Today I was jonzin’ for a pizza—a thin crust pizza with feta and spinach, to be exact. I prowled downtown. There’s one grill and one diner. No pizza. Alas, I ended up with a grilled Velveeta sandwich. I am in Wolf Point, Montana—population 1,900. This is the biggest city on Fort Peck Indian Reservation, the ninth largest reservation in America. Like far too many other rural downtowns, many of buildings are boarded. There are more bars than restaurants. More car…
Hope and Opportunity Mamma Carrie Style The land of no tears It was on a Friday night at a high school football game on the Fort Peck Reservation that it dawned on me: the child whimpering in the parking lot was the first cry I’d heard since arriving almost two weeks before. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been around children. I’d been to two pow wows, a myriad of grocery stores, and a rodeo. I wondered what was different here…
Prairie Bighorn Blount & Her Vision For Indigenous Business. Meet Prairie Bighorn Blount (pronounced blunt), a woman whose vision knows no bounds and her ability to turn dust into gold, impressive. I first met Prairie last winter at a sold-out business leadership conference she had spearheaded at Nike headquarters with notable speakers including the N7 founder, Sam McCracken, and Taboo from Black Eyed Peas. Four years ago when American Indigenous Business Leaders (AIBL), a national organization for business leaders…
I pulled into the Warrior Challenge Relay, put on by Circles of Care at Spotted Bull Recovery Center, as relay runners were emerging from a 20-foot-wide cargo net stretched taught, inches above a sand pit dotted with small, sharp cacti. The race was on! A young woman who was behind in the first leg, a mile sprint around the pow wow grounds, had pulled ahead as she completed her first of thirteen obstacles. At the north side of the course,…
