by Jared Miller

Browning, Montana (AP/Great Falls Tribune)

The Blackfeet Tribe’s best efforts to help troubled reservation kids were falling flat in 2002.

That’s when the tribal business council paired a former Bureau of Indian Affairs cop with a social worker and asked them to find ways to keep at-risk youngsters on the right path.

Four years later, social worker Francis Onstad and retired BIA officer Shanny Augare are known as the Blackfeet Juvenile Justice Planning Team. And they’ve raised more than $12.2 million in major grants, most of it to help children overcome social problems, and to build healthy families.

Their latest success, a $9 million federal grant announced during October, will help create mental health services for children who are considered severely emotionally disturbed, or SED, and their families.

Tribal Councilman Fred Guardipee, himself the former head of Blackfeet law enforcement, complimented Augare and Onstad for their efforts to serve the reservation’s youth and elders.

“This last grant, this $9 million, is going to go a long way to serve our troubled children and our families,” Guardipee said.

Onstad attributes the duo’s success largely to the expertise that she and Augare bring to the job.

The current model for major Indian Country grants requires a mix of social services and law enforcement, Onstad said. Grant writers who can combine elements of both in their proposals have a good shot at winning money.

Onstad said she’s also driven to fund children’s programs by the fact that Montana’s prison population is about 17 percent American Indian, while Indians make up only 7 percent of the state’s population.

“If you don’t service them when they’re young, they end up in the prison system,” Onstad said.

And Onstad said she works hard to win grants because, frankly, her paycheck depends on it. The Juvenile Justice Planning Team receives no money from the tribe.

“We have to fund our own salary,” she said.

Onstad’s and Augare’s biggest accomplishments include a $260,000 grant to help law enforcement handle victims of domestic violence; a $300,000 grant to help educate the community about rural victimization; a grant worth $250,000 a year since 2002 to help run the tribe’s youth detention center; a $300,000 grant to rehabilitate the youth detention center; a grant worth $450,000 a year for three years to help kids cope while their parents are in prison.

The latest grant was awarded by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s one of 25 grants awarded nationally by the group, for a total of $184.5 million.

Onstad said the first year of the grant will allow the tribe to establish the programs for severely emotionally disturbed kids and to hire staff. About 15 full-time and part-time employees will be hired to design the program.

Children will begin receiving care next year. About a dozen permanent people will be hired, including a psychiatrist, a psychologist and case managers.

“We have to develop all the services from the bottom up,” Onstad said.

The focus will be on helping the whole family. The project will draw heavily from Blackfeet cultural healing practices.

The program will work closely with the tribe’s White Buffalo youth detention center, which is still under investigation by the FBI for alleged abuses against child inmates last year, Guardipee said.

Onstad said she is certain that with hard work and enough funding, the tribe can start to improve the lives of troubled reservation kids and their families.

“Basically, the kids are not bad kids, they just need maybe a little discipline and maybe a little services,” she said. “And we’re here to help find funding and to get these services off the ground.”