Dealing With Drought And Poisoned Creeks In Fort Belknap

This story was first published on the nonprofit news organization the American Communities Project. The ACP is working with the University of Maryland on a grant from NASA's Earth Science Applications: Equity and Environmental Justice program to examine how experiences of environmental distress over time interact with other socioeconomic challenges on tribal lands. Reprinted by permission of Montana Free Press.

If you ask Juanita Crasco about the historic and unrelenting drought where she and her husband live and ranch on the Fort Belknap Reservation, she'll talk about her apple tree.

"See here? I have a picture ready. You see how it's just loaded with apples?" She took that photo on her iPad in 2021 and then drove roughly four hours to see her daughter in Browning, on the Blackfeet Reservation. When she returned two days later, all those apples were gone, decimated by grasshoppers. "They were so bad that year," she says. "We lost a hundred percent of our hay crop. A hundred percent."

Grasshoppers can't control their body temperature, and they need heat to thrive and reproduce. They like hot, wide-open fields and that's what they got that year at the Crasco Ranch, which occupies the land Jake Crasco's family was allotted by the federal government. Jake, 70, is enrolled Assiniboine-Nakoda and the third generation to ranch here. Juanita and Jake wanted to celebrate reaching 100 years on the original Crasco allotment, but that was the same year they lost their hay, "and we were too busy dealing with everything," says Juanita, who is Aaniih-Gros Ventre and grew up in Fort Belknap Agency on the northern end of the reservation. Her family also ranched, but eventually quit after years of costs far exceeding profits. In the last 20 years, the Crascos have had to reduce their cattle from a high of 1,000 to about 150. They attribute a lot of their decisions and their losses to a lack of water, but they're not giving up, even in so-called retirement. "We're still here. We're not going anywhere," Juanita says.

Fort Belknap encompasses about 675,000 acres in Philips and Blaine counties reserved for the Nakoda and Aaniih nations. Recent grant-funded imaging and analysis by scientists working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, better known as NASA, focused environmental earth observation data on areas also struggling economically - including Fort Belknap. The hope was to explore the connection between environmental issues and the larger challenges facing communities of color. In Montana, the researchers found distinct areas of deforestation attributed to both fires and disease. They identified streams and creeks likely polluted by now-closed off-reservation gold mines that used cyanide leaching. They measured air quality degraded by wildfire smoke and mapped new roads in what had been wilderness. But among the most drastic findings was a loss of surface water. The data show nearly 60% of it dried up between 2017 and 2022.

Juanita Crasco took a look at that and said, "that seems low." That's because drought and its effects have been part of what's happening at Crasco Ranch for decades. Jake says the drought that started in 2000 "got worse and worse. But in 2002, that's the first time I've seen this creek dry up since I was a little kid."

The creek is close to their house, and during the spring runoff of 2024, a season which also included a decent amount of rain in Montana, it was running again. Through a system Jake designed, water lines from that creek feed Juanita's many pots, gardens and even a greenhouse - a huge source of joy and pride for her. But in the pastures, the Crascos have learned that the only way to stay in business is to rely on the water underground.