Growing up poor on the wrong side of the tracks in an Illinois town across the river from St. Louis, Valerie Scott Small was two generations removed from the Crow homeland of her mother's people.
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Her grandfather had sought work in Seattle shipyards in the World War II era, and the family rarely looked back after her mother married an Illinois man.
"We knew we were Crow, but we didn't know what being Crow meant," said the 49-year-old Colorado State University doctoral candidate. "But once I came here, I didn't want to leave."
Small kept returning to her newfound family until embarking on a research project that allowed her to move to Hardin and immerse herself in science and Crow culture. She didn't come empty-handed. An education obtained against all odds - poverty, motherhood at 16, a biology teacher who told her she would never excel in science and an autistic child - qualified her to teach classes at Little Bighorn College. Once her Ph. D. is in hand, she wants to build an agriculture program at the tribal school.
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What may be her most enduring legacy is research on the Russian olive population that she says has become a forest along the banks of the Little Bighorn River as it flows north through the Crow Reservation into the Bighorn River near Hardin. She hopes that her research will help define the extent of the plant's territory and provide the groundwork for state, federal and tribal agencies to manage it.
"The Little Bighorn is a historically significant river, and also a river connected with a lot of ritual practices and social events" she said. "It's an important river for the Crow."
But it may not be a river her ancestors would recognize as their own.
Long before the first Euro-American explorers ventured beyond the Mississippi, wood from native trees flourishing in river floodplains, shaded exhausted Crow sun dancers and fueled the fires of their sweat lodges. Willows, cottonwoods and buffalo berries weaved through Crow life in rituals, as medicines and as traditional food sources.
They still do. But Small theorizes that Russian olive invader is now becoming dominant in riparian areas of reservation landscape, gradually eliminating or reducing the presence of native plants that were vital components in her ancestors' lives.
Small said she has noticed that tribal members are walking farther and farther from traditional campgrounds to find cottonwood branches of just the right size to build arbors that shade them from the summer heat.
"We posit that it is replacing, out-competing, our native plants for light, air and soil," she said. "It can withstand drought, flood, shade and browsing. It's a supreme competitor."
It grew slowly in the shade of cottonwood canopy and, in many places, created a silver-green understory beneath looming native trees. Cottonwood seedlings, requiring full sun, struggled in the shade of Russian olives thickly coating river banks. When ancient cottonwoods rotted and died, all that remained was the Russian olive thicket.
Russian olives seemed to have all the advantages. Studies on the Marias River in north-central Montana show that beaver will mow down cottonwoods but don't touch Russian olives, she said. Browsing cattle find cottonwood striplings more palatable than Russian olives, making cottonwood less likely to survive grazing, she said. While Russian olives can stabilize stream banks, cottonwood prefers soil disrupted by flooding. Modern water management practices make flooding less frequent.
Tracking trees
Searching for project for her doctorate, Small first heard about Russian olives from Connie Howe, who was director of the tribal Environmental Protection office in 2000. From there, she talked with Crow elders.
After starting work on her doctorate at the University of Southern Illinois, Small decided that CSU would be a better fit. Through grants from the Tribal College Research Grant Program and the American Indian College Fund, she launched her field research.
Last year with the help of some Crow college students, she mapped "presence points" along the Little Bighorn to analyze spatial distribution of the trees. This summer, she'll be setting up plots where the number and species of every plant will be noted, the height of the canopy measured, soil samples analyzed and animal habitat identified.
She wants to find out what percentage of native species significant to the tribe are present on the plots compared with the percentage of Russian olive. Analysis of the data will begin this winter. Based on her research, Small hopes to learn where Russian olive is going to spread next and identify satellite populations that maybe the source of future outbreaks.
"My hunch is that it's bird-dispersed," she said. "But I think it may also be spread by irrigation ditches."
While Small studies the banks of the Little Horn, she's mindful of a wall of Russian olives flanking much of the reservation's largest stream, the Bighorn River.
Regulated, dammed and diverted, its no longer the ideal environment for native cottonwoods adapted to the spring floods and summer droughts of free-flowing rivers. But Russian olive, a tree that probably began creeping onto the reservation in the 1970s, found the banks of the Bighorn River banks perfectly suited. Now mature Russian olive trees shadow the twists and turns of the once wild and unpredictable river, sometimes encroaching on fishing accesses.
Undergraduates from Little Bighorn College are taking a preliminary look at the problem on the Bighorn though a summer research program sponsored by NASA.
"The whole thing has to do with global warming and climate change," explained Roy Stewart, who is leading the small group of students. "NASA was looking for projects that affect the environment. This tree affects the environment."
In four weeks of research, the students plan to set up 10 plots along the river, Stewart said. He and the students are trudging through groves of the thorny invaders mapping likely plots with GPS and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technology.
"Once we get going with the software, the satellite can see where the Russian olives are at," student Bryan Singer said.
After they've mapped the trees and studied the light spectrum of the leaves, they can determine how Russian olives appear in pictures taken from space. Then they can compare the same coordinates with satellite images from the 1980s to gauge the spread, Singer said.
"We do hope to create an awareness within the tribe to get them involved," student researcher Annette Passes said. "We want to be part of the solution."