In Indian Country, Winter Isn’t a Season
It’s a Crisis-in-Waiting

Published January 12, 2026    By Joshua Arce

Before sunrise, the cold settles deep into Birney, Montana. For Michael Bryant Jr., winter mornings begin with tending the woodstove—clearing ashes and feeding the fire. He does this to ward off the Northern Plains cold that seeps through the walls of his house and settles in his bones.  He does everything he can to hold onto the heat inside his small home.

Michael is 60 and lives alone. He doesn’t have a car, and the nearest store is nearly 30 miles away. When temperatures drop below freezing, there are no easy backups—no quick trip for supplies, no extra margin in the budget. Every log matters. Every degree of warmth is earned.

“I have to work hard to keep the house warm,” says Michael. Even with federal energy assistance, winter pushes his fixed income to its limits. Electric bills can reach hundreds of dollars a month, and buying firewood simply isn’t possible. If he had a saw, he says, he would cut his own.

Winter, for Native Americans like Michael, is not just a season—it is a structural problem that renders it a pending crisis. One shaped by decades of underinvestment in housing, energy access, transportation, and food systems across Tribal lands. In communities like Birney, these gaps turn cold weather into a serious health risk, hunger into a constant concern, and basic necessities into difficult tradeoffs.

Native American households earn, on average, tens of thousands of dollars less per year than non-Hispanic White households. Many Elders live on fixed incomes in homes that rely on wood-burning stoves or outdated, inefficient heating systems. When winter arrives, they must stretch limited resources across fuel, electricity, and food—often without reliable access to grocery stores or community services.

Michael’s daily routine—hauling wood, managing heat, watching expenses—is not about resilience alone. It reflects a long history of land dispossession, infrastructure exclusion, and economic marginalization that continues to shape life for Native communities today. Understanding this history is essential to understand why winter remains such a dangerous and unequal burden—and why community-based solutions matter.

Historical Roots: Policies That Left Tribal Lands Behind

To understand why winter can be life-threatening in reservation communities, we need to look at how infrastructure and land access developed in the United States, and more importantly, who was left out of that growth.

Electricity Access and the Rural Electrification Act

The Rural Electrification Act of 1936 is credited with transforming rural America by bringing power to farms and small towns. But much of Indian Country was left out of this development. As one review notes, many parts of the Navajo Nation and other reservation lands were excluded from early electrification efforts — a decision that shaped decades of underinvestment in essential infrastructure, including dependable electricity for heating, water pumping, and food storage.

This early exclusion made energy systems in reservation communities weaker, more expensive, or simply nonexistent — problems that still resonate today.

Bennett Freeze: Decades of Halted Development

Another example is the “Bennett Freeze,” a federal policy that froze all development on land shared by the Navajo and Hopi tribes within the Joint Use Area from 1966 until 2009. For more than four decades, homes could not be improved, roads could not be upgraded, and utilities could not be expanded. This policy effectively stalled housing and infrastructure improvements, leaving many families to endure poor insulation, unreliable heating, and substandard living conditions that make winter survival harder.

The Dispossessed

The legacy of land dispossession and exploitation adds another layer. On reservations such as the Pine Ridge Reservation, the Oglala Lakota Tribe experienced outright removal from traditional lands and economic marginalization that resulted in persistent underdevelopment. These historical injustices shaped community conditions that today contribute to poverty, food insecurity, and inadequate housing and infrastructure.

Not only did these past policies limit access to land, but they also disrupted traditional food systems. As organizations advocating for food sovereignty point out, resource extraction and land dispossession have weakened Indigenous communities’ ability to grow, hunt, and harvest food in ways that would otherwise support their health and cultural continuity.

Systemic Failures Converge in Winter

The legacy of excluded infrastructure, halted development, land dispossession, and underinvestment is not abstract — it plays out in real challenges for Elders living on reservations, especially during the winter. These systemic factors shape four key conditions that make winter a pending crisis, not just a season.

• Infrastructure and Fuel Access: For many Native households, winter heat depends on wood-burning stoves, coal, or fuel vouchers—not because these methods are preferred, but because decades of underinvestment left many reservation homes without reliable access to modern utilities. Aging homes, limited electrification, and high energy costs mean Elders often rely on whatever fuel is available, affordable, and close at hand.
• Housing Conditions: Homes on many reservations suffer from poor insulation, outdated heating systems, and overcrowding. Decades of underinvestment mean that when temperatures drop, heat escapes quickly and fuel consumption rises steeply — a terrible combination for households already stretched thin financially.
• Geographic Isolation: Many reservations span vast rural areas with limited transportation, making access to groceries, medical care, and heating supplies especially difficult during snowstorms and extreme cold. For Elders without reliable transportation, these distances often mean going without essentials.
• Food Insecurity: Hunger among Native Elders is not simply the result of individual hardship. It is closely tied to land dispossession, limited economic opportunity, and food systems that were disrupted generations ago. When winter limits mobility and fixed incomes collide with rising food costs, the result is a quiet but persistent crisis.

Without consistent heat, meal preparation becomes a risk: food spoils, cooking is difficult, and the physical strain of heating the home and preparing meals becomes too much.

Solutions Are Community-Led

Despite generations of barriers, Native communities aren’t waiting to be rescued. Across the Southwest and Northern Plains, Tribal Nations are building their own solutions rooted in self-determination, cultural knowledge, and community leadership.

On the Tohono O’odham Nation in Arizona, the Tohono O’odham Utility Authority (TOUA) works to expand access to safe, reliable electricity and water in communities long excluded from regional infrastructure development. Similarly, the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NNUA) provides power, water, wastewater, and renewable energy services across one of the largest and most geographically challenging service areas in the country. These efforts are some of the many institutional efforts to preserve health, safety, and dignity on Tribal lands.

At the same time, many urgent needs remain unmet. That’s where partnerships become essential.

Community leaders and Tribal programs often collaborate with trusted allies like our organization, Partnership With Native Americans^® (PWNA) to fill critical gaps throughout the remote and isolated reservations spread throughout the Southwest and the Northern Plains. We deliver firewood and fuel during winter months, supplying food to senior centers, and support Elders when institutional systems fall short. These partnerships respect Tribal leadership while responding to immediate needs created by long-standing inequities.

The most effective solutions recognize two uncomfortable truths at once:
Native communities are leading their own futures while still navigating the consequences of historical exclusion.

Progress is happening, but the crisis isn’t over. Many Native Elders are facing another winter with limited heat, rising food costs, and homes that were never designed to withstand extreme cold – from the Southwest to the Northern Plains. Each season brings familiar risks—and without sustained attention and support, the same families are forced to make the same impossible choices year after year.

The Solution

Addressing winter hardships in Native communities requires more than seasonal relief —it calls for long-term understanding and action. Here are a few ways you can support meaningful change:

• Learn whose land you live on. Take time to understand the Tribal Nation connected to your community and the policies that shaped reservation boundaries.
• Support Native-owned businesses and initiatives. Economic sovereignty is a powerful tool for strengthening communities year-round. You can start by visiting our #BuyNative page.
• Listen to Native voices. Seek out Native-led journalism, history, and storytelling to better understand both challenges and solutions.
• Support Native-focused organizations. Whether through donations, advocacy, or sharing resources, organizations working in partnership with Tribal communities play a vital role in meeting immediate needs while honoring long-term goals.

One of the simplest steps you can take is to become more #NativeAware.

Being #NativeAware means learning how history, policy, and systemic inequities continue to shape daily life in Native communities today—and sharing that knowledge with others. It means recognizing that winter hardship, food insecurity, and energy insecurity are not isolated issues, but the result of long-standing decisions that can still be changed.

Winter may expose the cracks in our society—but it also reveals the strength of communities working to repair them.