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A new blu-ray disc manufacturing plant could bring 150 jobs to the Blackfeet reservation town of Starr School, Mont.Photo Courtesy Blackfeet Tribe

Blackfeet Initiative Helped Land Blu-Ray Plant

By Annie Greenberg

In the midst of a crumbling national economy and a local unemployment rate teetering toward 80 percent, residents of the Blackfeet reservation in Montana are nothing short of burgeoning, bubbling optimists.

Many of them are keeping busy learning about and making preparations for a new blu-ray disc manufacturing plant that will be established in Starr School, Mont., within the next year. The plant would be a branch of Spokane-based Blue Ray Technologies, the largest independent manufacturer of blu-ray discs, a high-definition form of DVDs. The plant will bring 150 new jobs to the reservation.

And it all started with a prayer.

According to Harold Dusty Bull, who served as an unofficial liaison between the company and the tribe, it began when his nephew went to Seattle for a minister's conference and met Erick Hansen, the CEO of Blue Ray Technologies, through Hansen's pastor and spiritual adviser.

"Erick told him he wanted to bring his company to an Indian reservation, so my nephew invited him out," Dusty Bull said. "In July a group of us gave him a tour, he said it was the ideal place, and so we just jumped on the possibility from then on."

Unofficial ambassadors flew to Spokane at their own expense

Dusty Bull said he and three other men from the reservation — his nephew, Titus Upham, Arlyn Edwards and Evertt Armstrong — who comprise the unofficial Blue Ray-tribe liaison, flew to Spokane at their own expense in September to tour the manufacturing plant there and officially commit to trying to make the project happen.

And without their commitment this wouldn't have gotten off the ground, according to Emorie Davis Bird, the planning and development director for the Blackfeet tribe.

"The tribal government was not involved in this — the community needs to be credited because those guys did all the leg work in having the company come out here," she said. "And that's what you want in a community — for them to be organized and empowered and effect change like this."

Dusty Bull said he was surprised by how active the community was when it came to the public meetings about the possible plant.

Community held a huge feast to help win project

"When we had water negotiation meetings, only three or four people would come out — but every time we met for blu-ray we got at least 30 or 40 people there," he said.

"When Erick came out to the reservation for a big dinner, to tell everyone that if you want me, I'm here, everyone in Starr's School cooked the whole meal — they had roasts, corn, potatoes, the full 100 yards, and the community paid for every bit of it."

Davis Bird said that on a reservation with a summer unemployment rate of 69 percent and a winter rate of 75 to 80 percent, the promise of 150 high-paying jobs with benefits cannot be overstated.

Lona Burns, 36, of Browning, Mont., knows what it's like to struggle on the reservation. She's a single mother of four children ranging from 7 to 17.

"Because we have so much unemployment, there are a lot of people living on welfare, on food stamps," she said. "The school, the hospital and the tribe are the three biggest employers, so if you don't work for one of those groups you have to find odd and end jobs on the rez ... you'll end up seeing a lot of new street people coming out younger than me."

150 jobs can change the future for the whole community

Burns said while she went to tribal community college and then went on to go to the University of Montana in Missoula, she had to come back to take care of her family when her ex-husband passed away.

She said because of the few opportunities for advancement on the reservation, she knows many people leave and — if they can make it — never come back. That's one reason she was excited to hear about the blu-ray plant coming, she said.

Dusty Bull said that, while the prospect of all those new jobs still feels like a storybook ending to a lot of hard work, to him, the plant will bring more than that.

"One-hundred fifty jobs means there's going to be 150 families with a steady income. One-hundred fifty jobs means our economy on the reservation is going to go up and create other businesses — schools are going to be impacted because poverty is so hard on education, not just on jobs," he said.

"Jobs are important. Jobs bring self-worth to people," Dusty Bull said. "I even see crime going down. I see alcoholism going down because people have hope in the future. We need to destroy poverty and the only way we're going to do that is through revitalizing our reservation — that's what I see this doing."

Greenberg reported from Columbia, Mo.

Annie Greenberg, Eskimo, is a journalism student at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She worked as a reporter at the Navajo Times for one year and interned as a reporter at the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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