Washington tribal elder reflects on 60+ years of adversity and success

ON A SUNDAY afternoon in 1960, Shirley Blackbear searched for the shimmer of old metal in the mounds of rubbish at a junkyard in Metaline Falls.

Shirley, 9 years old at the time, and her grandfather, Joseph Blackbear, had driven 43 miles from their home on the Kalispel Reservation to the tiny mining-town dump in the northeast corner of Washington in the hope of finding discarded aluminum, copper wiring and anything else they could sell to make a little money.

Every weekend, Shirley accompanied her grandfather on these salvaging expeditions from the reservation on the east bank of the Pend Oreille River near the towns of Usk and Cusick. Joseph spoke only a few words of English and needed Shirley to translate for him.

“The guy would weigh whatever we brought him and then tell me a price, which I would translate into Salish for my grandfather,” Blackbear says. “I had no idea if he was cheating us or not. He would offer maybe $5 or $7. Then my grandfather would say OK, and the man would pay us. That is how we got our money for gas and food.”

Shirley lived with just her grandfather by this time. Four other women in her life were gone. Her aunt had recently married and relocated to Montana; her grandmother had died; her sister had left the house to live with another family; and her mother had moved away. 

With money from scavenger runs, Shirley and Joseph purchased their staples — a loaf of bread, a pound of bologna and a couple bottles of Pepsi. “Then we would start over again the next week,” Shirley Blackbear says.

The routine continued for four years. Blackbear says she remembers being taken to a hospital once, suffering from malnutrition, and nearly being taken away from Joseph, who couldn’t write, so he signed welfare checks with a thumbprint.

Looking back on her childhood more than 60 years later, Blackbear says times often were hard, but she wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. In a sense, her life story and that of the Kalispel Tribe are the same: intertwined tales of overcoming adversity to achieve success, tinged with a sense of loss for the way things used to be.

Blackbear, 73, retired last year as the executive director of human resources for the Kalispel Tribe and Northern Quest Resort & Casino, a position she’d held since 2015. She started working at the casino soon after its opening in 2000.

Even though she didn’t have a college education, Blackbear quickly moved through the ranks there. Her calming wisdom contributed to her success, according to Phil Haugen, a Kalispel Tribe member, longtime friend of Blackbear and chief operating officer for the tribe and casino.

“Whenever you ask Shirley a question, there is always a pause,” he says. “She’s like a lot of the Kalispel from her generation; they don’t always answer you real quick because they’re thinking about what they want to say. And they’re thinking to make sure they say the right thing. So that calming, reassuring presence was just invaluable, especially with us not completely knowing what we were doing at the time.”

BORN APRIL 26, 1951, Shirley never knew her father. He was a white man her mother never talked about. Shirley’s mother, Alice Ignace Blackbear, was the translator for her uncle, the last Kalispel chief, Baptiste Bigsmoke. A few years after Bigsmoke was found dead in 1956, Alice was elected to a new tribal council, tasked with administering Kalispel affairs. She ultimately went on to a successful political career for the Kalispel Tribe but but struggled with what Shirley calls a drinking problem during Shirley’s childhood

In July 1960, Alice’s mother, Josephine Bigsmoke Blackbear, died. Shirley says her mother’s drinking became worse. Alice vacated her position on the council and left Shirley to be raised by her grandfather in his small house on the reservation. It was cobbled together with makeshift materials. They didn’t have indoor plumbing, so every day, Joseph used a bucket to bring in cool, fresh water from a nearby creek for washing in a basin. Outside, there was an outhouse.

The Blackbears were by no means the only members of the tribe dealing with hardship. In 1965, the average annual income for Kalispel Tribal members was $1,400, around four times less than the U.S. average. There were only a few houses on the reservation that had running water, and there was one telephone for the entire tribe.

Nevertheless, Blackbear speaks of her childhood and early adulthood with a smile.

She says poverty was in many ways a unifying factor that made the 200 or so members of the Kalispel Tribe a close-knit community centered on a deep relationship with the land, honoring ancestors and working together when times got hard. It was this mentality, she says, that led to her — and the Kalispel people’s — success with the casino.

Today, Northern Quest is one of two casinos and dozens of other successful businesses owned by the tribe — from stores and restaurants, to a community wellness center, to a car dealership — that together are worth hundreds of millions of dollars and employ close to 2,500 people in Spokane and Pend Oreille counties. The original 40-acre plot of land for the casino has grown to 700 acres for the casino and resort, and the tribe has 442 hotel rooms on the property.

Much of the proceeds from the tribe’s businesses (Northern Quest being the most lucrative) is directed back to tribal membership in the form of health-care benefits and educational programs that, among other things, Blackbear says, provide free college tuition to all tribal youth who graduate from high school and maintain a 2.5 GPA while in college.

“Before all of the prosperity that we have now because of the casino, we were a very poor tribe, but that period is something that my generation will always treasure,” Blackbear says. “I feel bad for the generations that came after us because they don’t have that memory. They didn’t have that struggle. I wouldn’t change my life for nothing.”

IN 1963, THE fortunes of the Kalispel people began to improve, thanks to a historic land settlement negotiated in part by Blackbear’s mother, who stopped drinking and resumed her work on the tribal council after a three-year hiatus. She lived in Usk and was back in Shirley’s life, though they didn’t live in the same house at first.

Alice and fellow tribal council members Ray Pierre and Louis Andrews traveled back and forth to Washington, D.C., to negotiate a deal to reimburse the Kalispel people for the unjust seizure by the federal government of more than 2 million acres that once stretched 200 miles from Eastern Washington to where Paradise, Mont., stands today.

Almost all of this land had been taken from the tribe by the time President Woodrow Wilson established the current Kalispel Reservation in 1914. The reservation consisted of about 4,600 acres of hillside and flood plain along the Pend Oreille River 50 miles north of Spokane that was pretty to look at but horrible for agriculture.

The 1963 deal gave the Kalispel Tribe approximately $1.10 per acre for their original tribal lands, or $2.7 million. It wasn’t a lot of money for that amount of land, even by 1960s standards. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average acre of U.S. farmland in 1963 was worth $131. But the settlement nevertheless marked a significant turning point for the tribe.

The deal enabled the tribe to build housing and install plumbing and electricity across the reservation in 1964, according to Haugen. It “created a little hope,” he says.

JOSEPH BLACKBEAR DIED in December 1964, just before he and Shirley were going to move into a prefabricated home built for them as a result of the land settlement. Shirley and her mother and stepfather eventually moved into the home.

Growing up on the reservation, Shirley attended middle school and high school in nearby Cusick, where she was a good student as well as a member of Future Homemakers of America, the Girls Athletic Association and the cheerleading squad.

During her sophomore year of high school, she won a nationwide tribal lottery to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M. This was followed by a summer humanities school at a women’s college in Connecticut. When she got off the plane in New Haven, Blackbear says, the couple that was hosting her was surprised by her clothes.

“I think they expected me to get off the plane in full ceremonial dress,” Blackbear says. “They even asked me if I lived in a tipi or normal housing. They had no idea what my life was really like.”

Blackbear returned home for her junior year of high school in the fall of 1967 but says that after her time away, she wasn’t very interested in school and ultimately graduated late because she had credits to make up. It was during this time that she got her first job, as something of a truancy officer as part of the Johnson-O’Malley Act, which was designed to keep Native American kids in school.

She became pregnant with her only daughter, Michelle, in June 1969. Michelle’s father was a Sioux from South Dakota she had met at a powwow; he never played a role in raising Michelle.

The prospect of having a child made Blackbear wonder about her own father, so she decided to try to meet him. Her mother told Blackbear the man’s name and said he lived in Superior, Mont. Blackbear drove there, looked him up and called him.

“I asked him if the name Alice Ignace meant anything to him, and there was dead silence on the phone,” Blackbear says. He eventually hung up, and the two never met.

MICHELLE WAS BORN in March 1970, shortly before Blackbear graduated from high school.

As a single mom, Blackbear says, she didn’t want to be on welfare, like she had been as a young child, so she got a position in the new tribal headquarters building as an administrative clerk. In 1972, she moved into her own place, with Michelle.

In 1974, Blackbear was elected to the tribal council, where she served intermittently for 14 years, working alongside Glen Nenema, current chairman of the Kalispel Tribal Council and the longest-serving tribal chairman in the nation.

After working at the tribal headquarters building, Blackbear joined Kalispel Metal Products in 1976 and quickly worked her way up to personnel manager. The small business produced aluminum gun and camera cases and eventually got into building metal docks for the National Park Service.

In 1978, Blackbear married Leroy Seth, a Nez Perce tribal member from Idaho who worked for the Indian Health Service Health Education Program. After getting married, the couple alternatively lived on the Kalispel and Nez Perce reservations, commuting two hours for their respective jobs and raising Michelle, and Seth’s son.

In 1988, Seth’s tribe built a home for the family, and Seth and Blackbear agreed that she would move to Idaho full-time.

Blackbear and Seth lived in Lapwai for 11 years.

“I did a lot of sewing and made outfits for Leroy, his son and my daughter for the powwows,” Blackbear says. “We had an RV we traveled in. I just cooked, cleaned and was happy.”

AT AGE 49, Blackbear got a call from her old friend Haugen, asking whether she might be interested in coming back to Washington to work for a new tribal gaming department. Her husband wanted them to stay in Idaho, but a couple of days went by, and Seth reconsidered. Blackbear soon was hired as a tribal gaming agent for the newly completed Northern Quest Casino (the resort was added in 2009, and the name changed).

Blackbear moved to Airway Heights, a small town just west of Spokane, where the tribe had bought a 40-acre property to build its casino. Seth stayed in Idaho. A year passed, and the couple grew apart and eventually decided to divorce.

“Sometimes I really regret not staying in Lapwai,” Blackbear says. “I think what my life would have been like. I still would probably be content. But I wanted to see what I could do to be instrumental in the casino and for the tribe. I will say that Leroy and I are probably better friends now than ever.”

THE FIRST TIME Blackbear set foot on the newly built 40,000-square-foot gaming floor of the casino after it opened, she remembers thinking, “What the heck has my tribe done?”

She wasn’t alone.

The tribe’s 1996 acquisition of the 40-acre trust of land where the casino now stands had set off a litany of community complaints claiming the casino would bring crime to the area, Haugen recalls.

There was so much opposition to the casino, the tribe nearly gave up on the project. But the tribe pressed on and eventually was allowed to begin construction four years after acquiring the land.

“The casino cost, like, $29 million, and it took, like, 26 banks to finance it,” Haugen says. “Nobody really wanted to take a risk on what we were doing. And now we’ve got people knocking on our doors trying to loan us hundreds of millions of dollars because of how successful we’ve been.”

As a tribal gaming agent, Blackbear’s job was to ensure that no one messed with the money or the cards. She worked Thursdays through Sundays from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. and says she absolutely loved it.

Blackbear started a new job in human resources in 2003 as a manager, fixing problems other employees brought her. She was totally in her element.

“I only got ticked off twice,” she says. “This [employee] from poker kept coming in and complaining and complaining. Eventually I told him, ‘You know what you got to do. You need to put on your big boy shorts and get out there and pay attention.’ ”

In 2015, Blackbear was named executive director of human resources. In 2022, she received the Women in Business Leadership Award in the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene area from Spokane Coeur d’Alene Living magazine.

AS A RESULT of the casino’s success, the Kalispel Tribal Council has invested heavily in medical and social programs to improve the lives of tribal members.

The reservation’s $22 million Camas Center for Community Wellness opened in 2008 and offers a medical and dental clinic, a day care, and fitness and recreation facilities. The tribe subsidizes the operational costs.

The Kalispel Language Program has helped broaden the use of the Salish language. Instead of just a few tribal elders, including Blackbear, now many younger members of the Kalispel Tribe also are fluent in Salish. Elders (tribal members 55 and older) benefit from sponsored trips to places such as Niagara Falls, Las Vegas and Hawaii.

But for Blackbear, the successes of the casino also have a downside. Since her mother died in 2006, she has begun to feel more disconnected from the tribe. Today, she lives in a suburban home in Airway Heights, two hours from the reservation, where she likes to host her daughter, three grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. But she rarely makes it back to the reservation, which she says has become somewhat unrecognizable to her.

When Blackbear used to walk on the reservation, she knew everyone’s name, but that is no longer the case. She thinks a lot of the traditions the elders practiced aren’t being carried on by the youth. Those traditions just don’t seem to be a priority anymore.

Regardless, Blackbear has high hopes for her tribe’s future. “I think the thing that makes the Kalispel special is that we are always there for each other,” she says. “While things might look different on the face of it, I don’t think our sense of community and belonging will ever change.”