictions of state governments. Elected tribal councils, headed by chairmen, oversee independent institutions such as police forces, courts and the Crow tribe’s Little Big Horn College.

Self said that the tribes were corralled on land considered worthless in the 19th Century, but since then, “these areas have since proven to be great in mineral resources.”

The Crow are the sixth-largest owners of coal in the world, Self said, and American Indians own about 20% of all the country’s natural resources.

“They’re more significant than OPEC to the economy of the United States,” he said.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate among the Crow is 75%, and 95% of the tribe receives aid from government programs.

Self said zoning will have economic impact. As an example, he said, some Crow enterprises have been cut off from customers because the state government, rather than the Crow, dictated the locations of new highways and road improvements. A zoning ordinance would give tribal officials the authority to coordinate road-building and development.

Zoning also would play a part in determining property values if the Crow decide to levy taxes.

Zoning as First Step

Real Bird said zoning is a first step to economic self-sufficiency. The tribe also plans to build a hydroelectric plant and sell some of the power. And the Crow are considering imposing a severance tax on coal mining, which is controlled by non-Indians.

“All these social problems that are associated with poverty, people are beginning to understand that we have to get ourselves out of these problems,” Real Bird said.

Self said his zoning plan contains no quick economic fixes. He suggests outlawing hazardous-waste dumping and heavy industry, except for coal mining. He also would severely restrict development on sacred lands, where some of the richest veins of mineral resources are located.

“(The Crow) will accept economic development, but they want more of a say in what kind of development, just like cities do,” Self said.

“There are a lot of sacred or religious sites on the reservation that previously were not protected,” Real Bird said. “I think it’s important that these sites and areas be protected for the future of the tribe.”

Real Bird acknowledged that the tribe’s exercising its authority could alter the reservation landscape and affect relations with non-Indians who operate businesses and own land on the reservation, but both he and Self said they have encountered little resistance to the idea, certainly nothing like the legal storm that followed a similar attempt move by the Yakima tribe in Washington state. The Yakima case is before the U. S. Supreme Court.

D. Louie Clayborn, Montana coordinator of Indian affairs, said there may be some grumbling from local government and private business, but he believes tribal sovereignty has been established in the courts.

“When you talk about zoning, it’s the right of a government to act as a government,” Clayborn said. Montana Gov. Ted Schwinden has said he has “no problems with tribal governments acting as governments.”