Seven people, three bedrooms, and two days in the life of a family on the Blackfeet Reservation 

Housing insecurity touches almost everyone in tribal communities in Montana. Its causes and consequences are deep-rooted, confoundingly complex, and often overlooked.

The Shelter Gap, a three-part series, explores Indian Country’s housing crisis by examining the barriers residents and developers face in buying, renting and building homes, investigating the root causes of chronic housing shortages on reservation land, and highlighting what’s possible when residents achieve stable housing.

This photo essay, which accompanies Part 1, offers a glimpse of the home life shared by thousands of Indigenous families across Montana.

BLACKFEET RESERVATION — Christmas music blared from a speaker as Jade-Heather Ackerman’s six children wrestled and squealed in their three-bedroom, two-bathroom trailer home on the Blackfeet Reservation in north-central Montana. 

The children’s faces flushed pink from the heat of the wood stove and kitchen oven, set to 425 degrees with its door angled open.

Dylon-Wade, 9, sat on the couch with a workbook on his lap as his sisters practiced TikTok dances and his younger siblings gave each other piggyback rides. Soon, he quit his multiplication tables and doodled a tornado instead. 

“Every day I feel this place is too small.”

Jade-Heather Ackerman

The wait list for low-income rental housing on the Blackfeet Reservation can stretch to more than 100 applicants, and the number of unoccupied homes for sale is functionally zero, as of the 2019-2023 American Community Survey. 

“OK, let’s get ready for bed,” Ackerman told the children at 9 o’clock, ushering them to change into pajamas and brush their teeth. 

As in many homes in tribal communities, each of Ackerman’s children shares a bed. Ackerman sleeps with 6-year-old Hudson-James and 5-year-old Elegance-Rose. Dylon-Wade shares a mattress with his 13-year-old sister Patricia-Ann. Madelyn-Joy, 11, shares with her older sister Cadyn-Rae, 16. 

Crowded living arrangements are common in Indian Country, where housing supply is severely limited, mortgage financing is hard to come by, developers are disincentivized to build new housing, and federal funding doesn’t come close to meeting community development and rental-housing needs. 

A 2016 study found that 32% of nearly 500 Blackfeet Reservation residents surveyed lived in overcrowded homes, defined as housing more than one resident per room, including living rooms, dining rooms and kitchens. Decades of inadequate federal funding of tribal housing authorities means that many rental units, which amount to most reservations’ primary housing stock, have serious plumbing, heat and electrical deficiencies. A 2018 survey of more than 300 Northern Cheyenne Reservation residents found that 15% didn’t have electricity in their home, and 19% didn’t have hot running water. 

Nadine Adams, who serves on the Fort Peck Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, grew up in a five-bedroom, two-bathroom home with 11 siblings. When friends, cousins, aunts or uncles visited, she said, 30 people could be in the house at once. 

RELATED

No roads home: How a chronic housing shortage keeps reservation communities in crisis. 

Housing shortages on Indian reservations force young residents to seek opportunities far from home and discourage financially secure citizens from returning to the reservation. Funding for tribal housing is inadequate to maintain existing housing stock. Convoluted land ownership, financing hurdles and lack of access to utilities discourage commercial development on reservation land. The result is a housing landscape that doesn’t meet the needs and aspirations of current and would-be residents.

“No roads home” launches The Shelter Gap, a three-part series examining barriers to buying, renting and building homes in Indian Country and highlighting the community benefits of secure housing.

by Nora Mabie 09.29.202510.03.2025

“With that many people in a house every day, that toilet flushes 60 to 80 times a day,” she said. “Your weight works on the rafters. [You’re] opening, closing windows, opening and closing every single door. The wear and tear on that house crumbles faster than average homes. … It’s natural in Indian Country.”

Ackerman and her children lived for seven years in federally funded low-income housing on the Blackfeet Reservation, but moved out when her now deceased husband began to struggle with addiction. She remembers looking for housing while she and her children stayed in a 10-person tent in a friend’s yard.

“It’s really scarce,” she told Montana Free Press in December. “There’s really nothing available.”

The wait list for low-income rental housing on the Blackfeet Reservation can stretch to more than 100 applicants. And the number of unoccupied homes for sale is functionally zero, as of the 2019-2023 American Community Survey. 

“It’s not like there’s a housing market on most reservations,” said Nancy Pindus, an associate with the Urban Institute who co-authored a 2017 federal report detailing housing conditions in Indian Country. “The houses don’t turn over. There are not a lot of new homes being built. … If you can afford it, you can get a trailer and plunk it down someplace.” 

Ackerman did just that, buying a three-bedroom trailer home on Facebook Marketplace for her family of seven. She pays to lease the land it sits on near downtown Browning. 

MTFP reporter Nora Mabie and Missoulian photojournalist Ben Allan Smith were invited to spend time with the Ackerman family last winter. These photos offer a glimpse of the home life shared by thousands of Indigenous families across Montana.

This series was produced with support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.