Indians getting straw houses

BOZEMAN, Mont. — Robert Young had no idea when he first met Katherine Red Feather on a South Dakota Indian reservation how much his life was going to change.

Young, at the time a successful clothing entrepreneur living a comfortable life in Bellevue, Wash., had come to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, prompted by a newspaper article he'd read about older residents on reservations dying during the winter because of inadequate housing.

Shocked that such a thing could happen, he decided to "adopt" one elderly reservation resident. He came away from his first meeting with Red Feather, whose whole family lived in a tiny trailer, knowing he couldn't sit by and do nothing: He was going to build her a house.

"I had some friends who were builders so I said, 'Let's go down and build one house. We'll take two weeks,' " Young said. "Fortunately I found a bunch of other people foolish enough to say, 'Gosh, let's try this out.' "

It was 1995. Young's crew returned to the reservation and built a home for Red Feather. Still struck by the plight of so many others on the reservation, Young founded the Red Feather Development Group that same year, a nonprofit named after his adopted grandmother. Two years later, he sold his clothing business, left the corporate world, and now devotes all his time to coming up with innovative ways to ease what he says is a housing crisis on reservations.

"I didn't want to walk away from it after seeing it but didn't have any illusions that we were gonna build homes for everybody in Indian country," Young said recently from the group's office in Bozeman. "It's an enormous problem."

The group estimates that over 300,000 of the 2.5 million residents of Indian reservations are either homeless or live in substandard and often dangerous houses.

The group has adopted a unique approach to addressing the housing shortages. Red Feather specializes in the design and construction of homes and buildings made mostly of straw bales, an inexpensive and energy-efficient building material that provides high insulation value. The straw bales form the walls, which are then covered in stucco.

Volunteers do much of the building work alongside the new homeowners, who put in a certain number of hours of "sweat equity" to be eligible for one of the homes.

Red Feather also helps them secure a mortgage, something that has frequently proved elusive to potential Indian homeowners, and to purchase or lease land, which can be difficult due to complicated land ownership on reservations.