“I was more naive about reservation life at thirty-six than I was at sixteen,” says Alyce. “I came of school age just as the old world was falling apart during The Flood, so when I was only five years old I was sent off to a mission school in South Dakota. I came home in the summers, but nothing was ever the same again. When I left Cornell, I was stepping back into a world that had become foreign to me, even though I knew everybody by their first name. I figured I’d take it easy, settle in slowly.”
The easiest way to settle in slowly was to move back to her home community of Twin Buttes. There, she could get her kids in school and help her siblings take care of their aging mother while she reacquainted herself with the reservation. But it soon became apparent that the journey from Ithaca to Twin Buttes was a longer one than Alyce had imagined. Nothing she saw looked familiar. Her memories, she finally realized, had been formed at her grandfather Spotted Bear’s house, on the bottoms, in a world that was gone. To her dismay, instead of finding a proud and vibrant people, she found her tribe all but resigned to an uncertain fate.
Despite Alyce’s resolve to settle in slowly, her instincts and character were soon leading her into the storm that had engulfed her tribe. By 1982, evidence of cultural collapse was visible everywhere: tribal schools were failing to meet minimum standards, the tribal coffers were empty, and the once vigorous tribal government was in a state of chronic disorganization and administrative disarray. A few months after she returned home, an ad hoc committee was formed to draft Alyce Spotted Bear into a candidacy for tribal chairmanship. In the fall of 1982, she was elected as the first tribal chairwoman for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations in what amounted to a landslide.
Alyce’s first act as the chairwoman-elect was to convene a council of elders to seek their advice. The words she heard were laden with foreboding. Morale in tribal government had reached a new low. Nobody trusted the elected leaders. The tribal membership had grown to 5,500, but those statistics masked the darkness of high noon. Tribal members could no longer visualize a future for their children. The unemployment rate at Fort Berthold had risen to 85 percent. Four out of five school-age children were malnourished. Infant mortality rates were quadruple the national average. Life expectancy for men had dropped below fifty years. Moreover, soaring rates of alcoholism and drug addiction among the tribes’ youth had created a social climate of hopelessness. If the tribes were to survive, the elders told Alyce, the time had come to make a radical break from the status quo.
There was a blush of serendipity to this new job that was not lost on Spotted Bear. Like Martin Cross, Alyce’s father, Lorenzo Spotted Bear, was born in the first decade of the twentieth century. Like Dorothy Cross, Alyce’s mother made her own soap, spun honey from wild beehives, and sewed her children’s school clothes from bleached flour sacks. Athletically talented and intellectually endowed, Martin and Lorenzo became lifelong friends from their first face-to-face encounter as schoolboys. Both would marry the daughters of Norwegian homesteaders, almost unheard-of at the time. As grown men they continued to enjoy each other’s company, particularly when they were out howling at the moon, sharing a pint of bootlegged whiskey. In the end, both of their lives ended in circumstances that neither man would have imagined for the other: Lorenzo, from a fatal encounter with a policeman’s bullet in a riddle of particulars that remain mysterious fifty years later, and Martin, from a tormented, diseased heart in a solitary ranch house in Raub, population: 11.
Like most Mandan families living at the Knife River, by the turn of the twentieth century the Spotted Bears had intermixed with Hidatsa clans, a tribal mingling that strengthened surviving clans and invariably brought with it blood relationships with the Crow, the Hidatsa’s first cousins. On her mother, Olive’s, side of the family, Alyce’s grandparents met on the steerage deck of a steamship in the mid-Atlantic, emigrating from Norway. After finding the Minnesota countryside teeming with their countrymen, the young couple got married and pressed on to the West until they reached the High Plains grasslands astride the Upper Missouri River. In 1910, Alyce’s grandfather Ingwald made one last move by covered wagon, settling finally on a 160 acre homestead near the village of Raub, a stone’s throw from Elbowoods. While Lorenzo and Martin were growing up in Elbowoods, Dorothy Bartel and Olive Shollas were growing up on the edge of Indian Country in towns that were forty miles apart. Between them, they raised twenty children without the benefit of electricity, plumbing, or modern conveniences. Both were disowned by their parents for marrying Indians, and both would bury their husbands in middle age. While each woman would live well into her eighties, neither would marry again.
“Growing up, the fact that our mothers were Norwegian had no bearing on our identity as Indians,” says Alyce. “We’ve always been Indians. We grew up in the Indian culture. If our mothers ever gave it a second thought, they never let on.”
After Alyce met with the elders, her instincts told her to put out the biggest fires first, then move on to the smaller ones. From where she sat, all the fires looked big, but nothing could be more important to their future than “getting food into the tummies of hungry children,” says Spotted Bear, and getting them back into school classrooms. Once she had accomplished that by securing new sources of federal assistance, Alyce turned her attention to the tribes’ desperate financial problems. Just hours after being sworn in as chairwoman, she discovered that the tribes’ books were “a horrendous, scandalous mess.” In fact, the tribes were legally bankrupt.
The accounts were in such disarray that before she could go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to ask for emergency assistance, the council had to hire a team of accountants to bring some order to the chaos. Unless something was done to get the books in order very quickly, the auditors were legally obligated to put the tribes into federal receivership.
While accountants were frantically sorting through the chaos, she told the council that her next priority was to get the tribes’ legal house in order. Unlike her fellow council members, Alyce knew that Raymond Cross was coming off a big victory in the Adair case. A loss would have been a legal setback for hundreds of tribes. When Raymond prevailed, the victory was hailed as one of the most important Indian water-law cases in decades. When he arrived back in North Dakota in 1982, he was thirty-four years old, single, highly trained, and fresh from an important victory.
“Hiring Ray was your classic no-brainer,” says Alyce. “He must have heard a voice, just like I did. One day he walked in and offered his services. He could have gotten a job at the best law firms in the country, but he came home at the very time we needed him most. The council hired him by a six-to-five vote. The vote on the council wasn’t a reflection on Ray at all. The tribes had been down for so long, they just didn’t see how we could afford it. I couldn’t see how we could not afford it. I told them, ‘You’ll walk him out over my dead body!’ Then I went into his office. He was packing up his things. ‘Don’t go. Please, please, please stay!’ We never spoke of it again. It’s probably the smartest thing I ever did.”
Under Alyce’s diligent, sure-handed leadership, the Three Affiliated Tribes gradually altered course away from the abyss. In the tribes’ darkest hours, providence, countless hours of unpaid work, and inspired leadership enabled the tribes to avert bankruptcy and dissolution as a tribal government. After bankruptcy was avoided, the next step toward solvency was a review of the tribes’ unpaid bills. By forgoing fringe benefits for all employees, the tribes gradually cleared the books of bad debt over the next four years. By the mid-1980s, the Three Affiliated Tribes were back on sound financial footing for the first time since Martin Cross stepped down in 1956. Progress was slow and painful, but there were also causes for celebration. In 1983, Raymond Cross argued the tribes’ case against Public Law 280 in Wold Engineering before the U.S. Supreme Court. A few months later, they got news that the tribe had won a split decision. The victory was Pyrrhic, however, because it was headed back to the high court and would have to be argued once again.
Chief Justice VandeWalle remembers the case being remanded back to the North Dakota Supreme Court.
“The Supremes asked us to take another look, and this time Ralph Erickstad wrote our opinion,” says Chief Justice VandeWalle.
VandeWalle’s esteemed mentor, Chief Justice Ralph Erickstad, was a lifelong friend of the Indian tribes of North Dakota. Erickstad had not made his first ruling with the intention of thwarting the tribes, or denying them access to remedies in state courts. He simply could not see where the court had the authority to trump the tribe’s sovereign immunity. “After another review, we again said we didn’t see where we had jurisdiction in this matter. We sent it back up. We were asking them for a bright line. That’s exactly what they were asking for from us.”
In 1984, a month after the U.S. Supreme Court announced its first “nondecision decision” in the Wold Engineering case, Alyce was getting ready to leave for Washington one evening when her eye caught a small headline buried in the back pages of the Bismarck Tribune newspaper. As tribal leader, Alyce made it her daily habit to scan the legal notices of local newspapers in search of sales of property that fell inside reservation boundaries. That evening, instead of acreage for sale, she found an announcement released by the North Dakota State Water Commission telling the public that the following day a new round of hearings would begin at the state capitol building in Bismarck on Pick-Sloan irrigation. The story was nothing more than a two-paragraph rewrite of a news release faxed to all the regional media by Senator Mark Andrews’s office in Washington. Senator Andrews, the force behind the new hearings, was anxious to promote the Bismarck hearings in hopes of getting Pick-Sloan irrigation projects back on track in Congress.
The state had offered to help the new Garrison Commission to get the ball rolling. The hearings the following day would assist the commission in determining “the costs and benefits incurred, and opportunities foregone” by groups directly affected by the construction of the Garrison Dam. Congress was intentionally vesting this new commission with enough authority to break through the logjam that had held up the construction of Lone Tree Reservoir for nearly a decade. To achieve that end as quickly as possible, the state agreed to screen testimony and compile an official slate of witnesses for the commission being assembled in Washington, D.C., by the secretary of the interior, William Clark.
“I remember coming right out of my chair when I saw that story,” says Alyce. “My first thought was, ‘Why didn’t anybody tell us about this? Where do we figure into this?’ Then, my second thought was, ‘Wow, if they’re going to compensate anybody, it had better be us.’”
She circled the item in the paper, wrote out a quick missive to Raymond, then stuffed it in his mailbox on her way out of town early the next morning. The hearing was scheduled for ten a.m., 120 miles away. “Raymond,” she scribbled in her perfunctory note, “I know you’ve got a full plate, but could you please attend this meeting? I’d do it, but I’m headed for Washington. Besides, you’ll have a better feel for the legalities involved than I would. I have a hunch this thing could be very important for us. If they’ll let you speak, make sure that they understand the tribes should be the first in line for any further compensation. Good luck.” She sped toward the airport in Bismarck through the early morning darkness with her fingers crossed. She had no way of knowing if Raymond would find her note.
By the early 1980s, the ghost of the long-dormant Sloan Plan irrigation projects came back to haunt Congress like a guilty conscience. Veteran lawmakers had to admire the resilience of an idea that refused to die gracefully. But to dryland farmers on the Upper Missouri River, a promise was a promise. Twenty years after Representative Krueger advised them to bide their time until common sense returned to Washington, and almost forty years after the Pick-Sloan Plan was passed into law, farmers were back at their drums. As the decades rolled by, Pick-Sloan’s original price tag of $1.9 billion had risen 1,000 percent to $20 billion, yet upstream farmers, birds, wildlife, and crops continued to wither and perish from chronic thirst. High Plains farmers had yet to see the first drop of Pick-Sloan irrigation water.
When the “red scare” of Representative Krueger’s day abated in the 1970s, pressure from western states brought long-delayed public works projects back to the table. North Dakota’s congressional delegation, led by Senators Mark Andrews and Quentin Burdick, made certain that Garrison Diversion Unit irrigation was at the front of the line. Their arguments were unassailable. For thirty years, downstream farmers had been cashing in on benefits from Pick-Sloan, such as the lucrative farming of floodplains and subsidized barge transportation for their crops. Upstream, the Department of Commerce estimated that North Dakota’s economy took a $100,000,000 hit every year from the income lost to vanished farmlands. The nation’s debt to upstream farmers was long overdue.
Congress agreed. In the mid-1970s, lawmakers gave the bureau the green light to proceed with the construction of the McClusky Canal, the main trunk of the distribution system in the regionwide irrigation plan devised by Glenn Sloan. “The Ditch,” as the canal that was deep enough to float a coastal freighter was called, would be a 120 mile long irrigation artery running east and west across the central portion of the state. The bureau hailed McClusky to skeptical farmers as their long-awaited reward.
Work had no sooner commenced on McClusky than the project was beset by problems, first small, then large. To allay the fears of environmentalists, bureau engineers announced that the new Lone Tree Reservoir, at the eastern end of the canal, would add 55,000 acres of waterfowl habitat to the central flyway. The strict new requirements mandated by NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act, compelled bureau engineers to make the protection of wildlife habitat a controlling feature of their master plan. But an investigation by the North Dakota Farmers Union showed that the bureau’s numbers added up to a shell game. Lone Tree Reservoir would create 55,000 acres of new wetlands, as advertised, while destroying 65,000 acres of waterfowl habitat that already existed. The net loss of 10,000 acres came at a time when waterfowl habitat on the Upper Missouri was disappearing at an alarming rate. Furthermore, the right-of-way for the McClusky Canal would destroy half as much productive farmland as the completed project would irrigate. Cooperating with the Corps and the bureau, the Farmers Union report concluded, was “the kind of working alliance the lamb is able to arrange with the lion.”
If everything went according to plan, with no cost overruns or complications, each of the 250,000 irrigated acres would cost the American taxpayer $900, ten times the value of the bare ground. How could all of this make dollars and sense, asked the editors of the Union Farmer, when the total value of the state’s tillable farmland was only $1.5 billion? “The reason people killed this idea when it first came up eighty years ago is simple,” they concluded. “It was as crazy then as it is now.”
But nobody in Washington was shedding tears for a handful of North Dakota farmers whose strongest economic trump card was silos full of surplus wheat. On the other hand, the loss of waterfowl habitat was a bird of a different feather. When the bureau began construction on The Ditch in 1976, the National Audubon Society immediately filed suit against the bureau in federal court. Their request for an injunction against the Garrison Diversion Unit for threatening to destroy federally protected waterfowl habitat was approved without delay. North Dakota farmers had waged a losing battle against the elements for a hundred years. Now, to end all ironies, the bulldozers bringing them relief had been stopped in their tracks by ducks and geese.
The fate of the canal would remain in limbo for another nine years. But like their constituents, Senators Andrews and Burdick were nothing if not persistent. In 1984 they brought the original Sloan Plan’s irrigation projects back to Congress. Both senators had made numerous appeals for a congressional commission to break the impasse over the Audubon suit. Pick-Sloan had now dogged Congress for almost forty years. Something had to be done. At the moment Raymond Cross and Alyce Spotted Bear
were arguing Wold Engineering and getting the tribes’ books in order, Congress relented and appropriated half a million dollars to assemble the Garrison Diversion Unit Commission. Secretary of the Interior William Clark was directed to assemble a blue-ribbon panel of eleven investigators. Their charter specifically instructed the investigating team to resolve all outstanding legal issues impeding “the entitlement of the state of North Dakota to a federally funded water-development program as compensation for North Dakota’s contributions to the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin program.”
In other words, said Congress, break the infernal deadlock with Audubon, get the bulldozers running again, and make this headache go away.
Like his father, Raymond was a habitual early riser. Reservation police often saw him driving to work at three-thirty in the morning. He found Alyce’s note, bright and early, and ate breakfast in his car as he turned around and headed down Old State Road Number Eight to Bismarck.
Unbeknownst to either of them, tribal councilwoman Tillie Walker, the sister of attorney Hans Walker, had also seen the small story in the newspaper while she was in Bismarck on other business. To the surprise of both, Raymond and Tillie ran into each other at the hearing. Try as he might, the state water commissioners denied Cross the right to speak. As soon as he told them he was representing the tribes, he was dismissed. The commission being formed in Washington would not be entertaining any legal issues related to the tribes, they told him. If the tribes had unresolved grievances over the dam, the commissioners urged him to bring the matter to the proper authorities at the Department of the Interior, in Washington. Based on the instructions sent to them by Congress, the state water commissioners had no basis for putting the tribes on agenda for the upcoming hearings in Fargo.
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