Roman is Burning: The struggle of American Indian football

Roman Stubbs
GameDay Kaimin

After Browning High School’s first football game, a 42-7 loss to Columbia Falls, their field is reduced to dirt. “Our field is in pretty bad shape after games,” said Browning head coach Robert Miller. “Sometimes I wish we had better facilities for football here. Not a lot of people believe in our football.”
This is the epitome, if not the plight, of Montana American Indian football.
After all, this is the same Browning, Mont., A hotbed for the state’s most gifted athletes, where cross country and track state titles are won, where basketball phenoms are heavily recruited, and where high school football gets lost in translation.
Putting talent onto the football field isn’t supposed to be a secret. For most Montanans, American Indian football is a secret, always has been. Since 1900, only five reservation teams have won state titles, in any division. The last one came 26 years ago. To scratch the surface of a 100-year struggle, I made four phone calls to men who know the struggle, starting with Miller.
Miller has been the head coach at Browning for seven years, and to be blunt, he tells me that the last time the Browning program had anything to brag about was almost 20 years ago in 1989, when he was a player for the Indians’ 6-3 playoff squad. In the 18 years since, Browning has had multiple-season winless droughts, including a five-year stretch in the mid-‘90s when the Indians didn’t win a single game. There is no youth development of football in Browning. There is no great lineage of experienced coaching, where the game’s grassroot fundamentals can be taught early to the kids. Talent isn’t discovered without these essentials. Miller does tell me that many of his players have talent, including his quarterback, all-around athlete Andrew Spotted Wolf.
“He has all the tools to be a great football player,” Miller says. “He’s fast, athletic, has a great arm and he’s shown flashes. But if our team isn’t working together, his talent isn’t exposed very well.”
Dr. Ronald Trosper is a professor at the University of British Columbia and has noticed the cultural trend of authority figures in American Indian lifestyle, especially in sports. Trosper is a Harvard-educated member of the Flathead Tribe who thinks young American Indians don’t traditionally respond to the type of coaching demonstrated in football.
“This isn’t a culture that accepts a dictator,” says Trosper, who cites the story of the 1918 Carlisle Indian School, a team that featured the legendary Jim Thorpe. Coached by Pop Warner, the team made historic headlines with upset wins over Navy and West Point, which Trosper attributes to Warner “listening to his players and how they wanted to play. They received him well, and wanted to play for his indeginous leadership.”
But Trosper understands that the culture of football isn’t like that of Warner’s freelance tactics, which could commonly be found today on the basketball floor. His analysis surfaces perhaps the most intriguing question of all, that of the American Indian individualistic approach to athletics.
Hays Lodgepole coach Shawn Mount answers that question. “Just like our ancestors did, as warriors thousands of years ago, its important for people to live by the deed, which is to prove yourself for yourself,” he says. “You’re not going to change a thousand years worth of indigenous tradition.” Mount’s team is 0-4 this season, and hasn’t had a winning season since the mid-1980s. Like Browning, Hays Lodgepole had a five-season span in the late ‘90s where they didn’t win a game. Paradoxically, it has been in the running for a cross country title every year in the past ten, and the boys basketball team won the Class C state championship last season, led by the states best player, 6-foot-5 junior A.J. Long Soldier, who has wowed Montana with his uncanny run-and-gun style. However, he doesn’t play football.
“I would love to have A.J. out on the field. He has so much football talent, he’d be like our Randy Moss,” he tells me. Long Soldier has lived his deed on the basketball floor.
In 2005, only 79 American Indians played on Division I teams. While talent is there, recruiting on the reservations is a challenge. Just ask UM Northern head coach Mark Samson. He has had eight American Indian athletes in his four years with the Lights, none of who have continued on in his program. Samson has tried to tap into the four reservations situated around Havre, and even has implemented a summer camp, trying to lure young American Indian talent to the confines of his school.
“I’ve called Browning, Harlem, Rocky Boy – the coaches just tell me none of their kids are interested,” he says.
Samson then discusses the different mentality between football and basketball, but still becomes lost in translation with the struggles of Indian football. He tells me of one instance last season, when he was watching Browning play Havre in basketball.
“There was one kid, about (6-foot-4) who was just blessed with ability,” he says. “I thought to myself, man, I’d love to turn this kid into a college football player. Line him up at receiver and run routes through him, or at safety where he could just run around and hit people. I could see it.”
Samson can see it. So can Miller, but many others can’t. The American Indian football precedent has been set.
“We roll into towns, and people yell racial slurs, telling us we can’t play football,” Miller says.
In December the Browning football field will lay as a rock field, under a sheet of snow, covering another year, another barren memory in a 100-year struggle. Fifty yards up the hill, some of the state’s best athletes will be in an energy-filled gym, playing for another state basketball title. Andrew Spotted Wolf will be in the middle of it all. And what of his football talent?
That will be out in the cold, too, staying Montana’s best-kept secret.