For members of the state’s far-flung tribes, who make up nearly 7% of Montana’s population of roughly 1 million, protective attitudes toward elders and cultural heritage have shaped a pandemic response around defending the most vulnerable rather than prioritizing economics. Tribal leaders across the state say reservation shutdowns and stay-at-home orders will continue for now, as widespread, proactive testing for the virus on reservations gets underway.

“For the most part, in general, wider society has put more value on the young, not so much on elderly and the information and experience and knowledge,” said , a Democratic state legislator and member of the Crow Nation. “Whereas with tribes, the acknowledgment and respect of elders as the carriers of the cultures has always been there.”

The stakes are high for the Crow and other tribes. Even with strict protective measures, ramped-up testing has already revealed a number of positive cases among the Crow, and members are braced for more.

For these Native American nations, losing an elder to the coronavirus, or any untimely death, is no small matter. Elders are often the bearers of vanishing languages, history and important cultural knowledge. The Indigenous populations here are small — fewer than 80,000 people in this state combined — so any losses would be significant.

“When an elder dies, there’s a whole history, a whole line of information that we lose,” Stewart-Peregoy said. “It’s like the library burning down.”

Several tribal leaders have pointed southwest to the deadly outbreak in the Navajo Nation as evidence of the need for strict measures to ward off outbreaks. There, in the reservation that covers a swath of Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, more than for the virus and at least 246 had died through Sunday. So far, none of Montana’s tribes has had an outsize virus outbreak, but small clusters have left many wary.

“We’re very concerned that we’re going to lose the last of those with the history of the people, the ceremonies and the traditions,” said Rae Peppers, a Crow member who lives on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in eastern Montana. “That’s what we’re really protecting.”

Montana is home to seven reservations and the Little Shell Chippewa Tribe, a landless nation granted federal recognition a few months ago. Across the state, where new positive cases have been relatively rare in recent weeks and testing has been made more widely available, nation leaders plan to continue their stronger stance as the rest of Montana shifts into something closer to normal life. Montana adopted stay-at-home orders early on and cases have remained relatively low — through Wednesday, one of the lowest rates in the country.

But already a handful of new positive cases have emerged in recent days on the Crow reservation with the wide availability of testing. Big Horn County, which includes the Crow and part of the Northern Cheyenne reservations, has ticked up to more than 30 positive cases.

In the state’s northwest corner, the Blackfeet Nation announced plans to test everyone living on the reservation and opened drive-thru facilities with free swab tests. In a letter to members earlier in May, Robert DesRosier, the tribe’s emergency response manager, urged people to continue to abide by lockdown orders, saying, “Blackfeet are being inconvenienced, not oppressed!”

Some people fear that the state’s reopening to tourism without mandatory quarantine or testing for visitors will set up more conflicts with Indigenous nations that have chosen to keep their borders closed. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead reservation, located in the heart of one of the state’s most popular vacation regions, has suspended all nonresident recreation on reservation land and urged residents to report infractions to tribal authorities.

Already, tribes have dealt with people taking flight from pandemic hot spots, attempting to shelter on reservations that have no active cases. On the Northern Cheyenne reservation, Peppers said tribal leaders have kicked out a handful of nonresidents camping, believing it to be a haven from pandemic hot spots.

A major concern for the Northern Cheyenne is a highway that brings heavy truck and tourist traffic from the Dakotas into Montana. The tribe has set up checkpoints to make sure those visitors do not try to shelter on the reservation, putting tribal members at potential risk.

“Everybody comes through here, and all we’re asking is they keep moving through,” Peppers said.

Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock has urged respect for the tribes’ decisions to follow their specific protocols — and even supported the Blackfeet’s decision to close access to the eastern entrances of Glacier National Park, which draws millions of visitors each year. That’s a far different response than in neighboring South Dakota. There, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem demanded that the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe remove checkpoints from state and federal highways through their reservations. Her hard-line response to the tribes’ protective measures has raised concerns over the governor’s respect for tribal sovereignty.

In Montana, meanwhile, some tribal officials said they are mostly satisfied with Bullock’s caution to let tribes set their own rules amid the pandemic. But Native nations fear the potential incoming surge of tourists when restrictions are lifted will set up conflict and new dangers.

“It’s unfortunate because what the Crow Tribe is trying to do is protect its own for public health and safety, and you wind up with people coming in just for recreation,” said Stewart-Peregoy.

For the Little Shell, the country’s newest recognized tribe, the situation is different still. Because the tribe has no reservation and no Indian Health Service Clinic, protecting elders is more challenging. Little Shell tribal chairman Gerald Gray said members are taking the virus threat seriously, but the situation is confusing.

“It’s one of those things, for us it’s really hard to tell where things are at, because we don’t have a clinic or a service unit to help our members,” said Gray.

The tribe has secured testing supplies for members, however, and offered free tests from the state at a drive-thru facility in Great Falls.

Across Indian Country in Montana, there have been no protests in favor of reopening or organized calls for getting back to business as usual. Instead, Peppers said, the scattered protests from some non-Indigenous people against stay-at-home closures have been puzzling.

“It’s such a lack of respect for the situation, it’s silly that they’re protesting it,” she said. “Maybe it’s because they’ve never experienced trauma.”

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A Flathead County health board member who led a movement to disparage the protective safety orders and downplay the virus is now the subject of two competing petitions — one to expel her from office and another to keep her.

When the commissioners in this county of about 104,000 people appointed Dr. Annie Bukacek to the health board in January, they might have known they were getting into a political hornet’s nest. “Dr. Annie,” as she’s known in the Flathead Valley, is a well-known and outspoken opponent of vaccinations.

Then, as the coronavirus spread into Montana and the crisis deepened here and across the country, she became a leading voice locally and in this politically purple state against government restrictions to curb its spread.

In a widely circulated video posted on social media, Bukacek cast doubt over official COVID-19 death tolls, saying medical professionals were pressured to attribute non-COVID deaths to the virus. In many communities, such as New York City, though, the deaths from the virus are now believed to have been . Many public health experts say historical comparisons show the counts nationwide are still .

On her Facebook page, Bukacek often posted criticisms of Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock’s stay-at-home orders, stating they weren’t based in science. Bukacek did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But on April 25, just days after the governor announced the state would begin easing restrictions that he credited with flattening the COVID-19 curve, Bukacek wrote, “I fervently pray we stay awake, as governors return freedoms they never had the right to take away in the first place.”

All this might seem to be just another fringe backlash against public health regulations, but Bukacek’s critics say she has power and authority as a member of the county health board, which manages the local response to disease outbreaks, including quarantine and isolation orders, plus related directives to businesses and schools. They say her actions risk lives.

Her critiques also mirror a growing movement that has mounted protests across the United States. While surveys show an directives and other measures to slow the spread of the virus, loud protests have materialized from Montana to Michigan to Kentucky. Health workers and others, in turn, are countering the protesters.

This fight over social distancing highlights the preexisting political divide in our country that now has taken on more edge given the economic and life-or-death implications for all.

The Flathead Valley is a microcosm of this fight. It’s a gateway to Glacier National Park, making it a haven for affluent tourists and retirees. It’s also a predominantly white populace in a spot bordering two large Native American reservations. And it has been a frequent, often reluctant, haven for political controversy, sometimes branded a haven for white supremacists and anti-government activists.

In 2010, right-wing pastor Chuck Baldwin moved from Florida to the county seat of Kalispell and built a following with his Liberty Fellowship, which defied coronavirus public health orders early on and held in-person church services.

Though Montana has been one of the states hit least hard by COVID-19, with a confirmed caseload of as of May 5 in a population of 1 million, Flathead County has had more cases than all but three of the state’s 56 counties. As of Tuesday, the county had reported 37 cases.

In Kalispell, where nearly 24,000 people live, many health care workers fear Bukacek’s anti-social-distancing movement could be risking their lives and the health of their patients.

Joan Driscoll, a nurse practitioner who has worked in health care in Kalispell for 20 years, said protests and false information spread by Bukacek have created widespread anxiety in the community.

“The danger to our community is that she is in a position of authority, as a physician and a voting member of the board that oversees our community health clinic,” said Driscoll. “By ignoring the mandates of staying at home and avoiding crowds, she is with her actions telling people those mandates — that are flattening our curve and keeping our hospitals under control — are wrong. That’s harmful to me and all other health care workers as we see more and more people infected with this virus.”

Local organizers have started a — an effort that’s so far drawn more than 2,300 signatures. A has garnered more than 4,500 signatures. Local officials have not put the issue on their agenda for discussion, though one county commissioner told the Flathead Beacon newspaper he .

Human rights groups fear Bukacek and the backlash against COVID-19 restrictions will recruit new adherents to the far right. Residents of Kalispell have already reported that a new Friday night “community cruise” of cars parading down the main drag has included displays of Confederate flags in a county that borders Canada and wasn’t a state during the Civil War.

“For a lot of people, it feels like she’s come out of nowhere over the last couple of weeks,” said Travis McAdam of the . “The reality is she has a long history of work in these far-right circles and is a fairly known quantity, especially for organizations who work around the legislature.”

Cherilyn DeVries of the Love Lives Here anti-discrimination advocacy group in Whitefish, a smaller community in Flathead County that weathered a white supremacist troll storm, said locals need to speak out against the anti-science, anti-public-health messages being broadcast in the region.

“Right now, she is intentionally creating controversy,” DeVries said of Bukacek. “She is trying to pit people against each other. She’s trying to get people to see the hospital and the health department as the enemy, when these are the very people who you’re going to go to to save your life.”

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