Plenty of other federal agencies also have subsidy programs for Indians. For instance, the Indian Health Service, based at the Department of Health and Human Services, had a 2015 budget of over $4.6 billion. And the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Native American Housing Block Grant Program has a 2015 budget of $650 million.

In recent years, payments from Washington have increased and the size of the Bureau of Indian Affairs has ballooned. But according to most of the people I interviewed on reservations, the problems seem to have become worse. Driving through Lame Deer, the center of the Northern Cheyenne reservation, some buildings were boarded up. Small said there used to be another market and a few other stores when he was growing up.

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“Free money.” That’s what Karl Little Owl, a Crow legislator, calls the funds coming from the government to build the Apsaalooke Warrior Apartments. The first development project on the reservation in a decade, Apsaalooke will be an $8-million, 15-bed veterans’ home, according to a sign at the groundbreaking ceremony.

The development wouldn’t have been possible without a combination of federal, state, and private donations. The Crow tribe is broke, Small said, for a variety of reasons. There’s next to no economic activity on the reservation. On the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation in Montana, the unemployment rate is 78 percent. According to the BIA, unemployment on the Crow Reservation is 46.5 percent.

The tribe, according to its leadership, owes HUD about $3 million. In the 1990s, the agency built most of the homes on the reservation, and the tribal leadership promised to exact a small monthly payment from each homeowner in order to repay the debt. Conrad Stewart, who used to work in the tribal housing once and now chairs the Natural Resources Infrastructure Committee for the tribe, said that the payments were to be between $20 and $30 a month.

The tribe members refused to pay, and now the situation is getting bleaker. HUD, the tribal leaders said, refuses to build any more homes until the money is paid back. And so no homes are being constructed or repaired. Instead, more and more people are moving into each small trailer home. The result is that many tribal members between the ages of 18 and 40 “don’t have homes,” according to Stewart. When the tribal government attempted to pass a law that would require people to pay their debts, many legislators were voted out of office.

But what choice do Crows have? Almost no one on the reservation can afford to build a home, because no one can get a mortgage. And no one can get a mortgage because the property on the reservation is held in trust by the federal government; most of it also is “owned” communally by the tribe. No bank could ever foreclose on a property, because the bank can’t own reservation land. The Bureau of Indian Affairs can determine what is “fair market value” for a piece of property and prevent one party from selling land to another. “We are the highest regulated race in the world,” said Stewart.