It was this event, more than any other in the tribe’s history, that had cast on the boom a certain karmic power. “The white man thought they were going to put us on the badlands where nothing would grow,” Hall told me. “Do you think they would have put us here if they had known?” I shook my head. Hall smiled. “Before the dam we were self-sufficient. Then they flooded us and destroyed our economy. If we’ve been blessed with this fuel, here, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t try to bring it back, what we lost. If managed right, this development could make our tribe self-sufficient again.”
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THE DAY BEFORE I gave up my hotel room to the oilman, I met a tribal historian, a woman, who invited me to stay in a house that had belonged to her late sister. The house was in Parshall, east of New Town, and over the following years, I would stay there whenever I came to the reservation. One day, while perusing a bookshelf, of which the house had many, I found a collection of old newsletters issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The first, dated May 18, 1953, announced the visit of a government “Oil and Gas Supervisor” who met with the tribal council regarding the leasing of land. The Bureau would hold eighteen auctions, through which companies acquired the mineral rights to a third of the reservation. At an auction in December 1953, bonus offers ranged from $5 to $190 an acre, and landowners earned $3.5 million collectively. By the following September, tribal members had earned $6 million, but the figure came with a caveat: “Not all of the Fort Berthold Indians share in this income,” a Bureau agent warned in a newsletter that month. “The truth of the matter is that only 710 individuals have shared in this oil income out of a total enrollment of 2,751, and 105 of these are Indians who reside off the reservation permanently.” Even among those who earned bonuses, the money was unevenly dispersed. Twelve people received more than a million dollars between them, while a majority earned less than five thousand apiece. For a few, the gift was well timed: The Garrison Dam was nearly finished, and tribal members were preparing to move. According to the newsletters, most of the oil income went toward new houses, while “35 individuals purchased 628 head of cattle; 12 individuals repaid their loans in full to the Tribe,” and “approximately 4,196.45 acres” were bought for home sites. Thousands had been spent on “furnishings and equipment, wiring of homes, four barns, sheds, corrals and fencing, and for food and clothing”—all “worthwhile expenditures,” noted the agent, “but the fact remains that for over 2,000 Fort Berthold Indian people, a major job of rehabilitation is still a serious immediate need.”
No one would ever mention this money to me, perhaps because no one on the reservation remembered it. The oil boom that began in 1951, later eulogized in books and plaques and North Dakota school curriculums, hardly arrived on Fort Berthold, where only a few dozen wells were drilled. The first of these wells was on land belonging to an Arikara woman named Helen Gough, who willed her royalties upon her death to build and maintain a museum. The Three Affiliated Tribes Museum, a modest A-frame in the casino parking lot, was the sole relic of the first boom I found on the reservation, as if the memory of the dam had eclipsed the memory of this boom, and what was lost to the dam had lasted while what was gained from the boom had not.
Booms by definition are temporary, strung along by the whims of international markets. In the sixties, the price of oil fell; then, in the seventies, it rose, and the industry flourished again in North Dakota. Even fewer wells were drilled on the reservation this time due to the problem of heirship: Allotments had fractionated among landowners’ progeny, and it was not uncommon for hundreds of owners to share in an allotment. By federal law, to drill on an allotment, a company needed consent from every landowner—nearly an impossible task, since so many had scattered after the flood. Unable to secure enough leases, oil companies considered it hardly worthwhile to drill on the reservation. By the end of the second boom, forty-two oil wells had been drilled on tribal or allotted land, and by 1996, only ten of these wells were still producing.
For decades, the tribe’s entire annual budget came from congressional appropriations. This changed in 1992, when the tribe won a $142.9 million settlement for land it had lost to the flood. The next year, the tribe opened the casino. The settlement and casino gave the tribe leverage it never had before, and as the tribe sought loans, it also sought new sources of income. In 1995, the council drafted a report on their oil and gas potential and sent it to hundreds of companies. Few responded, but those who did were unanimous in their concern that the fractionated heirship of Indian land made leasing prohibitively difficult. Only one company made an offer: For exclusive rights to drill on the reservation, it would pay the tribe 18.25 percent of its profits and a $2 million bonus, on the condition that three-quarters of allottees also agreed to lease their land for 12.5 percent royalties and twenty to thirty-five dollars an acre.
The company, Alenco, based in Alberta, had been connected to the tribe through two white brothers in Williston, North Dakota, who owned Powers Energy Corporation. Alenco agreed to pay Powers 4 percent royalties on all the oil it extracted from the reservation. In 1997, one Powers brother accompanied the tribal chairman to Washington, D.C., where they testified before Congress on a bill that would alter the heirship laws on Fort Berthold, requiring only a simple majority of landowners to agree to lease before their allotment could be drilled. The bill passed.
The first day most tribal members heard of Alenco was March 14, 1997, when the Minot Daily News reported that the tribal council, in a closed session, voted to accept the deal. Only two councilmen had dissented. One of them was Tex Hall.
The reservation erupted in outrage. Tribal landowners demanded a meeting with the Bureau, which they blamed for not informing them of the deal. When the council held a private meeting with Alenco, landowners protested until they were let in. “Will the Council place their interests above that of the private landowners?” one woman wrote in a letter to the Bureau. “Oil development of a vast area of land lends itself to political maneuvering. The request by the oil company to waive a number of Federal regulations was of grave concern to us, and we wondered if allotted lands would be adequately protected.” Letters elicited no response. After months of silence, the Bureau released a report in which it found that the deal was “not in the tribe’s best interest” and suggested Alenco amend it. A year later, the company presented a new deal not all that different from the first. Hall walked out of the vote, followed by two other councilmen. The deal never passed. A year later, Hall was elected chairman.
Nearly every tribal member I interviewed about Alenco shuddered to think what might have happened. The royalties and bonuses Alenco offered were far below federal standards, let alone market value, but perhaps the most terrible aspect of the deal was one that glimmered out in retrospect: The company would have had exclusive access to the reservation for a period of fifteen years. Hall opposed the deal because it was “not a fair price” but also because it would have broken one of the last levers of sovereignty the tribe possessed. He was not opposed to drilling, but he believed that the tribe, rather than give up control of its land to an outside company, should develop the resources itself.
Hall never had this chance. During his first two terms as chairman, the tribe slipped perilously into debt, and in 2005, when a company called Black Rock Resources, with no prior record of oil development, offered to lease twelve thousand acres of tribal land for thirty-five dollars apiece, the council voted, excluding Hall, to accept.
Hall was furious. Among his most vocal detractors was Steve Kelly, the chief counsel for the tribe. Kelly, a pale, portly tribal member who had been raised off the reservation in the oil fields of eastern Montana, believed the tribe was incapable of drilling its own oil and thus better off leaving the job to outside companies. It was Kelly who facilitated the leases with Black Rock and a majority of the tribal leases that followed.
Kelly was not the only one with whom Hall beg
an to spar. In 2006, the manager of the casino, Spencer Wilkinson, Jr., made an offer to the council, proposing that a company he owned called Dakota-3 operate an old oil well that belonged to the tribe. In exchange, Dakota-3 would earn 75 percent of the well’s profits.
Spencer was from White Shield but grew up in Oklahoma and moved to the reservation in 1993, when his uncle, Wilbur Wilkinson, was elected chairman. The casino opened, and Spencer got a job. His uncle’s tenure ended in scandal when Wilbur, with Spencer’s help, embezzled $20,000 from the tribe. Spencer testified against his uncle and kept his job at the casino, while Wilbur was sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison. In the mid-2000s, Spencer came to own Dakota-3 with several partners. The council accepted his offer to operate the tribal oil well, but before the Bureau of Indian Affairs could approve the deal, Dakota-3 began drawing payments from the tribe. On August 28, 2006, two months prior to the next election for chairman, Hall sent Spencer a letter, reminding him that the Bureau had yet to sign off on the deal. Hall also noted that he had heard Spencer was attempting to lease minerals from the tribe. “I will not process or sign any assignment of the Tribe’s mineral leases,” Hall warned. That fall, he lost the chairmanship after Spencer campaigned for his opponent.
The following year, the tribal council leased 42,842 of its acres to Dakota-3 for fifty dollars each and 18 percent royalties. In March 2008, Spencer posed with the new tribal chairman, holding a giant check addressed to the tribe for $2.1 million. Meanwhile, Spencer went door-to-door, leasing around as many acres at the same rate from Indian landowners. Then, in 2010, an Oklahoma-based company, Williams Oil, purchased Dakota-3 for $925 million, earning Dakota-3 a profit roughly two-hundred times what it originally paid for the leases. Not since Alenco had a deal generated so much outrage on the reservation. Tribal members wondered why the federal government, its trustee, had not held an auction or warned the tribe and landowners that their minerals were worth more than Dakota-3 offered. In November, Hall won reelection on the promise that he would fire Spencer.
Spencer kept his job, and by the time I arrived on Fort Berthold, his clutch on the tribal government had become legend. I often heard members speculate as to how he had enticed the council to lease the tribe’s minerals for such a low price. But what Spencer had done was common practice in the oil industry: Companies often purchased leases for little money before landowners knew what their land was really worth and sold them for enormous profits. Every company that acquired the first leases on the reservation, including Black Rock, “flipped” them to other companies. Spencer’s deal drew more ire because he was related to many of the landowners he fooled. “I felt really ashamed that I had been taken like that,” a cousin of his told me. In a culture where family mattered more than anything, she explained, she had trusted him. Spencer had exploited the tribe’s strength at the same time he exploited its poverty and vulnerability to federal mismanagement. “None of us knew there were billions of dollars under Fort Berthold,” another woman told me. “How do you believe that if you’ve been poor all your life?”
One morning in April 2011, I met with the tribe’s tax director, an energetic man with short, dark hair and an affinity for brash metaphors. “It’s a David and Goliath situation,” he told me. “When you’re worried about how you’re going to pay your electric bill, or you can’t buy your kids school clothes, or you’re an elder on fixed income, and you’re way below poverty level, and somebody throws $30,000 at you, and you don’t understand that it’s worth $300,000, you’ve just made a huge error. That’s what happened to our people. The oil companies have dictated this process. It’s not their first rodeo.”
The director, Mark Fox, was in his late forties and had spent most of his adult life working in tribal government. The tribe was unprepared for the boom, he believed. After centuries of colonization—of federal entities weakening and displacing tribal institutions—it did not have the resources, let alone the expertise or regulatory power, to control the oil industry. It had no environmental agency to monitor leaks or spills; no transportation department to track trucks; and what was more troubling, it had no criminal jurisdiction over the thousands of non-Native men and women who had come to work, since the U.S. Supreme Court had stripped tribes nationwide of the right to criminally prosecute nonmembers.
“It’s like the lottery winners you see on TV,” Fox said. “Their lives get worse, because they’re not ready for it. We’re the same way. My biggest fear is that we end up like other reservations I know—industry comes in, money’s thrown around, everyone celebrates for a while, and when industry leaves, the reservation is in worse shape than before.”
After I left Mark’s office, I thought about what he said. Not everyone had been blindsided. In interviews with landowners, I had begun to recognize the names of individuals who seemed to have gotten ahead of the boom. I heard these names over and over, saw them in court documents. These were the men and women whom oil companies had hired to appear at their relatives’ doors with lease forms in hand. How had they known? the landowners I spoke to wondered. Had they been smarter, wiser? Had they had the gift of foresight? In fact, it appeared they had been chosen to know, plucked up from the casino, from tribal government, from influential families. These “consultants” earned both direct payments for their services and a small percentage of royalties from oil produced on the land they helped lease. Oil companies had found their proselytizers, and after these men and women acquired all the reservation land there was to lease, many had started their own companies servicing the oil fields. For this, they had earned a moniker I would hear often on the reservation: “oil kings.”
Spencer Wilkinson was an oil king, but he was not the only one. There was also Steve Kelly, the lawyer for the tribe who had sparred with Tex Hall over the oil deals. In 2008, Kelly left his tribal position and founded the company Trustland, through which he acquired leases for many of the same companies whose deals he negotiated on the tribe’s behalf. When there were no more leases to acquire, Kelly had expanded his services, and Trustland grew into the largest truck operator on the reservation. That was before the company called Maheshu encroached on Kelly’s business. Maheshu was owned by another oil king—the tribal chairman, Tex Hall.
* * *
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ONE EVENING THAT April during my first visit to the reservation, rain fell so hard that trucks idled on roadsides and potholes roiled with mud. I drove east from New Town on Route 23, paused at a crossing of asphalt and dirt where a horse had slung its head over a barbed-wire fence and a pump jack nodded relentlessly. When the rain let up, I went on to the Scenic, a restaurant perched on a rise with a view of Lake Sakakawea. Three roughnecks smoked beneath the eaves, their dirty boots propped against the siding, knees protruding into the storm. A waitress seated me near an elderly man who caught my eye when I came in. He wore glasses and a nylon jacket, his hair thin and wispy. He invited me to eat with him. “The thing you must know,” he said once I had joined him, “is that this was our big chance, and we missed it.”
The man’s name was Ed Hall. The chairman was his nephew. Ed had been born in Elbowoods, a town in the Missouri bottomlands, and, in 1953, a year before the flood, left the reservation to join the Marine Corps. Over the next forty-eight years, Ed had lived all over the country: on the Turtle Mountain, Cheyenne River, and Standing Rock reservations, where he designed and built tribal roads; in Crow Agency, where he served as Bureau of Indian Affairs superintendent; in Washington, D.C., where he advised the assistant secretary of the Bureau; in Albuquerque, where he worked in a Bureau transportation department; until he came home in 2001 to assist with a redesign of the bridge over Lake Sakakawea. All those years in the bowels of the federal-Indian bureaucracy had kindled in Ed a fondness for reports. I would see him often on later visits to the reservation, and whenever I asked how he was doing, he would reply, “I’m working on a new report.”
The evening I met Ed at th
e Scenic, he told me about a report Tex asked him to write. After regaining the chairmanship in 2010, Tex had assembled a team, including Ed, to investigate corruption in tribal government. Tex meant for the report to remain private, but someone had acquired a copy and posted it online. The findings were troubling—money wildly mismanaged over the four years prior; $1.4 million spent on councilmen’s travel, almost half of that for the former chairman alone; a tribal debt exceeding $100 million; dubious leasing of tribal minerals, such as the sale to Spencer Wilkinson, Jr.; and a system of spoils that made it far too easy for councilmen to buy their constituents’ votes. There was widespread “fear of retaliation if one speaks up to address injustice, fraud or corruption,” according to the report. “This fear of retaliation is not only for the individual, but for one’s entire family. Tribal goods and services, once open freely to all, have been restricted and made available only to those who are politically connected.” Perhaps most troubling was that the oil boom had fueled this corruption. An ethics ordinance held that elected tribal officials could not “own interests in or conduct business with” oil and gas companies, and yet multiple councilmen already had been recruited as partners in oil-field ventures or owned companies themselves. The report did not offer names, but it occurred to me that among the councilmen violating the ordinance was the chairman himself. After Tex lost the election in 2006, he had made the curious transformation of founding Maheshu, through which he acquired leases for outside oil companies, and then entered the trucking business.
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