Improving housing on Montana's Indian reservations.

• Author: Joyner, Amy
• Position: Housing

In 1993, Seattle-based clothing manufacturer Robert Young was visiting Taos, N.M., when a story in a Native American newspaper changed his life. Left on a restaurant table, the story told of the myriad troubles caused by substandard housing and poverty on America's Indian reservations.

A decade later, Young lives in Bozeman and is the co-founder and executive director of Red Feather Development Group, a nonprofit that employs four people, including Young and his wife and co-founder, Anita.

And Red Feather Development is working to improve housing and promote community development on Indian reservations nationwide, with building projects on five of Montana's seven reservations.

The group takes its name from the woman who introduced Young to the humbling living conditions and poverty found on many reservations. Her name was Katherine Red Feather.

After returning to Seattle from Taos, then-32-year-old Young joined a New Mexico-based "Adopt a Grandparent Program," which paired him with the 78-year-old Red Feather, a Lakota elder living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. After a year of developing a long-distance relationship with his new grandmother, Young set out to visit her in Pine Ridge.

What he found shocked and devastated him. "The Third-World poverty level there was absolutely mind-boggling in this affluent country," he remembers.

Living in one of the most poverty-stricken communities in the United States, where high-school dropout rates reach 60 percent, Katherine Red Feather endured years in a crumbling trailer without electricity, plumbing, or insulation. Nearby, small trailers without insulation housed up to 20 people each.

That winter, three Lakota elders died in their unheated homes. The summer's 110-degree heat forced families to live in an abandoned school. "For how bad she had it," Young says, "she never complained."

Without any background in charity work, Young searched for groups working to improve reservation housing, and found none outside of government agencies and religious assemblies. And so, Red Feather Development Group was born to help the 2.5 million Native Americans who live on reservations, starting with the 300,000 who are homeless.

Almost immediately, Young began working the phone to find 14 volunteers to take a two-week break to build Red Feather a new stick-frame house. Working 20-hour days alongside tribal volunteers, his Seattle crew was joined by Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard.

The resulting...