Before she began working as deputy director of Lakota Funds, Ellen White Thunder had built a background in construction. She was certified as a residential building inspector. She was a certified pipelayer. She had her certification in plumbing inspection.
“I love everything about construction,” she explains. And she knew that knowledge in construction would be needed on Pine Ridge and other reservations in South Dakota, where there was not just a shortage of homes, but a shortage of the people who could build them and make sure they were safe.
“I wish it was as easy as saying, ‘let’s build some houses,’” White Thunder says. “But there are barriers every step of the way.”
Tawney Brunsch, executive director of Lakota Funds, has long been aware of those barriers. A founder of the
South Dakota Native Homeownership Coalition, a partnership focusing on increasing the number of Native families who achieve homeownership, she has been immersed in this work for decades. It was Brunsch who came up with the idea of an internship program to train Native workers in construction. She started the program, which NeighborWorks has helped support for the past eight years. The coalition has also started a training program for appraisers and inspectors.
Individually, Brunsch says, the numbers aren’t earth shattering. But all together, their efforts have made a significant difference when it comes to housing on Native land in South Dakota.
Challenges and solutions
The challenge to building new homes starts with the land, Brunsch explains. Some of the land in South Dakota is held in trust for Native Americans who want to live on the reservation. Some is held in Tribal trust. Some is individually allotted, and some of the land has been taken out of trust – off-reservation land known as “fee simple” land.
“If it’s Tribal trust land, you need to go through the tribe to acquire a lease,” Brunsch says, which can mean a lengthy approval process.
The next challenge is with the homes themselves. Because there’s no “extra” housing stock, “we don’t have Realtors; you can’t just go to Zillow to see what homes there are to purchase.” On Pine Ridge, most of the homes are either “stick built,” meaning built on-site using lumber, or “factory built,” meaning manufactured housing, often built on the factory floor and then moved to a permanent location. But even with factory-built housing, construction is involved – for basements, for example, or for a foundation.
Contractors are hard to find. There are plenty of tribal members who have the skills and are using them, she says, but they’re often employed on larger projects or developments, not individual homes.
The need to encourage more individual contractors to build homes prompted both the internship program and the Lakota Construction Summit, where people across the construction field good meet, learn and network. “The whole goal was capacity – to make as many resources available as we could in one setting.”
There are other barriers, too. In financing, which is where Native Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) often fill the gap. And in finding appraisers once a home is complete.
When a home and a loan are on trust land, it requires an appraiser familiar with trust land, Brunsch says. “There’s always a big demand for appraisers but even more so in Indian land; it can take months.” So can the wait for an inspector.
The coalition has managed to increase the number of both through the EDA Good Jobs grant.
“We’re not just improving systems,” Brunsch says. “We’re creating systems where there weren’t any.”
Internship program
“How can we help you be there for our Native families wanting homes?” This is the question Brunsch and the coalition put to contractors years ago. The answer came quickly.
“We need a workforce,” they said.
That’s when the coalition began the construction internship program, working with local tribal colleges to
identify students who may be interested in being placed with local contractors for hands-on experience.
The coalition pays the interns for 10 weeks. It’s not just a win, Brunsch says. “It’s win, win, win.”
The contractors get help and show the interns exactly how they want the work done. The interns collect $15 an hour, 40 hours a week. In summer of 2023, for example, 188 students applied to be construction interns. The coalition took 74 of them. Forty five of them took jobs with the firms after the internship ended; others went on to college or other opportunities, says White Thunder.
The internship program started on two sites – Cheyenne River and Pine Ridge – and has expanded to include Sisseton and the Rosebud reservations, and Crow Creek. “There’s such a demand for this program,” Brunsch says. “All of our tribal communities have the same struggles to get an experienced workforce – and a struggle to connect youth with well-paying job opportunities. I wish it happened faster.”
It’s hard to tell how many people statewide are looking for homes, Brunsch says. “But at any given time, our housing authority has a list that is 5,000 people long.”
White Thunder says a family member demonstrates how crowded housing conditions can be. “She lives in a three-bedroom, one-bath home. But at any time, she’ll have 17 to 21 people in her house. You don’t turn people away on the reservation; you find a way to make it work.”
That’s what the coalition is trying to do: Make it work. Homeownership is new to Indian country, and the homeownership rate is below that of other demographic designations. “Sometimes, we’re not even tracked.” Nationwide, the rate is around 50%, according to the NCRC, but Brunsch suspects the number is much lower in her part of South Dakota.
The coalition is figuring out the best path to homeownership in the state, including providing down payment assistance to make homeownership more affordable. The group is also working on creating building codes for the reservation, which hasn’t had them in the past.
“It’s so important to have a healthy home,” White Thunder says. I “It can impact not just your health but your mood and your energy.”
Lakota Funds and the coalition are considering all of these aspects as they tackle barriers, one by one.
Finding trainers who know the community is important. White Thunder remembers one trainer who did a solid job talking to her students who hoped to become housing inspectors, but the examples of the homes he showed his students were homes valued at $750,000. “They looked nothing like the homes on the reservation,” she says. “The issues were different,” she says. So White Thunder found a trainer from the Gila River Reservation near Phoenix. He visited Pine Ridge and studied the housing stock. He got a better idea of what the students in the class would see. Last year, 40% of the class passed the inspection certification exam – higher than the national average.
The program
White Thunder starts each intern with a box of tools and week of orientation on safety and soft skills, including communication. “The contractors that participate – they really want the interns to be successful,” she says. “They want to increase their workforce.”
Chris O’Bryan, president and owner of LaCreek Development in Martin, South Dakota, has participated in the Native Internship Program several times. His organization has 50 employees scattered around the state, most of them on the Pine Ridge or Rosebud Reservations.
“The biggest issue I have is the labor pool,” he says. “We get into all aspects of construction, and we struggle to find qualified, skilled staff. It comes down to training someone in house.”
The internship program allows him to do just that.
“On some construction crews, the older guys will give the younger guys a hard time, but we push them to bring the new guys under their wing and get them to the point where they can do things for themselves.”
Having the interns “has definitely increased my reach,” he says. “We have interns try roofing, concrete work and carpentry. We give them a wide variety of experiences because there are so many aspects of construction.”
The program gives interns a realistic look at construction. If they don’t enjoy it and decide to choose another field, “that’s part of the learning.”
O’Bryan’s interns have been as young as 16, but are usually in their 20s. “Last year, we kept two. This year, we may keep even more.”
Interns work through the summer, the busiest time of year. The commute to get to the property can be long, he says. And so are the days. They come equipped with basic tools, which White Thunder provides them with through a grant. “It makes them more efficient when they get to the job site and they feel like they fit in,” O’Bryan says.
Hank Two Bulls learned about the internship program from a friend. “He knew what I was looking for,” he says. “So I said I’d try it.”
That was two summers ago. Two Bulls started the summer working on a bus garage. “A lot of digging. A lot of concrete.” But as the some wore on, the project halted. When he asked for more hours, he was moved to LaCreek Construction Company, where he started doing carpentry work. The work felt familiar, and he caught on quickly. “They asked me if I wanted a job after being intern and I said ‘yes.’”
Now, he says, he does a little bit of everything. Carpentry. Concrete work. Painting. Remodeling. And when he has friends who are looking for something to do, he tells them about the internship program. “Friends, family, everybody,” he says. “I’m always mentioning it.”
