Warnings Disregarded, BIA Takes Over Tribal Policing

When she sleeps now, she closes both eyes. Two BB guns and a broken hammer are still by her bed, but Illena Marceau, 72, doesn’t reach for them in the night. The noises don’t draw her to the window anymore, and the darkness outside no longer holds fear.

Life on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation has changed since the Bureau of Indian Affairs began policing the area. The tribe’s own police department, the BIA said, had simply ceased to enforce the law.

In one case, an allegation of sexual abuse wasn’t investigated because “the mother didn’t believe her boyfriend would do something like that to her child,” a BIA report quoted an investigator as saying.

An inmate allowed to leave jail for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting instead went to his girlfriend’s house, where he raped and assaulted her, the BIA said. An escaped inmate stabbed a man to death. A police investigator failed to respond to a report of a child’s rape.

“There were things that were going on that shouldn’t be going on,” said Ed Naranjo, BIA special agent in charge of a six-state region that includes Montana. “A lot of it was that the police are untrained. Police were abusing their power, being heavy-handed.”

Mismanagement, incompetence, dysfunction, the BIA had seen it before, but not as bad. Throughout the country, only a handful of the 177 Indian law enforcement programs that the BIA either runs or contracts to tribes face such serious problems. But in Browning, it was a way of life.

Marceau often heard teenagers carousing outside her home and feared that they would break in. She said she knew that the police wouldn’t do anything, so she slept with her guns and her hammer, and kept watch on the night herself.

“I get up in the dark. I look around, see if anybody’s outside,” she said. “I just never complained.”

*

For 27 years, Tribal Police Lt. Richard Rutherford patrolled the streets of this depressed town in northern Montana, where the boarded-up buildings almost seem to match the number of open businesses. There is no main industry.

Jobs are few -- the unemployment rate is 23% -- and poverty is a way of life for 34% of the population. Children play in the snow, and a few people always loiter outside Ick’s Place -- a bar and liquor store.

But the Blackfeet are proud of their heritage and community.

Feared both by white settlers and other tribes, the Blackfeet were perhaps the fiercest Indian warriors of the 19th century.

Meriwether Lewis took a side excursion during the return portion of his expedition in 1806, hoping for peaceful contact with the Blackfeet. It went badly; two warriors were killed in the only bloody conflict of the expedition, and Lewis and his companions fled down the Missouri River before the tribe could retaliate.

But by the 1880s, the Blackfeet had been devastated by smallpox, and they were starving: The buffalo were gone.

Over the years, the government reduced the tribe’s domain from about three-fourths of vast Montana to a reservation almost contained by a single county. Today, there are about 50,000 Blackfeet in the United States and Canada; about 8,500 Blackfeet live on the reservation.

Most people, like Rutherford, have been here all their lives and will never leave. Besides, he said, where would he go? Huge extended families live in Browning and the surrounding reservation towns in the shadow of the Rocky Mountain Front near Glacier National Park. It is the heart of their ancestral home.

Rutherford, 46, knew that his department had problems. But he also believed that no one would listen to his complaints. The reason: Carl Old Person, police chief at the time, was the nephew of the tribe’s chief, Earl Old Person.

“Nothing would get done,” Rutherford reasoned. “Just accept it and do your job.”

He disciplined sergeants for missing reports and skipping court appointments. And he believes that is why he was transferred from Browning -- the largest town on the reservation with about 1,000 people -- to the village of Heart Butte last year.

“I was trying to make a change, but one man can’t make a change,” he said.

Carl Old Person disputes the characterizations, saying Rutherford was reassigned because an officer was needed in Heart Butte, not in retribution. He said the tribal council interfered with the police force, but his uncle did not.

“I don’t know what he’s getting at,” the former chief said. “I think I did a fairly good job.”

Earl Old Person, tribal chief and councilman, said complaints about his nephew and the department were discussed at council meetings, but nothing was ever done, something he blames on the frequent turnover of council members and a lack of funding.

“It’s true a lot of times council never really addressed those things,” he said.

It wasn’t just Rutherford who noticed the problems. The community was complaining to the BIA about incompetent officers, the hiring of known drug users and drinking on the job.

“It’s very unsettling to have to fight your own people to get them to hear you,” said Gloria McLean, 78, who complained to the BIA. “It’s just chaos.”

McLean’s car windows and front house window were smashed five years ago. She reported it to police, but said they took no interest.

“Fear dominates a lot of our people,” she said, working her fingers across a rainbow-colored quilt she was making inside her new apartment in a senior living complex. Her daughter moved her there because of concerns about her safety.

Some residents stopped reporting crime altogether.

“If you’re going to complain and nobody responds, then what’s the use of calling?” Naranjo said. “Nobody comes.”

*

The Blackfeet ran their own police department, ostensibly under BIA oversight. But in September 2000, a BIA review noted problems: Officers lacked proper training. The jail was filthy; some inmates had access to kitchen knives. There was nepotism, and tribal council politics interfered with department management.

The BIA told the department to shape up.

A review in May 2001 found only cosmetic fixes. For example, the department made a file to hold case reports, as instructed -- but the file was empty.

When the BIA said it would take over law enforcement on the reservation, the tribe appealed. It received 15 months to improve, as well as the assistance of three BIA special agents.

But Naranjo said police never showed much interest in working with the BIA.

“Never improved,” he said.

By last year, Carl Old Person had been fired, rehired and fired again. Troy Wilson, an investigator for the Blackfeet Housing Authority, was hired in August 2002 -- the fourth chief that year.

“It was pretty much a mess,” Wilson said.

He took over only a month after an inmate trusty walked away, went to his girlfriend’s house and stabbed a man to death. Naranjo said police didn’t even notice he was gone for several hours. A few months later, an inmate in jail for domestic abuse was allowed to leave to attend an AA meeting. Instead, he went to his girlfriend’s home, where he raped and assaulted her.

Finally, in February, a 13-year-old girl was raped. A hospital doctor asked police to send an investigator. Three hours later, no one had shown up.

The BIA had had enough.

“We had to do something, Naranjo said. “They were putting the community in jeopardy.”

On Feb. 15, BIA agents rushed into the police department with assault rifles. They ordered officers to turn in their guns and vehicles.

Rutherford and 12 other officers were out of jobs.

*

Inside the P & M convenience store, the usual crowd of men has pulled up their bar stools around an oval table in the back by the fountain drinks and deli sandwiches. They call themselves the Knights of the Round Table and joke that they solve the world’s problems here.

“We had tribal council interfering with law enforcement. It was bad,” Victor Connelly said as he munched on a bag of popcorn.

“I’m glad they showed up,” his coffee buddy, Wayne Hall, 43, said of the BIA. “The chances of justice being done was nil.”

Naranjo said there were instances of tribal councilmen springing their relatives from jail.

“They’d come right in there, get the keys and take their relatives out,” he said.

The BIA brought in about 40 officers from various reservations. They work here in 30-day stints. Naranjo said it will be several months before a permanent staff is hired; some former officers could be rehired.

Rutherford has applied, but at 46, he exceeds the statutory age limit of 36 or younger for a federal law enforcement officer. For now, he is trying to figure out what to do next.

Although most of the community cheers the BIA, Wilson and Rutherford aren’t sure that the takeover will make much difference. They say the department needs more money and officers. The BIA is working with the same $1.8-million budget and about the same number of officers.

More officers will be hired soon, Naranjo said.

“They don’t know our area, know the culture, know the problems,” Rutherford said. “It’s not going to change things.”

Fixing the police department is different from changing the tribal council -- what many residents feel is the root of the problem.

“There seems to be a great struggle to be the head honcho,” McLean said. “We don’t care who the head honcho is. We want them to do their job. There’s too much of that nepotism.”

Other tribes have had similar problems. At the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation near Havre, Mont., the police department was put on probation Dec. 4 after allegations of police brutality and improper procedure. Most employees have since been reinstated.

But Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, and Robert Ecoffey, director of BIA law enforcement services, discount the notion that Indian police departments are especially prone to problems.

“It’s not that there’s a specific problem with law enforcement in Indian country,” Ecoffey said. “It’s just that when they happen, the media tends to pick up on the negative things that happen in Indian country.”

*

On a bitter cold night in Browning, BIA Officer Jeff Chumley from the Hoh River Agency in Washington headed out for his evening shift in his sport-utility vehicle, marked distinctly with the BIA seal. He made the usual rounds -- by the bars, through each residential area and by the jail.

It was quiet. The only commotion occurred when two BIA police vehicles got stuck in deep snow outside town. Later, a man was arrested for causing a disturbance at a home and, at the end of the shift, a car flipped over on a slick road, injuring two people.

“There’s a lot of potential here,” Chumley said over the chatter of the dispatcher’s voice. “It wants to be a good community. I think they just allowed some bad people to overrun it.”

Thirty miles away in Cut Bank, Rutherford watched a high school basketball game this night. He is still unemployed.

And across town, inside her purple house in a row of Easter egg-colored homes, Illena Marceau climbed into bed next to her blind husband, her BB guns and hammer. She pulled the covers up snug.

She didn’t get up to look out the windows.