Exclusive Report: Exploring the Turtle Mountain Reservation

BELCOURT, ND (trfnews.i234.me) A look inside North Dakota’s, Turtle Mountain Reservation.
the turtle mountain reservation tucked in the low rolling hills along north dakota’s canadian border it’s an area that often gets overlooked in our region of the country so we thought we’d give you a look around the home of the turtle mountain band of chippewa indians over 14 000 people live on or near the reservation which is 72 square miles its largest employers are the government schools and casino across the casino parking lot is the heritage center yes yes everything around here is done by local people okay right here we have everything is kind of history yeah a history stretching back across generations to other tribes on the east coast of the united states in our modern world some of bell court’s institutions carry familiar political names like the quentin burdick hospital and clinic and the senator byron dorgan youth wellness center we do a lot of high performance training with our athletes when i first started work here it was more like a community um you know functional we work with the schools things like that now we’re just we focus on getting our kids in there for our sports and uh training them to a really high level so they can compete uh hopefully earn their way for a scholarship things like that heat changes when it comes winter time it goes down to about um 50 degrees because it’s a different type of material a thin building but for the most part we’re still able to get our athletes in here and still train the way we need how about folks around the community can you come in and watch a lot of our elders and uh you know men women children strollers people with babies they come in and they can use the track whatever they feel and okay um it’s a it’s a really good place for everybody to come and just you know let loose and just you know be yourself you know a little bit of exercise so and like every other community there are problems with drugs and alcohol but the tribe is taking a big step forward in dealing with it ground is being broken this month for the new turtle mountain recovery center the tribe also maintains a homeless shelter the manager of it says around half a dozen folks a night are using it during the summer months some of them are already have jobs and use it as a place to get back on their feet as they work on their personal struggles and the tribe also has its mother teresa of sorts velma wilkie and her team provide thousands of meals a year at velma’s soup kitchen so how many folks are you guys open every day or every day monday through friday okay one meal a day yes and that’s like four o’clock okay get quite a few people through here oh most of the time we get over 500. oh really yeah yeah well unfortunately i’ll kind of every town across our region has facilities like yours a lot of people going through so all right so what do you serve up every day it depends uh i like to give them a good meal home-cooked meal and uh like we just make our own menus and from there that’s quite a meal you gotta cook every day today we’re having sloppy joes and uh fries so much hamburger does that take oh i usually cook about 100 pounds depending on what i’m going to cook all right all right so you’re a hard little worker yes but i got a good crew i have a really good crew and the reservation like every other community is dealing with providing enough affordable housing there are over half a dozen housing developments on the reservation some housing is subsidized by the tribe and some of it is rent to own here’s tribal chairman jamie azure to talk about all that and other issues as we show you around the belcourt area yeah i know it has been an issue for almost decades but we made a great strides in the last five or six years to uh try to resolve some of the issues that we’ve had a lot of those issues stem from the event that we’re at today with with abuse and drug use in our communities that we’re trying to you know make a significant impact on stopping those we’ve had um meth homes where it’s where it takes over a month to uh if it’s tested for meth then it takes over a month to open up one of these homes uh we’ve also got them cleaned up yep yep yep and it’s a whole process you know and that’s not only here it’s everywhere it’s uh like i always say it’s sometimes uh since we’re a reservation we sometimes get a microscope over the over the top of us and it seems like things are bigger than it is yeah you know here than it is everywhere else but you know i’ve lived other places and it’s the same they got it all over now so um are you did any of the cares money or federal money is that anything that’s going to be used for housing or yes and how does your housing work do you do a subsidy or here’s a rent to owner it’s a little bit of everything uh we do have a housing authority so it is a separate entity that is underneath the tribal umbrella a lot of these questions would probably be better answered by the housing director but i can comment on there there are we’re probably into the tens of millions that were shifted over to help address some of the issues from some the relief money that was provided to the tribe so you’ve got money coming in to do some of these projects now uh we we get uh yearly projects uh we work with our epa and our god i can’t think of what the other program is it’s uh yeah brownsville the brownsville project okay uh so we were able to take down our old barnesville which was labelled core housing projects a few years back those were always uh 60 year old barn style homes that were basically dilapidated and used for zero income so any overall some new housing is coming in absolutely there’s a 52 52 apartment complex that will be on the grounds that the old housing was taken down on we had to leave it for a year to green zone it and take out some of the asbestos that were on the outside lining of water so that is coming we’ve uh started a new development that’s hooked onto an old development i believe there are 10 homes there in the last year and we have shifted funds from the tribe to the housing to contract out the remodeling of the home so we’re not pulling maintenance off of uh the housing authority because we have numerous housings that are spread apart so it’s it’s quite the uh there’s actually like over half a dozen housing areas housing sites yeah okay so all right so we’re trying to uh we’re trying to add relief to everything across the board bill i i would say that the numbers that are taken for high unemployment were taken probably in the 2000 census okay now if you go out now if you get on social media right now our local businesses cannot find people to get to come and work so with our uh booming college that we have plus with uh some of the relief programs that we’ve done with cobit 19 i would say that our unemployment rates are drastically different than what people uh report that they are okay so what i’m seeing online with a lot of stuff it’s probably a lot better than that i would say what you’re what you’re reading or a lot of the old i don’t want to say i would say some of the older issues that we have been addressing it’s just nothing takes nothing happens overnight right so uh a lot of the issues that you’re probably reading online are being addressed at some level and hopefully here in the near future that we can you know come back and do a nice big story you know we’ve got a lot of good things happening here in the turtle mountains but you know what we’re a long way from perfect you know and but we’re getting there we’re getting closer we’re on the right track so from belcourt north dakota on the turtle mountain reservation i’m neil carlson reporting for inews dot tv