It’s been three weeks since Stephanie Bearstail died under suspicious circumstances on the Wind River Indian Reservation, and the 18-year-old’s family is mourning her as they wait for answers from federal investigators.

Bearstail was a passionate softball player and determined student eager to graduate high school and enter college — she had recently expressed interest in becoming a radiologist, her parents Nikki and Kevin Ferris told WyoFile in a phone interview this week. As a senior, she was already taking courses at Central Wyoming College. 

Their only daughter was also a certified goofball, a little boss of the house and her three brothers, and a bright light in the lives of the family and many others on the reservation. 

“Even we were surprised how many people knew her,” Nikki Ferris said. “We knew of her friends, but we didn’t know how many she had.” 

On March 15, those friends and others — as many as 200 people, according to news reports — walked to a fence line along the side of Wyoming 137, a road that cuts across the reservation, running from near the Wind River Casino outside Riverton west to Fort Washakie. That’s the area where authorities say Bearstail somehow exited a moving vehicle on a windy March night. 

At the demonstration, Bearstail’s supporters wore red — the color that has become a symbol for the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women that plagues communities on and off the reservation. They carried signs that read “Justice for Steph,” some of which still hung weeks later on the barbed wire fence that threads between the sage brush. 

Bearstail’s death, her mother said, “just blindsided all of us.” 

The Ferrises declined to share details, saying they do not want to publicly reveal information that could complicate the job of investigators. But they have reason to believe their daughter was a victim of violence, they said. 

“The main thing that I think of every day is I just wish somebody would come out and tell the truth about what happened,” Nikki said. “I don’t understand how anyone could know what happened and not say anything.” 

Bearstail grew up and lived her entire life in Fort Washakie, where her father was involved in law enforcement and today is a judge on the Wind River Tribal Court. 

The night of March 4, Bearstail did not return home by her 10:30 p.m. curfew. The parents could remember only one other time their lively but studious daughter had been late for her curfew, they told WyoFile. They grew worried, and within an hour, left home to look for her. 

The parents tracked their daughter’s phone location, which placed her in the area between Riverton and the small reservation community of Arapahoe. “She did need help, and we were trying to find her,” her mother said. 

On the drive, they received word she had been hospitalized, and so they headed to SageWest Hospital in Riverton. They were able to spend time with Bearstail before she died, but their daughter was unable to speak or share what happened to her, they said.

The Wyoming Highway Patrol, which maintains a list of highway fatalities from around the state, published an entry to the list about a week after Bearstail’s death, according to news reports. The entry states: “An unknown SUV was traveling westbound on Rendezvous Road. The SUV passenger allegedly jumped out of the vehicle while it was in motion for unknown reasons.” 

The entry does not say where investigators learned of the allegation that Bearstail jumped from the SUV. Authorities haven’t identified the driver. The Wyoming Highway Patrol directed WyoFile to the FBI for comment on the case. The FBI has said only that the case remains under investigation. The Fremont County Coroner’s office is conducting the autopsy, which hasn’t been finalized, a representative of that office said this week. 

Using the limited information from the highway patrol fatality database, news organizations ran headlines stating that Bearstail “allegedly jumped” from the car to her death. Those reports disturbed the family, the Ferrises said, because taken in isolation, the information suggests Bearstail was responsible for her own death. 

The headlines, Nikki said, served “to deflect off what happened to her.” But Bearstail’s community appears dedicated to keeping focus on her case and on the issue of domestic violence, which they believe led to her death. Other community events are in the works, the Ferrises told WyoFile. 

Native American women fall prey to violence, murders and unexplained deaths at disproportionally higher rates compared to other demographics in the United States. 

Many of the cases go unsolved, and reformers have pointed to the complicated jurisdictional nature of reservations — where local, state, federal and tribal law enforcement sometimes overlap in areas that are often economically depressed and, in the West, geographically isolated — as leading to a lack of accountability for perpetrators of violence.

That does not appear to be the case here, as the FBI swiftly took control of the investigation. “In this case, the FBI, they were [at the crime scene] that morning,” Nikki said. “They got involved quickly.”

RELATED

FBI launches initiative to investigate Wyoming’s missing and murdered Indigenous people

Dozens of tips, no breakthroughs yet in FBI’s missing and murdered Indigenous people effort

Bearstail was the second oldest of the couple’s children. Her younger brothers, ages 15 and 13, have tried to return to school, but on some days have had to go home or haven’t been up for going at all, their mother said. 

“They’re not doing OK,” Nikki said. “It’s really hard.”

Since her daughter’s death, Nikki has made a steady stream of posts to social media, calling for justice, expressing her raw grief and remembering her daughter. There are videos of Bearstail running track, and of her dancing — full of life. 

As the Ferrises have received messages sharing swirling rumors about the night Bearstail died, they’ve implored people to take what they know to the FBI. But to date, all the family has been told by officials is that an investigation is active, the parents said. 

The FBI “said it would take time,” Nikki said in the March 25 interview. To her knowledge, “they’re still out there investigating,” she said. 

In a statement to WyoFile sent Wednesday evening, an FBI spokesperson for the Denver Field Office said the agency “appreciate[s] public interest in this incident and encourage[s] anyone with information to contact the Bureau of Indian Affairs/Wind River Police or the FBI.”

The agency could not offer a time frame for when it would conclude the investigation, the statement read. “We methodically and thoroughly address every element of the incident,” spokesperson Vikki Migoya said. 

Correction: This story was updated to correct a misspelling of Nikki Ferris’ name. —Ed.

The post ‘Come out and tell the truth’: Parents of teen who died outside Riverton wait for answers appeared first on WyoFile .

The 2.2-million-acre Wind River Indian Reservation encompasses frothy rivers and wild mountains, alpine lakes, buffalo herds and rich cultural heritage. The kind of outdoor attractions, in other words, that many western communities leverage to fuel tourism. 

Just look at  Lander, Thermopolis, Jackson and Dubois, said Paul Huberty, executive director of the Wind River Development Fund. 

“Everybody around us has capitalized on the natural resources here, and of course, all of those areas used to be part of the reservation,” Huberty said. “So we know it works.”

The Wind River Development Fund and others on the reservation are planning to undertake several projects aimed at making outdoor recreation more robust and accessible — both for tribal residents and for tourists who flock to nearby destinations to experience iconic landscapes and wildlife. This year, the state is chipping in to help make that happen.

The lion’s share of 2025 Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Program grants will go to projects on the Wind River Reservation. Of 15 projects receiving a total of $17.8 million in funding, seven are on the reservation and earmarked for $4.4 million. The Wind River Development Fund and its partners were awarded six of those. 

The state grants dovetail with a major reservation redevelopment project already under way. Last August, the Development Fund was one of six awardees of the federal “Recompete” pilot grant program, which targets areas where prime-age (25-54) employment significantly trails the national average. That hefty award comes with $36 million for eight job-creating projects. 

“This is part of a bigger vision for the reservation,” Huberty said of the outdoor-recreation projects. That broader vision encompasses workforce training initiatives to a local farm project and the construction of an ecotourism complex — all aimed at nurturing economic vitality in a place where economic markers place it well behind the rest of the state. The 2022 per capita income in Fort Washakie, for example, was $17,814, according to Huberty — significantly below the statewide per capita income of $76,440 and in a different world entirely from Teton County’s $418,669.

Development Fund Chief Operating Officer Director Erika Yarber, who is Northern Arapaho, considers generations — both past and future — when thinking about the work ahead. 

“Our ancestors didn’t go through what they went through for us just to settle for mediocrity like we are,” she said. “We are meant to thrive in our environment and not just survive any longer.”

Projects 

Even though the reservation is vast, Huberty said, it’s been carved up over the years, and much of it is held in trust by the federal government. “So it’s not like you can do whatever you want with it.”

Despite those constraints, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to developing outdoor recreation, he said. The state grants awarded to the Wind River Development Fund are as follows:

• $791,000 for trailheads at Mosquito Park, Washakie Park and St. Lawrence Basin in the Wind River Range. The project will install signage and tribal permit kiosks and construct or upgrade picnic areas, parking, existing buildings and vault restrooms. Right now, a lack of signs makes it hard for users to even find these spots, Yarber said. “A lot of the trails are completely grown over,” she said. “It’s pretty rugged terrain.” 
• $1.2 million for improvements at Bull Lake, Dinwoody Lake, Moccasin Lake and Ray Lake. This project will construct or upgrade kiosks, restrooms, boat ramps, picnic areas and pavilion-type structures. 
• $508,000 for the Fort Washakie powwow grounds to enhance the powwow arbor — the circular structure used to hold cultural events. 
• $1.1 million for three Eastern Shoshone playgrounds, which are key elements of a larger outdoor sports project. The project will include an ADA playground, an elder playground with equipment meant to help older people move and a children’s playground. Restrooms and tables also are included.
• $78,000 for outdoor sports to rehabilitate a baseball field in Fort Washakie that has fallen into disrepair. 
• $333,000 for the Tribal Buffalo Initiative. This project will construct a pavilion-type outdoor education center with a concrete base, picnic tables, signage and a public restroom at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative — a tribal buffalo restoration project. The goal is to enable the initiative, which is located on Highway 26 on the way to Yellowstone, to be able to host tribal ceremonies, celebrations, visitors and school groups. 

The final state outdoor recreation grant awarded for a reservation project earmarks $410,000 for the Northern Arapaho Tribe for improvements to its Ethete powwow arbor. 

Complementary 

The state grants are meant to invest in outdoor-based tourism in a way that helps spread out visitor impacts across the state. The growing industry generated $2.2 billion and supported 15,798 jobs in Wyoming in 2023, according to federal data. 

The bulk of that tourism is in northwestern Wyoming. In 2024, Yellowstone National Park tallied its second-highest annual visitation at 4.7 million. The Wind River Indian Reservation sits just southeast of the park. Creating nicer visitor amenities could help siphon off some of those visitors and others who come through Fremont County by giving them a reason to stop. 

“We know that $167 million comes to Fremont County during tourist season,” said Yarber, who also sits on the Wind River Visitors Council. “And we sit here in our windows and just watch campers and people come and want to have an experience. And there’s just nowhere [on the reservation] for them to spend their money.”

The state grants aim to complement and support the larger work of the federal Recompete Grant. That federal package includes $9.75 million to build a 14,000-square-foot buffalo center for the Tribal Buffalo Initiative. Another component is $6.5 million to construct a wildlife museum and new ecotourism center for the Tribal Fish and Game office in Fort Washakie. A workforce development component will assist community members with attaining certifications that include trail building, while a wellness component aims to incentivize healthier communities. 

Outdoor recreation ties into all of those, Yarber and Huberty said. 

While the Development Fund was the lead applicant for the grants, Yarber and Huberty stressed that community organizations are co-applicants for individual projects. Partners include the Tribal Buffalo Initiative, Eastern Shoshone Tribe, Wind River Food Sovereignty Project and Central Wyoming College.

“This is not just us, this is the community coming together,” Huberty said. “There’s no way we could do this all on our own, and we wouldn’t want to.”

Federal uncertainties?

The vision is ambitious, and the parties have a lot of work to do. Wind River Development Fund and partners will be hiring soon for the outdoor recreation projects, though crews won’t be able to get into mountainous areas for trail work until summer. Those state grants are supposed to be finished by the end of 2026.

The reservation will never be as popular as a national park, and nobody wants that. But the initiatives can help not only create but sustain economic activity, Huberty and Yarber said. 

While there’s uncertainty with federal grants amid funding freezes and job cuts propelled by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts, Huberty said, his organization hasn’t seen any indication of funding decreases. Still, they are proceeding with caution. 

“We were just about to take off running,” Huberty said. “And instead what we’re going to do is just, walk.”

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the name of Wyoming’s 2025 outdoor recreation grant program. -Ed.

The post With $4M for seven reservation projects, grantees hope to boost Wind River’s outdoor profile appeared first on WyoFile .

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

FT. WASHAKIE—Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October was thick with smoke on the Wind River Indian Reservation, with glimmers of fall foliage along its southwestern rivers shrouded in haze beneath a fuzzy horizon. Reservoirs were shriveled by drought, wildfires raged to the northwest, snow was conspicuously absent from mountain peaks and rivers dried to trickles. It wasn’t hard to imagine a future with much less water here. 

Such a hereafter was at the forefront of Big Wind Carpenter’s mind as they sat on a soft gray beach beside Bull Lake Dam, the first of a triumvirate of federally built and privately managed dams on the reservation that feed a non-Indian irrigation district, and a place Big Wind’s family used to recreate when they were younger. Big Wind, a member of the Northern Arapaho, uses “they/them/their” pronouns, and asked to be identified by their nickname, after the Big Wind River running through the heart of the reservation, instead of their Anglo surname.  

“I grew up here. We’d come here during the summer. We’d ice fish in the winter, and we’d set up a campfire over here,” Big Wind said, pointing to a shaded area surrounded by cottonwoods and junipers. The family could usually count on hauling in ling and trout, but today the climate activist isn’t so sure future generations will be able to enjoy this place in the same way. “I think of this resource not being here in the future,” Big Wind said.

As humanity continues to burn fossil fuels that heat the climate, glaciers in the mountains around the reservation are receding. Without the moisture that trickles down from them, Bull Lake and other reservoirs on the reservation could soon yield much less water, making agriculture, aquatic life and even human survival on the Wind River reservation — already rife with tension — even more difficult. 

“It’s not looking good,” Big Wind said.

That vision of a desiccated future for the reservation turned even grimmer in 2023 when U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Republican and Wyoming’s only House member, proposed a bill that would have directed the federal Bureau of Reclamation to give the Pilot Butte power plant, a defunct hydroelectric facility and its reservoir on the reservation, to a nearby agricultural community. The legislation giving Midvale the hydropower plant that once provided electricity to parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming would provide that community with renewable energy each spring and summer. But it also would have further solidified non-native farmers’ control over a river within the reservation. For the tribes, this move was an affront to their sovereignty, and there’s concern that with a Republican trifecta in Washington, it may happen again. 

The Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes that inhabit the Wind River reservation believe the water in question is theirs, and any law that transfers land or infrastructure from the federal government to private management within the reservation is a continuation of centuries of mistreatment from both.

For the entirety of the reservation’s history, its water has poured down from the snow and ice in the Wind River mountains, known to locals as “the Winds” — towering peaks home to some of the country’s most stunning and climate-vulnerable glaciers. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, by 2015, snowpack in the Winds had diminished by as much as 80%, and researchers from Central Wyoming College studying glaciers in the range estimated in 2018 that some may disappear altogether in five or six decades.

More recent reports have found that average temperatures in the ecosystems around the Wind River reservation have risen 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s, and peak streamflow is occurring more than a week earlier, leaving less water to go around later in the summer when it is hottest and driest.

Bull Lake Dam is the human-made extension of a prehistoric impression on the land created to augment the flow of the Big Wind River, which runs through the heart of the reservation. 

An 1868 treaty gives the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, which are both recognized as sovereign nations by the federal government, headwater rights to all the water within the boundaries of their roughly 2.2-million-acre reservation. 

But they have been boxed out of their water rights on the Big Wind River by decades of state-led lawsuits, which awarded control over that body of water to Midvale, an irrigation district on the land within the original boundaries of the reservation that was sold over a century ago through an act of Congress. The tribes heavily contested the sale, but ultimately agreed to it.

Wyoming does not have a recognition process for tribes, so the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho pursue government-to-government relations with the state on an ad-hoc basis.

Across Wyoming’s high, arid desert, water is likened to gold. On the Wind River Indian Reservation, water is known as “the gift of life.” It is not just a resource for agriculture or ranching by the tribes, though they do use it for both, but an important spiritual, recreational and aesthetic force, one to be preserved and enjoyed. The tribes want to let hundreds of millions of gallons a day from the Big Wind River pass undisturbed through Diversion Dam, the point along the river where Midvale diverts water into the Wyoming Canal for irrigation. The tribes want to use the “in-stream flow” for their religious ceremonies, fish habitat, riparian vegetation and recreation, while still leaving Midvale irrigators enough water for their crops. 

But under state water law, which evolved from 19th-century irrigation disputes, Wyoming has the right to adjudicate the water in the Big Wind River. Midvale irrigators, who draw the vast majority of its water, see gross profits north of $15 million annually, according to the district’s website. They are not anxious to relinquish to the tribes control over the water their agricultural revenue depends on. 

Leaders from the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, enemies through most of their history who today exhibit a sometimes-uneasy alliance, agree the warming climate is changing the ecosystem around them. Both tribes agree that controlling all their natural resources, especially their water, is the best way to safeguard their communities’ future health and prosperity. 

But decades of mistrust between the tribes, Midvale irrigators and the state have in recent years led the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho to forge new alliances in pursuit of their water sovereignty goals, a realignment Midvale leaders say has further stressed the irrigation district’s relationship with the tribes. 

Building water sovereignty, whether by relitigating their water rights, defeating federal legislation or reclaiming land, remains a difficult battle for the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, which have no clear support for the endeavor in any state or federal chamber of government. Nonetheless, the tribes see water sovereignty as critical to their future as climate change intensifies.

“We’re going to see more days like this,” Big Wind said, looking out on the hazy body of water. “Now is the time that we can plan.”

Conveying history

About 20 miles southeast of Bull Lake sits the town of Ft. Washakie, the hub of the Wind River reservation. It is named for the famed Eastern Shoshone leader who signed his people’s treaties with the United States. Almost from the moment Chief Washakie agreed to the first treaty in 1863, which granted his people 44 million acres of land spanning parts of what is now Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming, the government, and later, Wyoming — the Equality State — began chipping away at the land and natural resources awarded to the tribes. Five years later, Washakie signed another treaty significantly shrinking the reservation to close to its current size. By the 1980s, the Wind River reservation, which had become a “temporary” home for the Northern Arapaho in 1878 after the tribe was promised but never received a reservation of its own, had been whittled down and fractured into about 2.2 million acres.

Northeast of Ft. Washakie, above the Big Wind River, lies the Midvale district, composed of about 74,000 acres. Settlers were enticed to move there beginning in 1905, after Congress approved the Land Cession Agreement of 1904, a bill for which Wyoming’s lone congressional representative, Frank Mondell, lobbied heavily. 

The act opened the reservation to white settlement over the objections of members of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho, whose leaders ultimately agreed to the deal. The tribes sold their land to the federal government, which promised to use the revenue from selling the land to supply the tribes with an irrigation system south of the river, complete with state water rights.

But the federal sale was a bust. The land proved too tough to farm, and interest from would-be settlers was paltry. Those who did settle took the lands nearest the river. The government began an irrigation system for the tribe but never completed the project, or secured the promised state water rights, though it charged tribal members for water whether or not they used the half-finished ditches.

Midvale was eventually irrigated by the federal government, beginning in the 1920s after Mondell successfully maneuvered money Congress had originally marked for Indian reservations to help finance the project. Portions of the reservation ceded under the sale prompted by the Land Cession Act were eventually returned to the tribes by the federal government decades later. But hundreds of thousands of other acres that were once part of the reservation remain out of the tribes’ control.

Many tribal members on the reservation today view the land north of the Big Wind River that wasn’t returned to the tribes with a mixture of suspicion, resentment and resignation. “Ceded is just another word for stolen,” said Wes Martel, a member of the Eastern Shoshone who helped create the tribes’ water codes in 1987 and was a member of the then Joint Business Council, the tribes’ head of government.

Martel has a sun-worn face and spiky white hair with a long ponytail that gets darker the closer it gets to the middle of his back. He was a tribal leader in the last two decades of the 20th century, when the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho saw their water rights effectively put out of reach by the courts in a series of cases known as the Big Horn trilogy. 

The two tribes had headwater rights baked into their 1868 treaty by almost seven decades of legal precedent, making their claims the oldest and most senior in the region. But in 1977, Wyoming sued the tribes for jurisdiction over the water within the reservation.

The litigation went on for a decade and a half. During that time, Martel and Orville St. Clair, another Eastern Shoshone member of the Joint Business Council, worked together closely. Martel recalled a large meeting in Cheyenne between the tribal council, their lawyers, the Department of Justice and other stakeholders, during which he became fed up with an onslaught of terms he said held no cultural or legal relevance for the tribes. He stood up and proclaimed, “this isn’t an Indian water rights case. This is nothing but a white man’s water case.” He left the meeting a few minutes later.

In 1989, the state’s 5th District Court awarded the tribes just under half a million acre-feet of water annually within the reservation — almost 163 billion gallons of water — for “practically irrigable acres.” With their water rights quantified and apparently confirmed, the tribes, as sovereign nations, asked the state’s water engineer to adhere to tribal water codes and ensure there would always be 252 cubic feet of water per second (cfs) — over 113,000 gallons a minute — flowing past Diversion Dam on the Big Wind River. This would strengthen the tribes’ cultural and spiritual connection with water and benefit aquatic life, riparian vegetation and recreators, they said.

 “Our law is over state law,” St. Clair said.

The state refused, but in 1991, the 5th District Court ruled the tribes had the right to change their water use from irrigation to in-stream flow. Then, a year later, in a decision that produced five different concurring opinions, the Supreme Court of Wyoming reversed the state district court ruling, saying that only the state of Wyoming possessed in-stream flow rights.

For the tribes, being controlled by state laws within their reservation was a violation of their sovereignty and treaty rights.

In his concurring opinion, Justice G. Joseph Cardine wrote the tribes could only use their water for in-stream flow if it was first diverted for irrigation, and then, somehow, ended up back in the Big Wind River.

Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Mike Golden sided with the tribes in a scathing dissent. “I reject the argument that the reserved water is the property of the state and the state engineer thus must have control. The reserved water rights are not within the boundaries of the state, but within the boundaries of the reservation.”

‘A messy deal’

Today, as members of the Wind River Water Resource Control Board, Martel and St. Clair are still working for water sovereignty. So when Rep. Hageman proposed a bill in May 2023 that would direct the Bureau of Reclamation to give the defunct Pilot Butte power plant on the reservation to Midvale, the two men saw history repeating itself. Under her bill, Midvale would continue to use the water for irrigation and gain a cheap, albeit seasonal, source of energy requiring no combustion and producing no greenhouse gases.

Hageman did not respond to a request for comment.

“Ever since the 1868 treaty was signed, we have had periods where the government, if they don’t get their way, they’re going to pass legislation” and get what they want, St. Clair said.

“None of them ever consulted us,” Martel said, referring to Wyoming’s congressional delegation, which includes Sen. John Barrasso, now Senate majority whip, the chamber’s number two Republican, and Sen. Cynthia Lummis, also a Republican. “They didn’t even have the common decency.”

Neither Barrasso nor Lummis responded to repeated requests for comment. 

It felt like this bill had grown directly out of the reservation’s acrimonious history with Congress. “They’ve been stealing Indian land for so long they think it’s the right thing to do,” he said.

White Wyomingites don’t understand how the tribes came to be on the reservation, St. Clair said, or the impact of the surrounding community on the tribal land. If settlers had never been coaxed to Midvale, “imagine what this landscape would look like,” he said. “The buffalo would be thriving. Everything would be environmentally compatible.”

In response to the bill, Martel, St. Clair and other tribal members went to Washington D.C. last summer to speak with ranking U.S. House and Senate members, including Wyoming’s delegation. They told them the tribes did not approve of the legislation and added that they should be the ones to take over the shuttered hydropower facility as well as hundreds of thousands of acres in the northwest corner of the reservation — as they have been arguing for decades. But it was clear that would be an uphill fight. In Hageman’s office, Martel recalled seeing a map of Wyoming that did not show the reservation.

“We’ve got to stand up for ourselves,” he said.

At an October debate, Barrasso implied it was the Bureau of Reclamation’s responsibility to consult the tribes regarding Pilot Butte. “And they didn’t,” he claimed. “I think that was a mistake.”  

Lyle Myler, head of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Wyoming office, said the agency sent Midvale and each tribe’s chairman a letter in January 2022 explaining the ongoing cost of maintaining the power plant and the agency’s desire to find “possible paths forward” for the facility. The legislation is “something that [Midvale] pushed, working with their congressional delegation,” he said. The Bureau of Reclamation reviewed a draft of the bill shared by Wyoming’s congressional delegation, he noted.

Last May was the first time Myler and the tribes spoke about the legislation, he said.

The Pilot Butte Reservoir and its hydroelectric facility are “not something that was ever going to go to the tribes,” said Steve Lynn, Midvale’s irrigation manager. “It’s kind of a messy deal if the tribes really think that’s theirs.” The tribes are “out of the loop” of infrastructure that brings water to the power plant, which is controlled by his irrigation district and the federal government, he said.

“It’s easy to pick on the small people, the minorities,” said Travis Shakespeare, a member of the Northern Arapaho and a senior hydraulic technician with the Wyoming Anticipating Climate Transitions program at the University of Wyoming. “We don’t have the money for the lobbyists to be up there speaking for us.”

Climate change and ‘misinformation’

The tribes and Midvale farmers are neighbors, Lynn noted, and share “the same piece of dirt.”  But they don’t agree about climate change, its impact on the region’s diminishing water cycles and how to respond to them.

“I don’t want to sound like I don’t care about the climate,” said Lynn, who, as an irrigation manager, is deeply aware of the perils of drought and flooding. But, both of those can be cyclical, he said. He doesn’t “necessarily buy into man-made climate change,” he said.

Only 38% of Wyomingites believe climate change is a very serious problem, according to a Colorado College poll released last year.

But the tribes of the Wind River reservation do. Earlier this year, the Northern Arapaho released a priority climate action plan as part of an application for federal energy transition funding. In it, the tribe calculated its emissions, as required by the application, and suggested that installing rooftop solar, winterizing homes and purchasing electric vehicles would “balance environmental stewardship with development of the economic resources.”

Seeing the Northern Arapaho acknowledge its climate impacts was a watershed moment for Big Wind. “For a long time we didn’t want to place blame on ourselves for being a part of the problem,” they said. “Having the Northern Arapaho Climate Action Plan is a big step in the right direction.”

Climate change is creating even more urgency in the tribes to control the water on their reservation. That wouldn’t disrupt Midvale irrigators’ access to water, they argue. “We could take over control, have authority and be a caretaker for this and the majority of things wouldn’t change,” Big Wind said. “Where we’re at right now, there’s enough for everybody.”

But with enough water to go around, Lynn said he couldn’t see why the two tribes wanted to take control of the Big Wind River. Midvale already maintains state-mandated water levels for the river beyond Diversion Dam, he said. “I don’t understand why they’re concerned,” Lynn said. “There’s plenty of water.”

From July through September of last year, when snowmelt had dried up and stored water became crucial, Midvale drew, on average, nearly 69% of the Big Wind River at Diversion Dam, according to Bureau of Reclamation data. Wyoming’s Office of the State Engineer asks Midvale to make sure there is about 400 cfs of water below Diversion Dam only if the river is running so low that downstream users are in jeopardy of not getting enough water, said Josh Fredrickson, the office’s superintendent for the area. According to Bureau of Reclamation data, since 2003, there has been an average of 531 cfs in the Big Wind River just below Diversion Dam during the irrigation months, generally considered late April to early October. 

On paper, averaging river flows across seasons in the West tends to smooth the wild swings in water levels. This year, a United States Geological Survey stream gauge between Diversion Dam and Riverton showed the Big Wind River with as much as 4,520 cfs during early June, when snowmelt peaks. But the gauge also regularly recorded the river running below the 252 cfs required under tribal law, including six days in May during the growing season when the flow ran as low as 166 cfs, and during a two-week stretch in October in which streamflow hovered in the 170s. 

“The tribes want to eventually control all the water within their jurisdiction,” St. Clair said. “You’re talking sovereignty, that’s what that is.”

Shakespeare, the Northern Arapaho member of the University of Wyoming’s climate transitions program, wondered how much that kind of sovereignty would mean without the capital to revitalize and maintain dams in perpetuity. “If you have to rely on the state and federal government for funding sources, are you really sovereign?” he asked.

St. Clair, however, doesn’t see federal funding, which supplements income from oil and gas drilling and casinos on the reservation, as a handout. It’s a way to help preserve the tribes’ economy and way of life, and to hold the U.S. to its treaty agreements, one of which guaranteed the tribes “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of” their land, he said. “You agreed to that and we’re not letting you off the hook for that.”

With water’s spiritual significance to the tribes and climate change already looming over the reservation’s water cycles, control over the river matters. “What we have over everybody and all these agencies is we live here and we care about these resources,” St. Clair said. “We give a damn, in other words.”

In a white Toyota pickup, Big Wind followed the water draining from Bull Lake to where it joins the Big Wind River, which they are named after. They continued tracking it southeast towards Diversion Dam where it detoured down the Wyoming Canal. At Pilot Butte Reservoir, they spoke of the benefits in-stream flow could bring to the river, its ecosystems and the tribes, whose nomadic culture was almost completely severed when they were confined to the reservation.

“Why do we need to grow corn in the middle of this arid field with rocky, low soil conditions, when we could actually just keep water inside this river?” Big Wind asked. If the tribes controlled the river and left more water in it they could “eat the berries alongside it, eat all of the plants that are growing in the riparian area and eat the fish. We can find our food right there. We wouldn’t need to create this whole different system.”

Restoring the river wouldn’t happen overnight, and the tribes would still farm and ranch, they said. Midvale residents could still irrigate their fields, but they would also get to enjoy the recreational and aesthetic benefits of leaving more water in the Big Wind River year round, Big Wind added. 

And if droughts get more intense and last longer, or if snowpack diminishes to the point where there is not enough water in the river for everyone to get their full water allotment, the tribes would have conversations about how to supply Midvale the water it’s owed under state law, St. Clair said. 

“They’d still get their water,” he said. But under such circumstances, “everybody’s dry. That’s a dry year.”

Lynn believes the tribes can access their water rights under Midvale’s management of the river. “Just because we control Diversion Dam doesn’t mean we do what we please,” he said, adding that it would be difficult to imagine a future in which tribes control the water in the Big Wind River given the status of state and federal law.

That view amounts to “the same old lack of recognition of tribal and treaty rights” by Midvale, Martel said. “That’s how they operate the system — it’s all for them.” He isn’t surprised that Lynn disputes that humans burning fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change, but said that will likely make compromise between the two sides more difficult. 

New allies

In the absence of productive relationships between the tribes and Midvale, or Wyoming’s elected officials, the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho have established connections with environmental nonprofits to strengthen their position dealing with the state.

In 2021, Martel joined the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an organization that helps steward the ecosystems around Yellowstone, one of which is home to the headwaters of the Big Wind River. The coalition supports tribal sovereignty on environmental matters and advocates for the removal of Diversion Dam.

Historically, the tribes have been subjected to “cultural injustice after cultural injustice,” said Charles Wolf Drimal, the organization’s deputy director of conservation. “Anytime there’s some issue that comes up, the tribes always seem to get the short end of the stick, and that’s what’s going on with this Pilot Butte Conveyance Act.”

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition also has supported the tribes as they seek to reclaim lands north of the Big Wind River that are currently managed by the Bureau of Reclamation, which should include Pilot Butte Reservoir, Drimal added.

“We have an opportunity to right a past wrong,” Drimal said. “That’s our focus moving forward.” 

The coalition’s backing of the tribes has not gone unnoticed by Midvale.

“It doesn’t help to have the Greater Yellowstone Coalition telling half truths and saying that we stole their land and stole their water and all this,” Lynn said. He’s always open to working with the tribes, he said, but “when you keep having people bringing up the past and things you can’t change — and it’s a varied version of the past — it’s hard to move forward… There’s enough misinformation that comes from that side of the river that it keeps people fired up about things that really just aren’t true.”

Tribal members are open to working with Midvale, but they are not optimistic that will happen anytime soon.

“The state sees tribal issues as niche and something that doesn’t affect everybody,” said Big Wind, who is a tribal engagement coordinator for the Wyoming Outdoor Council, where St. Clair sits on the board of directors. 

For that to change, “non-native Wyomingites would have to see us as equals, the government would have to see us as equals. And I don’t think that’s the case today.”

Those who dictate water’s flow wield such influence that “I don’t see that kind of power being given up so easily,” they added.

Two weeks before the end of 2024, Barrasso moved to pass the Pilot Butte Power Plant Conveyance Act. On the Senate floor, he spoke of a new energy source for locals, the small size of the land proposed for transfer and savings for American taxpayers, calling the bill “a win-win.” Of the tribes, he said that his “office has been actively engaged with all parties involved” and that he was confident Midvale would manage the facility to the benefit of everyone in the region.

When he was finished, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., whom tribal envoys spoke with last summer in D.C., objected, saying consultation between lawmakers and the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho was insufficient. The bill was defeated, but only for the moment. With incoming Republican majorities in the House and Senate, it was unclear how long this victory would last for the tribes.

“I’m thinking they’re going to take another run at it,” St. Clair said. “We’re ready for it and confident we can still maintain our position.”

The post Wyoming tribes push to control reservation water as the state proposes sending it to outside irrigators appeared first on WyoFile .

Northern Arapaho leaders are advising tribal members to carry government IDs when they leave home out of concern they may get profiled and caught up in the Trump administration’s growing deportation dragnet. 

Eastern Shoshone leaders published their own warning early Monday evening.

In a letter posted Sunday to social media, the Northern Arapaho Business Council recommended tribal members carry identification, “at all times when in public in order to prevent possible questioning or detention by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.” 

The Business Council also directed the Northern Arapaho Enrollment Department to issue free tribal identification cards to enrolled members. “We strongly urge that you have Tribal ID for yourself, your children and your entire family,” the business council wrote in its letter.

The Wind River Indian Reservation’s other governing body, the Eastern Shoshone Business Council, also waived its fee for new tribal identification cards, in the light of “growing fears,” from its members, that body wrote in its own letter.

 “We plan to work diligently through the established government-to-government relationships we have fostered and further address any challenges with this new U.S. administration,” the letter read.

Wyoming House Rep. Ivan Posey, who belongs to the tribe but does not speak for its government, said the warnings were warranted. 

“Tribal people, as well as our brothers and sisters from the south, are brown,” Posey told WyoFile. As the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump pushes his aggressive deportation agenda, racial profiling by federal law enforcement is an increasing worry for communities of color.

“It causes a concern about what means they’ll use to interpret this immigration law enforcement,” Posey said. “It almost comes down to racial profiling. We thought we were past that decades ago. With the efforts of some in government, that exercise will become more common, unfortunately.” 

A spokesperson in ICE’s Denver office did not respond to a WyoFile request for comment. 

In Sunday’s letter, the Northern Arapaho Business Council said tribal officials had met with a representative of the Bureau of Indian Affairs policing division and would continue to express concern to state and federal authorities. “These are uncertain times,” the letter concluded, “but the Northern Arapaho Tribe and its people will endure.”

WyoFile sought comment from Gov. Mark Gordon’s office as well as U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, historically an advocate for Wyoming’s federally recognized tribes in Washington D.C. Through a spokesperson, Gordon declined to comment. As of publication time, WyoFile had not received a response from Barrasso, but will update this story if contacted. 

Similar warnings, similar concerns

At least two tribal governments in Montana also warned their members to start carrying tribal identifications, according to a report in The Missoulian. Officials with the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribal government described an uptick in people showing up to receive such cards as fear of harassment by authorities grew, that newspaper reported.

The Northern Arapaho Business Council cited concern from its members, as well as “reports nationally of Native individuals being hassled and even detained by federal immigration authorities,” as motivation for Sunday’s letter. 

The “deeply troubling” reports cited in the letter could be a reference to news reports out of Arizona. Officials from the Navajo Nation, whose reservation falls within Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, say they have been contacted by tribal members who were detained by ICE in Phoenix, according to reporting by the Arizona Republic. 

Navajo Nation officials described at least 15 tribal members being questioned or detained during ICE raids on workplaces and other enforcement actions in Arizona and New Mexico, CNN reported Monday.

The Eastern Shoshone Business Council asked its members to “educate themselves through reliable sources,” and carry their ID cards.

Many Wyoming lawmakers and some sheriffs would like to see state law enforcement play a more active role in immigration enforcement, though those laws are federal. Lawmakers have brought a series of bills seeking to force sheriffs to cooperate with the federal government, and in at least one case, legislation that would require Wyoming law enforcement to investigate people’s immigration status. 

Those bills are in various stages of the legislative process. Meanwhile, a number of Wyoming sheriffs are pursuing agreements with the federal government on their own that would make their county jails a more streamlined piece of the federal government’s deportation machinery.

The post Tribal leaders in Wyoming warn members to carry ID amid fears of harassment by immigration enforcers appeared first on WyoFile .

ETHETE—Desirae Sylvia had never done anything like this — she’s not really into politics. But there she was on a Saturday morning in October, setting up art supplies and tables in a community hall on the Wind River Indian Reservation for a poster-making rally to support House District 33 Democratic candidate Ivan Posey.

“A lot of people are rooting for him, and especially the Native American population,” Sylvia said. Having a Native American in state office representing the reservation tribal communities, “that’s huge for us.” 

The prospect was alluring enough to motivate Sylvia, who works at Pizza Hut in Lander, to wade into political activism. Others followed suit this fall with pro-Posey rallies and events on and off the reservation. Democratic-aligned groups contributed to get-out-the-vote efforts. 

Posey, an enrolled Eastern Shoshone member and former Eastern Shoshone Business Council member who works in tribal education, is challenging incumbent Republican Sarah Penn, a nurse practitioner who lives in Fort Washakie, for the statehouse seat.

Though Wyoming is a red state, it’s not a long shot to run as a Democrat in District 33; the seat has changed hands between parties several times in recent years. It’s also bounced between Native and non-Native representation. Posey would reflect the district demographic majority if he won. 

In addition, Posey stands to be the sole Indigenous lawmaker in the Wyoming Legislature. Sen. Affie Ellis (R-Cheyenne), a Navajo lawyer who’s been in office since 2017, will retire at the end of the year, leaving open the possibility of no Native representation. 

Voter turnout in District 33 was low in the 2022 general election, with fewer than 2,000 votes cast in the race that Penn prevailed in over left-leaning Northern Arapaho incumbent Andi LeBeau. 

That relative apathy could change this cycle. Penn established herself as a reliably right-wing vote and advocate in the statehouse, raising her profile with the powerful Wyoming Freedom Caucus and making her a favorite among its supporters. Posey’s candidacy, meanwhile, has energized reservation residents like Sylvia and Democrats statewide. 

Add to the mix that the race may prove pivotal in determining the legislative balance of power between the hard-line Freedom Caucus and the traditionally conservative Wyoming Caucus and its allies, and Wyoming political junkies are closely watching HD 33.

The candidates 

Penn touts the fact that she’s not a career politician as a plus. Her husband is a teacher on the reservation and her three children attended reservation schools. She initially felt moved to run for the seat by what she saw as unconstitutional mandates during the COVID pandemic, according to her campaign website.  

Posey was born and raised on the reservation. The youngest of 13 children and a U.S. Army veteran, Posey served on the Eastern Shoshone Business Council for more than 20 years. He is the Tribal Education Coordinator for Central Wyoming College and serves on several boards, including the Wind River Development Fund.

The candidates’ platforms and priorities emerged during an Oct. 8 candidate forum in Riverton. The forum was notably civil, and the candidates agreed that property taxes are top-of-mind for many of the district’s off-reservation voters, education is a major concern on the reservation and jurisdictional boundaries complicate several of the district’s issues. 

Differences also emerged: Penn, who often cites the U.S. Constitution, favors small government. She has concerns about Wyoming election security due to the use of electronics, she said, and believes the federal government has overreached when it comes to public land. She doesn’t believe the government should fund early childhood education, does not support Medicaid expansion and is staunchly pro-life. 

“We should be tasked with protecting that life,” Penn said. “Life is life, and it should be protected from conception until natural death.” 

Looking ahead, Penn said she wants to continue working on medical freedom measures, government transparency and securing funding to address illegal dumping in Fremont County. 

Among the bills she sponsored in the Legislature:

• House Bill 115 – Donated blood-mRNA disclosure. This bill would have required blood donors to disclose vaccination status. It did not pass. 
• House Bill 61 – Fiscal accountability and transparency in education. This bill would have mandated school districts to issue annual reports on resources spent on DEI or social activism-related programs. It also would have prohibited school districts from requiring employees and students to use a student’s preferred pronoun if the pronoun doesn’t align with their biological sex. It did not pass. 
• House Bill 49 – By the people act. This bill would have required audio or video access to public meetings if practicable and specified that public comment be offered and minutes made public. It did not pass. 

In terms of balancing the needs of reservation and off-reservation pieces of the district, Penn said, she held around eight town hall meetings during her term to hear concerns. She is reachable by phone and will make herself available to those who want to talk to her, she told WyoFile in an email. 

Posey, meanwhile, isn’t overly concerned about election security, he said, as Wyoming has had very few instances of voter fraud. He supports Medicaid expansion and early childhood education. He does not think the government should tell a woman what to do in terms of reproductive health care. 

“I am pro-life, but I don’t think it’s government’s role to make the decisions for a woman in terms of reproductive health so I believe that it’s still a woman’s choice,” he said. 

When asked about specific legislative topics, Posey provided few details, instead saying he will get more up to speed if he’s elected. But he would like to address mental health needs, he said, and he stressed the importance of cooperation and civility. 

“The roar of divisiveness sometimes overshadows the voice of the people, in my opinion,” Posey said. “To get things done, you have to work together. I view myself as an independent thinker, and I will listen, I will take all sides and I will make my position.”

The district  

Stretching over 100 miles from the Wind River Range south of Dubois to the northern Red Desert, House District 33 is diverse in both its populace and its geography. The slender district encompasses the major reservation towns of Fort Washakie, Ethete and Arapahoe. It stops short of the Riverton city limits and narrows in its midsection to exclude Lander but encompasses the small non-tribal communities of Atlantic City, Crowheart and Hudson.

All told it covers 2,966 square miles and houses roughly 9,500 residents. 

District representation has changed hands between Republicans and Democrats, as well as enrolled tribal members and white ranchers. Penn assumed office in 2023 after beating Democratic incumbent Andi Lebeau. LeBeau had won the seat in 2018, besting Republican rancher Jim Allen. Allen, meanwhile, had beaten LeBeau in 2014.

The last time voters were asked to elect a representative, fewer than 2,000 votes were cast. That was down nearly 25% from the 2018 election, when 2,579 votes were cast, and was the lowest general election turnout in the last decade. 

Campaigning 

Voter turnout is a big part of the Posey team’s strategy. Advocates cite several obstacles to tribal residents voting — from difficulty getting rides to the polls to indifference in voting for a state body they don’t see as truly representing their interests. 

Early on, the Fremont County Democratic Party created “commit to vote” cards as a way to incentivize people to vote for Posey. “The people of the Wind River Reservation deserve representation,” the cards read, before taking a dig at the incumbent. “Current House District 33 Representative Sarah Penn spends more time mouthing extreme MAGA talking points than fighting for you!”

A political action committee called Common Sense for HD 33 also took aim at Penn, accusing her of voting against seniors, kids, schools and ranchers in favor of an extremist national agenda.

She addressed that PAC during the forum, saying it mischaracterized several of the bills she either supported or opposed. 

“I just want to say that I was elected two years ago on the faith and hope that I would take a different approach to how government should be involved in our lives,” Penn said. “And I think … to have a PAC dedicated totally to opposing me, is evidence that I have upheld that promise.”

Penn didn’t employ specific get-out-the-vote programs during her campaign, she told WyoFile, and instead opted to “just meet people where they are — at home, through door knocking!”

Posey’s campaign schedule included more organized public events; he appeared at town halls in off-reservation communities like Atlantic City, did a meet and greet in Lander and attended a campaign-sponsored event in Fort Washakie. 

Not your typical event

That event, a masquerade party, took place on a Saturday night in mid-October. Shortly after doors opened, people of all ages streamed into Rocky Mountain Hall donning Halloween costumes. Bagged meals and candy were available on a table up front. Three drum circles provided music as participants paraded around showing off their costumes, and an emcee reminded the crowd to vote for Posey. 

It didn’t resemble a typical campaign event. But the Halloween-themed party was designed for his reservation constituents, Posey said, who prefer family oriented gatherings.

Aurelia Blackburn, 20, organized the event with 19-year-old Kalijah Day. Posey is Blackburn’s grandfather, but she also wanted to help him because she admires his community-oriented spirit, she said. 

“I think he has a lot of support,” Blackburn said. He will have to overcome the support Penn carries, Blackburn said, and his supporters will have to overcome their own hurdles. 

“People being able to go vote, getting a ride to vote, would be the biggest challenge for him,” she said. 

The post Wind River Reservation race could shift power balance in Wyoming’s Legislature appeared first on WyoFile .

LITTLE WIND RIVER DRAINAGE—Driving into the foothills west of Fort Washakie to tour experimental cheatgrass treatments, Art Lawson’s attention landed instead on the verdant vegetation he saw in every direction and something that he didn’t see at all — free-roaming horses. 

The landscape he was driving though had immediately, dramatically rebounded following a massive roundup of the non-native equines in late 2023. 

“Almost overnight results, really,” said Lawson, who directs Shoshone and Arapaho Fish and Game, which manages wildlife on the Wind River Indian Reservation. 

“The mule deer that I’ve seen since we removed horses is unreal,” he added. “Really, deer [numbers] I haven’t seen in 10 years.” 

There was no doubt in Lawson’s mind that the Wind River Indian Reservations’ many thousands of feral, free-roaming horses are what displaced mule deer and an array of other native species. 

“We used to drive around and see horses,” Lawson said during the June outing. “Now we can drive around and see wildlife.” 

Adaptable, hardy and unencumbered by predation, horses can double their population every four years. On the reservation, they were “growing in unreal numbers,” Lawson said, and obviously damaging the landscape’s ecological integrity. 

“The cheatgrass that’s leftover after horses have been there for a while, it’s horrible,” Lawson said. “There’s no nutrition in cheatgrass.” 

Free-roaming horses’ dominance over the Wind River Range’s eastern foothills peaked just before last year’s roundup. In late fall 2022, a first go at an aerial survey found 5,500 horses on 1 million acres of the reservation — roughly half the land area within the boundaries. That didn’t account for animals the survey missed or foals born into the herd the following spring. 

“We felt pretty confident there were at least 9,000 horses out there at that time,” said Pat Hnilicka, the supervisory biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Lander office. 

The estimate was “very shocking,” he said. 

Nationally, there were an estimated 73,520 free-roaming horses and burros as of March. At that time, the Bureau of Land Management estimated that there were 10,264 animals in its Wyoming herd management areas — which means the reservation housed almost as many feral horses as the rest of the state combined. 

Hnilicka shares Lawson’s views on the immediate ecological impacts of the 2023 and 2024 roundups. The increase in forage that’s now available for wildlife was “very dramatic,” he said.  

“It was at an ecological crisis point,” Hnilicka said. “If something wasn’t done, there was no turning back.” 

Roughly 7,600 horses were gathered and trucked away over the last two years, he said. Another aerial survey is forthcoming, but in the meantime Hnilicka’s confident there are fewer than “several thousand” horses remaining on the reservation. 

Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that the 7,600 horses removed from the landscape frees up well over 100 million pounds of forage. 

“Now that forage is available for wildlife,” Hnilicka said, “or for natural recycling — protecting the soil.” 

Ahead of the horse removals, wildlife managers on the Wind River Indian Reservation set up around 30 range monitoring sites to scientifically quantify how the range is recovering. One of those sites showed a “six-to-seven-fold increase” in the amount of residual forage remaining after the growing season, according to Hnilicka. 

Even the overall look of the land is different. When horses were abundant, Hnilicka would look around and “for miles in every direction” see no residual grasses. Now, the “Wyoming brown and gold” colors of fall have returned to the hillsides sloping off the Wind River Range. 

“That’s the residual grass and forbs that are on the landscape that are still there [because they] haven’t been consumed,” Hnilicka said. 

The return of those grasses and forbs and less-intensively browsed shrubs has caused ample and welcomed ecological ripple effects, Lawson said. There was a resurgence of mule deer in an area where they need all the help they can get. Pronghorn seemed to thrive, too, and were raising twins in noticeably higher numbers. A herd of 1,000-plus elk returned to calving grounds on high open ridges they’d abandoned because it had been “completely covered in horses.” 

A whitetail deer fawn bound across a field in view of Lawson’s truck window as he was mid-conversation discussing the ecological effects of the horse removal. 

“We’ll see more and more wildlife now,” he said. “It’s almost like they thanked us.”

The post Wildlife rebounds from ecological ‘crisis’ following wild horse roundups on Wind River Reservation appeared first on WyoFile .

PAVILLION—Wes Martel’s frustrations bubbled up with ease while walking toward a penstock churning with water diverted from the Wind River. 

“This is all reservation land,” he said. “That’s our position. This place never should have been created.” 

Martel, a 77-year-old former Shoshone Business Council member, gestured across a portion of the northern Wind River Indian Reservation transformed by irrigation into a verdant agricultural landscape. The area had been opened up to white settlement more than a century ago, and the mechanism — an agreement ratified by Congress in 1905 — still does not sit well with many tribal members. Now, 119 years later, another congressional action has raised the ire of Martel and current elected leaders of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe. 

Wyoming’s U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman and U.S. Sen. John Barrasso have pushed companion bills that would require the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to convey a derelict hydroelectric power plant located within the borders of the reservation to the Midvale Irrigation District. The legislation, which tribal leaders say was written and advanced without either lawmaker consulting the tribes, has already passed the U.S. House, and would also compel transfer of the land beneath the mothballed infrastructure. 

Eastern Shoshone leaders, current and former, have traveled to Washington, D.C. to fight the proposed land transfer, which they say feels familiar.  

“It’s a land grab,” Shoshone Business Council vice-chairman Michael Ute said. 

The elected tribal leader drew a parallel to the Chief Washakie era, when 1863 and 1868 treaties constrained the Eastern Shoshone to the reservation they now call home. After the treaties were ratified, white settlers pouring into Wyoming still desired the land and water of the Wind River Indian Reservation. 

“If they could not negotiate with the tribes, they went behind their back and enacted legislation,” Ute said. “The same thing is happening today. They’re enacting federal legislation to take a piece of land right in the middle of the reservation.” 

Familiar feeling

Ute joined Martel Wednesday at the site of the disputed property, which is owned by the federal government and managed by the Bureau of Reclamation. It’s essentially an old tin-sided building housing a hydroelectric facility that’s gone unused for 16 years. The infrastructure and land that would be turned over to the Midvale Irrigation District by the bill also includes a penstock filled with water diverted from the Wyoming Canal. The water, which used to spin a turbine to generate electricity, now bypasses the building, directly feeding Pilot Butte Reservoir. 

The Eastern Shoshone have no firm plans for the power plant. 

“It’s the principle,” Ute said. 

Martel piggybacked on the thought: “We’ve just got to fight back,” he said. “We’re trying to familiarize ourselves with how this got this far, and what do we do to stop it?” 

The Midvale Irrigation District approached Wyoming’s congressional delegation about transferring the title of the old Pilot Butte Power Plant so it could be rehabilitated. Dollars and cents drive the irrigation district’s interest in an era of increasing electricity costs for utility customers, farmers and ranchers.

“Midvale is committed to doing whatever is necessary to keep costs down regarding its service to our customers,” Midvale Irrigation District Manager Steve Lynn testified to the House Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee in September 2023. “The benefit of power production to our customers would be seen in minimizing the costs of services that we provide.” 

A month later, the Pilot Butte Power Plant Conveyance Act was reported out of the House Committee on Natural Resources without discussion on a consent list. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives without debate or opposition in February. 

Sen. John Barrasso’s identical bill cleared the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in December. An amendment, brought by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), was passed that directs Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton to “enter into negotiations with Midvale Irrigation District to determine the terms of the conveyance.” 

Hageman’s office did not respond to an interview request for this story. Barrasso’s media team pointed WyoFile toward remarks that the senator made while the bill was being marked up in committee. 

“It’s a win-win situation,” Barrasso said during a December 2023 hearing. “The American people will no longer own a mothballed facility that would cost money to demolish. The people of Wyoming will be able to put the hydropower plant back into use.” 

As the legislation has made its way through Congress, the power plant’s location within the borders of the Wind River Indian Reservation has not been a part of the discussion. 

No consultation 

“If you Google, ‘Pilot Butte Power Plant Conveyance Act’ and ‘tribes,’ nothing comes up,” Ute told WyoFile outside the mothballed facility. “It’s just a piece of legislation that seems non-controversial to everybody.” 

The Eastern Shoshone Tribe learned about the legislation by reading the news, he said. 

“That’s how the tribes found out about it,” Ute said. “It wasn’t the delegation coming to us saying, ‘Hey, we’re doing this, we’re doing that.’” 

WyoFile was unable to reach the Northern Arapaho Business Council for input on this story. 

Former Shoshone Business Council member Orville St. Clair, who’s a member of the Wind River Water Resource Control Board, was part of a tribal delegation that traveled to Washington, D.C. last winter to encourage Barrasso, Hageman and other members of Congress to kill the bill. 

“I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt,” St. Clair said of Hageman. “She’s a freshman legislator.” 

Displeasure with the lack of consultation was likely inflamed by the class of federal land that’s involved in the proposed land conveyance. The Bureau of Reclamation is not normally in the business of land management — it manages dams and other water-related resources — and for decades the federal agency has been looking into disposing of tens of thousands of acres of property within the Wind River Indian Reservation. The tribes, meanwhile, have been pushing to get that land back since the 1940s: Repatriating Bureau of Reclamation property is a campaign of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Martel’s employer. 

In the early 1990s, the bureau requested disposing of somewhere “in the neighborhood of 56,000 acres” of excess land in the Muddy Ridge area. The process, however, “stalled out,” said Lyle Myler, who manages the bureau’s Wyoming-area office. 

“Just recently, there’s been a renewed effort … to reinvigorate that process,” Myler told WyoFile. 

The way the process works is revoked land — which is being reassessed and surveyed — would fall under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management, he said. That sister federal agency would then lead a process that could result in the BLM managing the lands. There’s also the potential of some of the property being returned to the Wind River Indian Reservation. 

Not related to Muddy Ridge

The Pilot Butte Power Plant conveyance being pursued by Congress is unrelated to this process, Myler said.  

“The power plant resides on land that was not identified and is not part of the Muddy Ridge revocation,” he said. “It’s separate.” 

Selling the infrastructure requires an act of Congress, because it’s classified as “reserved works” that are otherwise not eligible for transfer. 

“That’s why the district has pursued separate legislation for conveyance of the power facility,” Myler said. 

Although the old hydro plant sits on land the bureau would otherwise retain, Eastern Shoshone members worry that legislation could stymie a land transfer they believe would right a historical wrong. 

“To me, the bill is kind of a wrench in the works,” Ute said.

The Eastern Shoshone also have interest in acquiring the power plant. 

“We have a tremendous need for power in that area,” John Washakie, great-grandson of Chief Washakie and a councilman on the Shoshone Business Council, told WyoFile. The tribe operates some oil and gas rigs in the area, he said, and “loss of power,” at times, has been a “big issue.” 

“It could be a valuable asset,” Washakie said. 

Socioeconomically, the Wind River Reservation has lagged behind the rest of Wyoming for generations, though there’s a newly funded push for revitalization. 

Regardless of who receives the old hydroelectric plant, it makes financial sense for the Bureau of Reclamation to get rid of it, Myler said. Even though it’s not functioning, he said, there’s still an expense to monitor the old infrastructure. 

The Pilot Butte Power Plant, which can generate up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity, dates to 1925, according to a report accompanying Barrasso’s bill. The Bureau of Reclamation contracted out operation and maintenance of the seasonal facility to the Midvale Irrigation District, but it’s fallen into disrepair on two occasions: From 1973 to 1990 and from 2008 to the present. In 2016, the Wyoming Water Development Office estimated it would cost between $4.4 and $8.3 million to bring the old power plant back online. 

Walking out from the old building at the center of the dispute, Martel and Ute ran into Lynn, the Midvale Irrigation District supervisor who rolled up in his pickup truck. The trio introduced themselves and engaged in cordial conversation. 

Lynn told the two tribal members that the bill was unrelated to the Eastern Shoshone’s efforts to acquire excess reclamation land in the Muddy Ridge area. “I wish I could make you comfortable with that statement,” he said. 

Martel repeated one of his many frustrations. 

“They should have consulted with us,” he said. “They didn’t even have the common decency to come and explain these things to us.”  

Lynn heard him out.

“I know,” he said.

The post Federal ‘land grab’ advanced by Barrasso, Hageman angers tribes appeared first on WyoFile .

It’s no secret the rural 2.2-million-acre Wind River Indian Reservation has received few major economic investments since its establishment a century and a half ago. 

Consequences for the communities contained within the tribal land have reverberated for generations: The reservation’s three main small towns — Fort Washakie, Arapahoe and Ethete — are dropping in population, possess few local businesses and lack adequate infrastructure and housing. Poverty rates on the reservation are much higher than in nearby areas, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Home values on the reservation are less than half of broader Fremont County. Around a third of tribal residents lack any health care. 

There are few upsides to the somber socioeconomic realities that have long saddled the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes, who despite federal and state theft of their lands, have continued to survive in the region. 

Last year, however, the Wind River Development Fund identified one silver lining: The lack of economic vitality made the region eligible for the federal “Recompete” pilot grant program, which targets areas where prime-age (25-54) employment significantly trails the national average.

“In Wyoming, this was the only area even eligible to apply,” said Paul Huberty, who heads the Wind River Development Fund. 

Huberty, who’s a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, started down the road of applying when he was less than a year into the job. Quickly, he learned there were long odds: the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration received 565 applications. Those applicants sought $6 billion, when just over $200 million was available. 

Nevertheless, Huberty and the Wind River Coalition’s application was selected as one of the 22 finalists around Christmas. They were awarded a $400,000 planning grant, part of which went toward a much more detailed application. 

The grant applicants sought to get nine projects funded to the tune of $47 million. 

Two weeks ago, Huberty and fellow Wind River Development Fund staffers Lisa Wagner and Erika Yarber were summoned for a phone call with the Economic Development Administration. 

“We thought they just wanted to ask a couple more questions,” Huberty said, “because they kept coming back and asking for additional information.”

Nope. 

The call was to inform them they were one of six awardees, and were receiving $36 million for eight job-creating projects. 

“We were shocked,” Huberty said. 

Two weeks later, the Wind River Development Fund’s executive director was using the word “surreal” to describe the entire experience. 

Yarber, meanwhile, was sanguine. She spoke enthusiastically about the prospects that the infusion of capital will help Wyoming’s most impoverished area turn a corner. 

“All these projects are for the entire reservation,” she said. “Both tribes, the whole community. They’re going to help Riverton, Fremont County and hopefully our state as a whole.” 

The freshly funded “Wind River Indigenous-based Economy Recompete Plan” is designed to provide jobs and improve lives via infrastructure and business investments that touch on everything from bison restoration to ecotourism to health care to the Wind River Food Sovereignty Project. Here’s a list of the funded projects: 

• “Tribal Buffalo Center” for Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative: $9.75 million

Bison restoration on the Wind River Indian Reservation has the goal of bringing back the species — an effort that’s underway — and also having bison be declared as a wildlife species under the tribal game code. Jason Baldes, who heads the effort, now has funding to build a 14,000-square-foot buffalo museum that will directly support 15 full-time and 6 part-time jobs.

• “Cultural Center incubation” for Wind River Development Fund: $2.21 million

This project will create an “incubation program” for the Eastern Shoshone Cultural Center and the Tribal Buffalo Center, creating seven new full-time jobs in the process.

• “Bringing ecotourism to Wind River” for Eastern Shoshone Tribe: $6.5 million 

This project will overhaul the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho’s Tribal Fish and Game’s headquarters in Fort Washakie. A new 3.5-acre site will host an “ecotourism complex” that includes a nearly 6,000-square-foot museum and office and a 7,200-square-foot storage facility. It’s expected to produce 16 full-time jobs. 

• “Creating a path to land sovereignty” for Wind River Development Fund: $1.2 million 

This project will create an “innovative model” to help Indigenous residents understand the complexities of reservation-based land. The final product will be something like a master plan for the Wind River Indian Reservation, according to Huberty. “We’ll do a comprehensive assessment of where the community wants to see future economic development,” he said. 

• “Growing resilient food systems” for Wind River Food Sovereignty Project: $4.2 million

On a 30-acre lot west of Fort Washakie, Wind River Food Sovereignty Project co-directors Kelly Pingree and Livy Lewis are leading the effort to train and build market infrastructure for small-scale agricultural producers on the reservation. The investment, which could produce 10 full-time jobs, will help pay for a commercial kitchen, hoop houses, plant nursery, youth and elder gardens, orchard, a “food forest” of native plants and more. 

• “Building a healthier workforce” for Eastern Shoshone Tribe: $3 million 

Six new full-time jobs are expected to be produced by an initiative that will target health care services for people who suffer from diabetes and struggle with substance abuse. Some 500 patients could benefit via increased employment and income. 

• “Investing in human capital” for Central Wyoming College: $5 million 

Funding is supporting educational programs that will target underserved areas by creating pathways to jobs for 25-54 years-olds. The goal is for the funding to result in the graduation of 772 students who will enter the workforce. 

• “Wind River Coalition Governance” for Wind River Development Fund: $5.4 million 

This funding will pay for a program that will manage the Recompete Plan activities and ensure performance measures are on track for success. It’s expected to create 11 full-time jobs. 

In total, getting the projects off the ground will create 71 full-time and 14 part-time jobs that will pay well for the reservation, according to the application. 

Yarber, the fund’s director of business development, said the overall structure of the economic revitalization plan is “holistic.”  

“Everything is intertwined — every single project,” she said. “That’s what makes this so awesome.” 

The intention is for the investments to pay dividends long into the future by laying the foundation for economic growth. By capturing a “modest” amount of tourism, the plan’s long-term goal is for $147-$189 million of economic activity and 1,570-2,005 new jobs.

Art Lawson, the Shoshone and Arapaho Fish and Game director, is benefiting directly from the just-secured grant money: It’ll build him a new office and an ecotourism center for anglers and hikers. But he foresees benefits extending well outside of his profession. 

“Good things are happening,” Lawson told WyoFile. “We’ve needed this for a long time. Hopefully it’ll create more entrepreneurship and more businesses on the reservation, and generate some funding to help tribal members out.”

The post Wind River Reservation embarks on one of largest economic development efforts in its history appeared first on WyoFile .

Rahel Mehari Manna drew a deep breath of crisp air and set her eyes on the buffalo that would soon feed hundreds of her neighbors on the Wind River Reservation. 

Community members gathered around her as a marksman stood apart, taking aim for a quick, clean, humane kill. 

The shot that rang out a moment later marked both the end of one bull and the next small step in a generations-long journey toward strengthening tribal food sovereignty — a task involving the reintroduction of buffalo to Wind River, a renewed emphasis on traditional foods, recent investments in storage and an interrogation of a colonial past. 

After the animal fell, Manna looked on as a forklift raised the carcass, and the community began to ready the buffalo for processing.

“It was a blessing,” Manna said. “Honestly, just about everything I do every day is a prayer, and trying to stay humble and remember that most things that get you excited that are positive are a blessing.”

For Manna, who is Eritrean-American from the Tigrayan tribe, this blessing started in early December when the Northern Arapaho Business Council and Intertribal Buffalo Council announced she had won a raffle for a whole buffalo from the Northern Arapaho Tribe’s herd. Following the harvest, she paid $900 to have the whole buffalo professionally processed, then began distributing the roughly 500 pounds of lean, free-range, grass-fed meat to the community.

“I’m trying to repay the generosity I’ve been shown,” she said. “Anybody who harvests the buffalo on the rez, they should give a majority of the buffalo to the community.”

Sharing the bounty

Getting a buffalo to the people is easier said than done, given the community’s current lack of food distribution infrastructure. Without a single brick-and-mortar community-run pantry on the Wind River Reservation, there’s no obvious or easy place to even store such a bounty. And while many reservation households rely on these monthly food distributions for fruits, veggies and healthy proteins, resources are limited and access remains difficult. 

When Manna had buffalo meat to share, Jackie White, her adopted mother, was already working to improve food distribution. They both are intimately tied to their community and help build supports like access to food.

On a bright winter day in January at the Fort Washakie pow wow grounds, White smiled as she assembled food boxes for a line of people in their cars to stay protected from the biting cold. White, who is Northern Arapaho, is the Tribal Relations Specialist for Wyoming Food Bank, and since 2020 she has been spearheading food distribution in the Wind River area. She is excited about building more local, internal food sovereignty support, as opposed to federal government programs and state initiatives. 

“We are looking at food pantries,” White said. “We have to have the building infrastructure, and then we’re gonna have to raise the money. There’s a whole lot of different things that are involved in bringing the food pantries together.”

Wind River Cares, the Northern Arapaho Tribe’s community healthcare provider, is donating a building in the town of Arapahoe, according to White. Eastern Shoshone Tribal Health is also in talks with White about a Fort Washakie location, she said. It’s all in the beginning stages. 

The idea of reservation-based facilities that can store meats, fruits and veggies for anyone to access is exciting, White said. They could even use such locations much like grocery stores. She hopes this will combat the high levels of diabetes and lower life expectancies that Indigenous people on the Wind River Reservation face compared to their white counterparts. 

White helped put together a food survey in 2021, with Wyoming Food Bank’s Culturally Responsive Food Initiative, to ask tribal members on the Wind River Reservation what culturally preferred food they would like to have access to during the monthly food distributions. The answers were overwhelmingly in favor of foods like buffalo, elk, chokecherries and corn. 

“As Indigenous people that nourishes our heart, mind, body and spirit,” she said.

White is critical of food distribution models that require people to jump through lots of hoops but offer limited options. She hopes to build something better. 

“Now, it’s not like the old school,” White said. “We are able to do things the way we want to do them.”

Manna was not the only one to recently donate local proteins for food distribution. Northern Arapaho tribal member Nate Friday and his daughter Tasha and brother Starr donated five elk, then the Shoshone and Arapaho Game and Fish donated five elk as well. Between the elk and the buffalo thousands of pounds of locally sourced protein have been made available to the community. 

A day after the Wyoming Food Bank’s January food distribution, a group of about 25 stakeholders met to discuss the feasibility of creating a local pantry system. Rachel Bailey, director of the Wyoming Food Bank, said that there was interest in putting together an advisory council that could potentially develop into a governing board. 

“This needs to be community-led and community-run,” Bailey said. “Building these food pantries on the Wind River Reservation is a very important step in being able to address some of the challenges of food insecurity on the Wind River Reservation, but it will not solve the challenges of food insecurity.”

Small towns, long roads, few options

Bailey said around 11% of people in Wyoming are food insecure, citing USDA census information. Many who live on the Wind River drive into nearby towns like Riverton or Lander for groceries, which can be difficult in the winter months. And while these towns have food banks, lack of reliable transportation, and high grocery prices, are big issues for most utilizing the monthly food distribution. 

To bridge the gap, Wyoming Food Bank currently stages distributions each month in Arapahoe and Fort Washakie. There are usually 300 boxes available at each site. Larger households —  some are home to 10 or 15 people —  often receive more than one box to feed everyone. 

“Across the state, the only access to food might be a convenience store. People travel really long distances to source food. And so, if you do not have the access to transportation or time to go and do that, then that is a barrier,” Bailey said. The Wyoming Food Bank, she added, is purely in a supporting role in getting these pantries off the ground. 

Recovering from colonization

The Wind River Reservation’s history of colonization has contributed to the lack of supportive food networks. In his 2019 paper “Restorying Northern Arapaho Food Sovereignty,” Northern Arapaho researcher Melvin Arthur outlined the importance of reclaiming these foodways in the face of colonial eradication. 

“Food sovereignty is a crucial means for all Indigenous nations to reclaim — our culture, history, health, and political sovereignty,” Arthur writes. It’s important for solutions to come from a historical and community-based understanding of tribes’ individual food history, he said, as well as knowing how events like genocide, residential schools and trauma contribute to food systems. “Our struggles and our suffering multiplied as our people were killed — by starvation, disease, despair, and direct attacks — and by having our land, food ways and children stripped away.” 

The United States Department of Food Distribution program and food rations during the early 1900s contributed to the alienation of local food systems on the Wind River Reservation, Arthur also found.

“This dietary change hit us with a growing supply of the sugar, fat, and salt found in canned pork, canned chicken, canned beef, butter, corn syrup, and cheese,” Arthur wrote. “This program also led to a lack of fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Manna is very familiar with this colonial history and how it impacts food chains today. She not only donated buffalo meat to the monthly Food Bank of Wyoming distribution but drove all around the reservation with her gifts. She donated a large amount to the Eastern Shoshone housing authority, White Buffalo Recovery Center, and to mentors and elders both Arapaho and Shoshone. 

As a member of the international Indigenous community living on the Wind River Reservation, Manna said she wants to give back to the place that has welcomed her so warmly. 

“I was really happy to feel that generosity from both tribal communities,” Manna said. “It’s a beautiful feeling of having a community so far away from home.” She was homeless for a time and relied on food pantries and shelters, she said. “People fall on hard times. It’s important to have a place in the community to protect the vulnerable.”

The post Buffalo bounty bolsters young Wind River food pantry system appeared first on WyoFile .

As a young girl, Jenna Murray watched her grandfather stitch up an injured horse one day at her family’s ranch on the Wind River Indian Reservation. She observed intently as he sewed with calm expertise. His hands were too large to tie the knot, and he asked if she could assist in the final step.

Murray didn’t hesitate, didn’t balk at the blood or tremble while tying. When she finished, she said, her grandfather announced she would one day be a surgeon. 

Today, the young Eastern Shoshone woman attends medical school at the University of Utah, where she is interested in addiction recovery and maternal health care. Her path into medicine wasn’t straightforward; she was waylaid, slowed and nearly deterred. And just as her connection to the reservation played a major role in going into medicine, that connection helped her stick to the track that she almost fell from. 

Murray’s story is featured in a new short documentary, “Winding Path.” The film, which screened at Sundance Film Festival and is currently on the festival circuit, weaves together broad rural health care struggles with Indigenous issues and personal demons that many individuals battle.   

It’s all been a bit overwhelming for Murray, putting her story out there, seeing her face on the screen and receiving applause at a prestigious event like Sundance. But, she said, she’s growing more comfortable as she sees how it touches viewers. 

“The amount of people who have been moved by it, or learned something new … I didn’t expect that,” she said. “And so that’s been really cool. And makes it worth it.”

A split childhood, a formative place 

Murray grew up in Las Vegas, but spent summers visiting her large extended family on the Wind River Indian Reservation, where her paternal grandparents had a ranch. Her grandfather, Larry Murray, was a well-known educator, coach and rancher with an easy smile and a major role in her life.  

On those summer trips, she rode horses, worked on ranch projects, spent hours with cousins and learned about her heritage through powwows and ceremonies — it was a “formative” time. It also contrasted with the Vegas version of her life, which was more fast-paced, diverse and citified. “It really felt like two different worlds, honestly,” she said. 

It was also on the reservation when her grandfather recognized her fascination with medicine and proclaimed Murray would be a surgeon. 

As she grew into her teenage years, Murray became more invested in her life and friends in Las Vegas. She didn’t visit the ranch as much. One day in 2011, her grandfather, who was 70, suffered a heart attack in his barn. His wife performed CPR for 40 minutes waiting for EMS to arrive. 

If the medical emergency would have happened in a city, Murray said, he likely would have survived. But by the time he was transferred to Casper, it was too late. 

Despite, or perhaps fueled by, the loss, Murray worked hard in school and during her pre-med college classes. But she also started drinking, and it got out of control. When she was asked to leave her graduate program due to her erratic behavior, it was a wake-up call. 

She was devastated, she said, but began seeing a Native counselor who exposed her to a culturally centered method of therapy. Encouraged by him, Murray returned to the reservation. There, she said, the land helped her heal. She was sober by the following year and regained her medical track with a new interest in culturally tailored addiction treatment for Native people. Inspired by her grandfather’s heart attack, she is also interested in issues of rural health care access as well as preventative health.

After she finishes her second year of med school, she plans to transition into doing her Ph.D work at a Native community health center in Salt Lake with a focus on substance use and pregnancy. 

A week in Wyoming

Documentary co-director Ross Kauffman and producer Robin Honan came across Murray’s story as part of the work their company, Red Light Films, does telling stories related to the university’s Native American Research Internship program. Murray participated in the program. 

Kauffman is an Academy-Award-winning director who has made critically acclaimed films such as “E-Team” and “Born into Brothels.” Honan has also won an Oscar.

“They knew that Jenna had a story to tell,” but also intuited that she “was willing to share her story, because not everyone is,” said co-director Alex Lazarowich, a Cree filmmaker from Alberta, Canada. 

When they asked Lazarowich to join the filmmaking team, it was a no-brainer. “I felt like it’s a really awesome opportunity to tell a positive story about the Wind River Indian Reservation,” she said.  

The team spent a week in Wyoming last summer filming Murray on her family’s ranch and meeting friends and family members. Lazarowich, who had never been to Wyoming, was “blown away” by the beauty and scope of the landscape. 

Lazarowich makes films for Indigenous people to watch, she said. “Because for me growing up, I never saw a lot of people who looked like me or reflected back at me or my experience.” 

In this case, she also wanted to share Murray’s story “so that someone out there who’s Native could see it and be like, ‘Wow, maybe I could do that, too.’”

Plus, she said: Google Wind River Indian Reservation and grim stories of poverty and violence pop up. She hopes the film can dilute that perception. 

“To show people another version, I think is like the best thing that we could do with this film,” she said. She also hopes it leads to meaningful conversations about rural health care access and other Indigenous health issues. 

Murray didn’t originally get why filmmakers were interested in her story, and admits it was a little uncomfortable to have the camera pointed at her. She also didn’t initially understand the gravity of getting into Sundance. By the time the festival was over, she had walked red carpets, felt the reverberation of audience applause and heard really positive feedback. She thinks the film struck a chord as a hopeful story rather than a bleak reservation portrayal many are used to. 

“They did a beautiful job,” she said. “And I don’t regret it at all.” 

Though traveling the festival circuit now, the film will have a Wyoming screening on Aug. 7 in Riverton during the Native Education Conference at Central Wyoming College. The film will also be available to screen online soon. 

The post Shaped on the Wind River Reservation, med student hopes to heal in rural communities appeared first on WyoFile .