ST MARY, Montana — In a regular spring season at Johnson’s of St Mary, the RVs would be pulling
into the more than 150 sites with sweeping views of
Glacier National Park.
Campsites would start filling up. The kitchen would start churning out homemade
soup and bread.
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But last
spring, everything was quiet at this tourist destination in the corner of
northern Montana, where the Blackfeet Reservation meets Glacier National Park.
It had to be.
TheBlackfeet Nation’s tribal Business Council closed the eastern entrances of the
park, which sit on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, in an effort to protect
the tribe from further exposure to the coronavirus. The pandemic, which has
ravaged Indigenous communities across the country, has taken a devastating toll
on the Blackfeet Nation and Native Americans in Montana. On the reservation,
where fewer than 10,000 people live, 47 have died from the virus. Statewide,
Native Americans make up one-third of Montana’s more than 1,400 COVID deaths,
according to the state public health department, despite being just 7 percent
of the population.
Nathan St
Goddard, a Blackfeet tribal member who runs Johnson’s, is hoping for a better
spring this year. On March 17, the business council voted to allow him to open
— with vaccination rates of eligible people on the reservation reported close
to 95 percent.
“The best
part about my business is the history,” St Goddard said. “My grandparents ran
it, my mom ran it, and I want to keep the legacy going.”
The 30 or so
businesses here rely on visitors to Glacier National Park, and owners spent the
precarious past year with their livelihoods pitted, in part, against the
council’s priority: to keep everyone as healthy as possible.
“We lost
people,” the business council chairman, Timothy Davis, explained at a February
meeting. “We didn’t want to lose any more.”
Other losses
had piled up though. Last May, Jennie Walter, who owns Rising Sun Pizza in St
Mary, posted a video on Facebook pleading with the council to reopen: “Please,
see us. Know us. We are a small, proud business and we need your help.”
The long
year has been, St Goddard said, a “no-win situation.”
“I risked
looking insensitive to make a dollar, which isn’t true,” he said. “I just wanted
to open safely and feed my family.”
Now that the
council has opened the entrance, the business owners are gearing up for the
spring and summer season, cautiously optimistic that coronavirus infection
rates will stay low enough to safely stay open.
And, as
Stephen Conway, a Blackfeet tribal member who runs Heart of Glacier RV Park,
put it, their corner of the world might be particularly appealing now.
Visitors, he
said, “come to our area to get away from crowds and people.”
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