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BILLINGS — This past Sunday, on the eve of food benefits coming to a halt amid a political stalemate in Washington D.C., dozens of people in and around Wyola on the Crow Indian Reservation took home fresh elk meat.
The harvest, courtesy of the Crow Tribe’s bison management crew, was one of many recent efforts that tribal leaders in Montana have taken since the government shutdown tore a hole in one of the country’s most important safety nets.
“Since the beginning of October we had two buffalo food distributions and two elk food distributions,” said Chaz Bends, head of the Crow Bison Management Program. “Each time we do it, we’re feeding over 300 families.”
The hobbling of federal food benefits earlier this month had state and local governments scrambling to ensure some of the most vulnerable people in the country don’t go hungry during the government shutdown. In the Indigenous communities of Montana, home for over 40,000 people, tribal leaders have enacted a series of policies in the past week to bolster food supplies.
“We did one big elk distribution in Crow Agency last week,” Bends said. “And the people of Wyola were asking that we bring some food down there this past Sunday. Our next distribution is going to be this Sunday in Lodge Grass.”
As the U.S. government shutdown limps into its second month, one of the consequences of Congress’s inability to pass a deal to fund the federal government’s operations has been the threat to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.
Administered by the United States Department of Agriculture, roughly one in eight people in the U.S. rely on SNAP to purchase food for themselves and their households. Nearly two thirds of SNAP participants are in families with children. Throughout the fiscal year of 2024, according to the USDA, federal SNAP spending amounted to $99.8 billion, with nearly 42 million people receiving benefits, each one an average of $187.20 per month.
Although past administrations have funded SNAP through contingency plans during government shutdowns, the USDA announced last month that come Nov. 1, SNAP payments would cease with the ongoing shutdown.
On Monday, in response to a demand from a federal judge to keep the program afloat, the Trump Administration declared that it would make $4.65 billion in SNAP benefits available for the month, covering roughly 65% of the allotment amount for participants.
While Gov. Greg Gianforte did donate a portion of his salary to a Livingston nonprofit that processes livestock for state food banks, he said he would not use state funds to cover the cost of SNAP without a guarantee of reimbursement from the federal government. Montanans can expect to receive a portion of their SNAP benefits later this month, according to previous reporting from Lee Montana Newspapers.
A 2023 survey published by the USDA showed about 13.5% of households in the U.S. were food insecure; that is, homes with family members who were unable to obtain adequate food throughout the previous year. In 2023, 18 million people were food insecure, up from 17 million the previous year.
The nonprofit Feeding America reported that in 2023 nearly 140,000 Montanans were facing food insecurity, more than half of whom were living below the income threshold that makes them eligible to receive SNAP benefits. In 2024, according to data compiled by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, one in 14 Montanans benefited from SNAP.
Over a five-year period, according to the USDA, nearly a quarter of Native American households faced food insecurity. In recent years, the lack of access to adequate and nutritional food has spurred Indigenous leaders and advocates to promote food sovereignty, adopting proactive policies like raising buffalo herds to enable tribes to sustain themselves with healthy food sources.
The response from Montana’s tribal leadership has been a combination of food drives, meat harvests and more unorthodox measures.
On the Blackfeet Reservation, those facing fines in tribal court can turn in non-perishable goods instead of money. Rodney Gervais, chairman of the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council, hunted and harvested a cow elk earlier this week, while last week the tribe issued a declaration of state of emergency.
This past Monday, Blackfeet Tribal Council member Mike Comes At Night arrived from the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington State with a flatbed trailer full of donated produce.
On the Flathead Reservation, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes organized an extensive outreach program to supply food vouchers to SNAP recipients with at least one enrolled tribal member in their home.
The Sioux and Assiniboine Tribes at Fork Peck secured $250,000 for assistance to tribal homes with SNAP beneficiaries. In his declaration of a state of emergency Monday, Fort Peck Tribal Chairman Floyd Azure also encouraged those were able to make donations of non-perishable goods.
The Northern Cheyenne Food Pantry recently received several trailers worth of food, Food Pantry Director Del Harris said, which as of Tuesday were being sorted and distributed to three different locations across the reservation. Harris said he was confident in the food pantry’s food supply, but was concerned with distribution, considering how many elders live outside of Lame Deer and the two other sites the food pantry operates.
“We’ve got one truck here,” Harris said. “Luckily, we started to embrace more proactive measures earlier this year. I was always thinking something was going to happen, I just didn’t think it would be this.”
Del Harris’s mother, Emma Harris, chairs the Northern Cheyenne Food Pantry’s board of directors while also working at the Boys and Girls Club in Lame Deer. Along with the food pantry in each district on the reservation providing a noon meal, she said through the month of November the Boys and Girls Club will be serving dinner.
“We are pretty lucky,” Emma Harris said, “in the fact that the community is coming together to provide assistance to each other.”
To the west, on the Crow Reservation, Chaz Bends said one of his goals even before the shutdown was to hold monthly distributions of meat from the tribe’s growing buffalo herd, which as of this week was at nearly 500. Even with those distributions growing from monthly to nearly weekly, he said he still aims to expand distributing to local schools on the reservation.
“What I’ve been telling my fellow (bison management) commissioners is to remember why this land is here and why these animals are here,” Bends said. “They’re here for us. They’re here for the people to provide a healthy food source and we can’t forget who we are. And we can’t rely only on the government and outside food sources.”
