Meet Terri Smith.
”I honestly think this job is perfect for me right now. Because I'm getting a second chance, I want everyone to get that,” says Terri Smith, the administrator of the Northern Arapaho Reentry Agency on the Wind River Reservation in central Wyoming.
Her program helps Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribal members coming from prison readjust to life on the reservation and keep from going back into custody. The official term for that is “recidivism.” It’s the likelihood someone who’s been convicted of a crime will reoffend. Before Terri started fighting recidivism, she was the chief judge of the Wind River Tribal Court. But back then, she ended up going to federal prison herself. Her story is one of someone who turns her own struggles into a lesson that can help her community. But it also highlights how the feds came to have control of tribal justice systems. How the effects of that control are still cascading through history up until today,leaving people like Terri to pick up the pieces.
Reporter Chris Clements got to know Terri and the murky waters of the tribal and federal justice system. Chris takes us with him as he tags along with Terri on her rounds.
. . .
I shadowed Terri Smith on a Tuesday back in September of last year. Rain pelted her truck as she sped across 17 Mile road, which cuts straight through the reservation, from Arapahoe to Blue Sky Highway. In the distance, you can see the snow-streaked foothills of the Wind River mountains. There’s farmland and mobile homes, punctuated by small communities like Ethete and Pavillion.
“Sorry, I'm used to driving in the city. So people say I'm a crazy driver. I don't feel like I am,” says Terri, laughing.
A rainstorm blew over flat pastureland and doused rows of ranches, trailers, cattle. Terri wore a beaded necklace and beaded hoop earrings, her hair tied in a low bun.
She took me on a tour of Arapahoe and Riverton, two places she’s lived in all her life. Listening to her talk, it wasn’t long before I came to realize – a non-Native outsider could never do her job in the same way. A map of the reservation, and the people who call it home, has been etched into her mind. As she drove, her eyes seemed busy with memories. “I know the Little Shields live here. I know the Whites live over here. Last name White. C’Bearings over there. Lawson right here,” Terri says, “I know the Sitting Eagles live here.See all those houses right there? That's Beaver Creek Housing. So that's tribal housing, Northern Arapaho tribal housing. And that's been around since I was a kid. I remember my aunts live there, all my aunts, actually.Right behind there too, it's called the warming hut. The tribe just opened that up last winter when somebody, like, froze to death.”
Terri tended to talk fast. That’s probably because she had a lot to do. At the time, she was in charge of helping fifteen clients keep from going back to prison. Some of their stories were similar to her own.
“A lot of people need help with housing and treatment,” says Terri. “So that's what I'm helping them with right now.”
But early on in our conversation, she told me there’s been too much focus by the news media on crimes committed on reservations, without recognizing Native people’s strength and joy. She says her willingness to be interviewed is because she wants to disrupt that tendency.
“One of the reasons why I am open to talking to you is I want people to know that there's good on the reservation too,” Terri says. “There's people that are trying. And that's like, what I'm I feel like, because there's all negative. Have you seen that New York Times article that we’re the third most dangerous reservation in the U.S.? And you know what I mean, there's just like – and then you see all the crime, you know, and then bad stuff, like my stuff, too, like that left a stain, right? And so I want people to know there's good stuff here, too.”
That New York Times article she mentioned profiled violent crimes on the reservation. One line from it reads, “Life, even by the grim standards of the typical American Indian reservation, is as bleak and punishing as that of any developing country.” Some Wind River folks didn’t appreciate that story too much, or its framing.
It’s been just under fifteen years since Terri’s conviction, and she hasn't gone back to jail. Now, she’s the only employee in a program that exists because recidivism rates for tribal nations across the US are disproportionately high, according to a report from the Interior Department. It said recidivism is thirty-three percent higher for Native people – including the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes – than for other groups.
I should say, I’m not a crime reporter or historian. I wrote about tribal communities at my last job in Cortez, Colorado, near the Navajo Nation. I did stories on coal mines, public health, and hydropower projects. These days, I mostly cover Wyoming politics.
But I heard about Terri and the program when I saw a press release about it on a local online news site. It talked about the federal grant that made Terri's program possible, and it made me curious. The last line of the release said, “Currently, there is no single Tribal agency on the … reservation devoted to reentry services.”
Terri said staying out of the federal system as a recently-released tribal member is really hard for a bunch of reasons: a serious lack of affordable housing, a lack of reliable transportation, the challenge in getting official documents like drivers’ licences that are needed to get jobs. These are huge hurdles.
It was late September, and the tall grass in Arapahoe, where Terri works, was turning brown. She took me by her office in Great Plains Hall. She had a flyer for the agency hanging on her door that her partner made using ChatGPT. On it, there was a quote that read, “I am not what happened to me. I am what I CHOOSE to become.”
. . .
In Terri’s telling, her own story of going to prison started with her boyfriend.
“When we started dating, I was a sophomore and he was a first year law student. And he was the first Ute tribal member to go to University of Utah law school, and we were together for almost three years, and you know, I’d used drugs with him. I used cocaine and alcohol.”
They seemed like a power couple. Both their stars were rising. But not long after that, “He passed away from an overdose, and I found him, me and his mom, and so that was traumatic, right? Like, I'm not taught. I was never taught to deal with my grief in a healthy way.”
After her boyfriend died, Terri says she stayed sober for a month. Then she started drinking again. Once she started law school at the University of Utah, a friend introduced her to Oxycodone.
“I would take a lot of Tylenol PM, because every time I would lay down, I would think of him, but I remember taking that pain pill, and I could sleep that night. And I just, that was the first time I could sleep in months.”
The oxy felt like a lifeline during her grief. She graduated with her law degree and moved back to Wyoming. She said she was living something of a double life: on one hand, she was involved in a drug conspiracy that involved her sister and a non-Native man in Utah.
“He was selling these pills to my sister or giving them to her, and then she was getting them back here, and a cousin was getting rid of them for us.” Terri said, “And so I was part of that process. I was helping get them to my cousin, and then I was picking up the money from my cousin, sending it back to my sister, right?”
In 2011, Terri was hired to be an attorney for the Northern Arapaho Tribe.
“At the end of the last two, three years of my addiction, I was appointed judge, right? And I felt like a hypocrite, you know what I mean.” Terri says. “But I was like, how do I stop, you know? When you're an addict, you can justify anything.”
When the FBI found out, they charged Terri and her sister with conspiracy to distribute drugs. Terri was disbarred. She spent about six months in federal prison in Victorville, California, since Wyoming doesn’t have a federal prison. It was difficult for her family and friends to visit her out there, she told me.
“Now, it's a blessing, because when I was indicted in 2019, you know, I went to treatment and all that, and I think right after that is when the fentanyl hit like, and honestly, like, I thank Creator all the time like, because there's no doubt in my mind that if I didn't get caught when I did and pulled out, that I would have been doing fentanyl.”
When Terri got out of prison in 2021, she couldn’t practice law anymore. So, she worked at a transitional living center as a peer recovery specialist. She knew some people on the reservation would never be able to look at her in the same way.
Then, a councilman for the Northern Arapaho Tribe came to Smith and told her the tribe had received a grant from a federal agency to combat recidivism with a new program. He asked her to run it, and she agreed.
Terri says she believes in taking responsibility for the drug conspiracy. And I heard similar things talking with Tremayne Thunder, her first-ever client.
. . .
Terri takes me to visit Tremayne. He’s a member of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, too. We meet up with him outside the transitional living center, Eagles Hope, a small, two-story sober living complex in Riverton, right off Main Street. Tremayne is in his forties, with a goatee and an easy laugh. He steps into the car wearing a black baseball cap with bracelets on each arm.
Terri introduces us. “Chris, Tremayne. Tremayne, Chris.”
“How are you? Good?” I ask.
“All right.” says Tremayne, “How are you?”
”I'm good.”
“Kind of cold, ain’t it?”
“I know. I should have brought a jacket.”
“Chris thinks I'm a great driver, Tremayne.” Terri says. “Other people think I'm crazy.”
The three of us go to a nearby library to talk. Once we’re settled into our chairs, Tremayne shares his story of how he ended up in jail. He had a twenty-two long rifle in the car with him when the cops pulled him over on the reservation.
“I was driving the vehicle on Fourth of July, and got pulled over, coming from Lander, going to get liquor,” he says. “Yeah, and that's how I got pulled over, and I got caught with that gun. I didn't even know the gun was in there, but I took the blame for it anyway, though, you know, because I was a driver.”
Tremayne had been in the federal system years before that for aggravated assault and kidnapping, so he wasn’t allowed to have the rifle. They took him to tribal jail first, but he was released after about a month because his medical condition had gotten worse. He said he had chronic heart failure from a bad car accident and from abusing drugs like meth. A few months later, Tremayne told me he found out the feds indicted him for having the gun.
“When I did finally get arrested, and they found me at the hospital, and I was pretty, in pretty bad shape, you know.” says Tremayne, “So I think that overall, that fed, that little fed bit I did, I think it was a blessing in disguise, and it saved my life overall, you know, because I don't know why I'd be, I'd be dead already, you know, because they gave me three months to live when I did get, when I was in there.”
But after serving 21 months in federal holding in Nebraska and federal prison in Texas, Tremayne said it was time for him to come home again and start his three years of supervised release.
“When it came time for me to get released, I had nowhere to go. And that's when Terri came in. She helped me from the very start, even when I was in prison.” Tremayne says.
Terri’s new program filled a void in Tremayne’s progress toward re-entering his community. First things first, she helped him find a place to live.
“She can relate to everything, as in, all of it: the prison system, the probation system, being an addict, everything. Her story inspires me so, so much. It makes me want to do better, you know, because it can be done.” says Tremayne.
She also drove Tremayne to and from medical appointments and meetings with his federal parole officer. Before Terri created this program, there was no one to help him do that stuff on Wind River, and certainly no one who was a member of the same tribe.
“If there's a document that I don't understand, I call her, and it's just like, ‘Man, I don't understand this. Can you help me with it?” Tremayne says.
. . .
But here’s the thing. For Native people like Terri and Tremayne, it isn’t just about what they did. Because they’re Native, it’s often just as important where they committed their crimes.
That might sound like a random fluke of geography. But it’s not. If Native people commit certain crimes on reservations like Wind River – things like murder, sexual assault and arson – then they fall under the jurisdiction of the feds, not tribal courts. And even though it may seem like that nation-to-nation relationship has been that way forever, that’s not the case.
The reason behind that will lead us down a bit of a transhistorical rabbit hole.
It takes us back to the 19th century, to an old Supreme Court case named after Brulé Lakota leader Crow Dog, then to a law passed by Congress called the Major Crimes Act. And finally, we’ll wind up right back where we began: with tribal members like Terri, working day in and day out against high recidivism — recidivism that some people say is exacerbated by what happened over a century ago.
Actually, We’re Going to Decide For You
Let’s turn the clock back to 1881. And let’s change the setting from the rainswept Wind River Reservation to a dusty road on the Great Sioux Reservation, which is located inside present-day South Dakota, but before it was a state.
“I'm an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, and I teach Native history,” says Jeff Means, an associate professor at the University of Wyoming. He says the story of how the feds came to have jurisdiction over major crimes on reservations goes back to two Lakota Sioux tribal members: Spotted Tail and Crow Dog.
It starts with, obviously, a little bit of Spotted Tail’s history.” Jeff says. “He was very much one of the leaders that viewed peace with the United States as the only option.”
At that time, the US was operating under a policy of forced assimilation when it came to Native nations like the Lakota Sioux. Fifty years earlier, the chief justice of the Supreme Court wrote that tribes were “domestic dependent nations” and that their relationship to the US is like that of a “ward to its guardian.” Means says Spotted Tail was more interested in partnership and peace with the feds than Crow Dog, a medicine man who thought differently.
‘He viewed maintaining Lakota culture as more important than accommodating with the United States.” says Means.
Means explains that there’s differing stories about exactly why these two tribal members got into a disagreement on this particular day, on that road.
“In any case, it ends up with Crow Dog shooting Spotted Tail.” Jeff says.
He shot Spotted Tail to death out there on the Dakota prairie. Previous to this case, tribal nations like the Lakota Sioux were meting out their own punishments for crimes committed on tribal land by tribal members.
After that happened, the families of both men met. Following the laws of the tribal council, Crow Dog agreed to pay restitution to Spotted Tail’s family by giving them eight horses, a blanket and $600.
“The people of South Dakota were outraged,” says former Wyoming state Senator Affie Ellis, a member of the Navajo Nation and the first Native woman to serve in the state Senate. Ellis said white officials in the territory didn’t want Crow Dog to get off that easy.
“They said, ‘Look at this. They only had to pay back blankets and horses. This isn't fair. He needs to be hung.” says Ellis, “This is a capital crime.’
And so, using European ideas of justice, the U-S moved to try and hold Crow Dog accountable for his actions.
“Because in Western culture, that's what you do, right?” says Means, “If somebody kills someone, then they have to be held accountable.”
According to Means, in the culture of the Brule Sioux, they’re not necessarily thinking about punishment that way.
“Especially in an intra-tribal conflict like this, because you want to maintain peace. You want to maintain, you know, good feelings amongst the people. So you can't have an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, because that'll just cause more hurt feelings, open wounds and cause more trouble.”
Despite that, the federal Dakota territorial court tried and convicted Crow Dog for murder.
“That means being hung and killed,” says Jeff.
But Crow Dog appealed the conviction, and it got bumped up to the territorial Supreme Court, which said, “‘Yes, indeed, you know, he did commit this murder, and we do have jurisdiction,’” says Jeff.
Before too long, “the United States Supreme Court gets involved in it.”
And to a lot of people’s surprise at the time, the court upheld tribal sovereignty in the Crow Dog case. They ruled that actually, no, the US does not have jurisdiction over crimes on reservations. Tribes do. In 1883, the court found that tribes are inherently sovereign, and that they have the right to implement their own laws as one element of that sovereignty. The case, called Ex parte Crow Dog, was a big development in federal Indian law. But not as big as what happened right after.
“So he goes free. Crow Dog goes free, right?” says Means, “And this is very upsetting, not only to local authorities and so on, but really to the United States government.”
There was a backlash against that decision by members of the mostly-white U-S Congress, who, in 1885, passed the Major Crimes Act in response to the case. They didn’t like its outcome.
According to Means, “This Major Crimes Act at the time made seven offenses, federal offenses which would be handled in federal court. Murder being one of them. There's now 15 of those offenses currently.”
Under that law, Native people who commit crimes like arson or manslaughter against other Natives on tribal land will likely have their cases tried in federal courts, not state or tribal courts. In those lower courts, punishment can sometimes involve parole or time in state prison. A few people I talked to for this story told me state facilities are sometimes considered better than the federal Bureau of Prisons, a system that Tremayne and Terri spent time in.
“That's where we started seeing the dismantling of tribes regulating their own affairs with the assumption that they weren't doing it properly,” Ellis says. “So I think what we're trying to do is get back to that, because more federal intervention hasn't been the solution.”
Two crimes listed in the Major Crimes Act are felony assault and kidnapping. Tremayne had been convicted of both before he was caught with that rifle in 2022. But the newest development to this generational story comes with Terri’s program. She can really help people like Tremayne. She’s not some faceless federal bureaucracy trying to acclimate them to society – she’s a fellow tribal member who gets it.
What Happens Now?
So, in Jeff Means and Affie Ellis’s view, more federal intervention is not the answer. But it is the reality that many Native Americans have lived under for decades. In the years since the Major Crimes Act passed into law, more violations were added to the list, and the feds’ jurisdiction in Indian Country has broadened. Reservations like Wind River are a patchwork of different jurisdictions: county, state, federal, tribal. That can make communication and efficiency difficult.
Jeff believes there’s a direct correlation from the Major Crimes Act and Crow Dog to the challenges tribes face today, especially those high rates of recidivism from earlier.
It's really one of the first major assaults on tribal sovereignty,” says Jeff Means. “It's caused problems universally throughout Native America. I mean, it still affects people today, obviously, because of the need to have federal officers involved with, you know, 15 specific criminal offenses.”
He says it’s often an ineffective system to have the feds involved in Native issues in remote, rural areas.
“Basically, what the United States is saying is that you people, all of you Native Americans are incapable of having a proper justice system, so we're going to have to have one for you,” says Means.
Recidivism has been a problem on the Wind River Reservation for years. According to Paul Ricketts, the chief U-S probation officer in Wyoming, in fiscal year 20-23, almost 76 percent of Native Americans who were released from federal custody violated their release somehow and were put back on court supervision, or sent back to jail or prison, or ordered to a halfway house. 76 percent were sucked back into the system. But compare that to almost 43 percent of non-Native people in Wyoming doing the same thing, during that same period.
For Means, it comes back to tribes having their sovereignty stripped away by laws like the Major Crimes Act. But there could be a solution that the feds and tribes could start moving toward, step by step.
“Because assimilation was total, sovereignty would have to be total,” says Means. “That would mean creating independent nations within the borders of the United States, giving Native Americans the choice to become their own nations. Now, that's a process that obviously is going to take decades.”
The US Constitution recognizes tribes as sovereign nations –– but what that looks like in practice is pretty complicated. Means told me a lot would need to change about the tribal, federal relationship so that full sovereignty can be restored, in areas like education and land rights. Tribal members on Wind River, for instance, can’t fully own their own land – it’s often held in trust for them by the feds.
“If ever we're going to get back our control of our criminal justice, we have to be given the kind of resources we would need to become an independent country.” says Jeff. “That means to build an infrastructure so that we could have judges that were trained to be judges that we, you know, in criminal judges, etc, that we'd have enough lawyers and so on. And we have, there are a lot of Native nations that have those, but not everybody does, right?”
This is something I heard from multiple people in the process of reporting this story. That as harmful as the Major Crimes Act was and is, it’s become so entrenched that the path forward for Native communities isn’t as simple as, “repeal the law.”
“We lack correctional facilities, obviously, in the tribal system,” says state Representative Ivan Posey, a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe and currently, the only Native member in the Legislature. Even if both tribes did have the power to enforce all their own laws, “We'd be pretty much stuck with that same situation where, who do you house them at, you know?” says Posey.
In the meantime, people like Terri are working on the back end against an all-too-common outcome: a Native federal prisoner ending up back in the system. Even if her tribe doesn’t have the power to fully manage its own justice system yet, she can still try to keep people out of it. Her program is one of a kind on the reservation.
“To the extent that we can rely more on tribal governments and tribal courts to provide those services, the better off I think everyone is,” says former lawmaker and Navajo tribal member Affie Ellis again. And reentry services like Terri’s aren't just new to the Wind River Reservation: they’re new to many other tribal nations in the US.
Terri’s goal is to reduce recidivism among her reentry clients by 50 percent. Affie says she supports that.
“When the feds are involved, they don't necessarily have the wrap-around services that really make a difference when it comes to treating an individual, not just the crime, in a punitive way. But how do we restore that individual so that they can live in that community in a really productive way?”
But Affie is worried about the program’s dependence on federal grant money from the Bureau of Justice Assistance.
“We've seen this time and again in Indian Country: great idea, great program. Here's some funding. Tribes get something going, and then money runs out, they lose the grant, and then the program's gone.”
The tribal court that Terri served on when she was indicted by the FBI was new and, at the time, it felt like big progress. All its judges were women. Just as both tribes were starting it up in 20-18, the feds gave it new power to investigate domestic violence cases. But it doesn’t have much teeth. It can only issue misdemeanors, not felonies. More serious crimes still fall under the feds’ or state’s purview.
And then there’s the Wind River Tribal Reentry Court, which is separate from everything else we’ve heard about so far. It’s made up of a district judge, US attorney and public defender – all feds – and one representative each from the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes. The team meets on the reservation to talk with tribal members directly.
People on supervised release like Tremayne meet with the court regularly to make sure they’re following its rules – or they could go back to prison. Again, this is different from Terri’s program, which is completely voluntary.
So before the reentry court started up about a year ago, tribal members often had to travel or be taken all the way to Cheyenne or Casper to meet with the nearest district judge.
“They came to us and said, ‘What can we do to help this situation? How can we be better?’” says Sunny Goggles, one of the tribal representatives on the court and the program director of White Buffalo Recovery Center. That 76 percent number from earlier – the number of Native people in the state who somehow brush up against the criminal justice system after getting out of prison – it hits home with her.
“That just blows my mind,” says Sunny. “But I see it. I see it with family members and relatives.”
The bottom line for Sunny will always be that the federal government controls much of the tribes’ judicial system, including punishment for more serious crimes like felonies.
She says she appreciates her colleagues on the reentry court a lot. But she has her doubts about the feds she works with on a broader level than the court, like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons.
I like the feds that I work with, but I really think on the federal system, you know – it's a job, it's a job,” says Sunny. “I don't think their heart is in it. I don't think their heart is for our community, and unfortunately, we don't have control over these systems. There's not a lot of dialogue between the federal system and the tribes.
You Do What You Can Do
It’s summer now, and the Big and Little Wind Rivers are beginning to run full. The grass at the powwow grounds in Ethete is shining bright green. Bees are hovering overhead.
Tremayne Thunder recently had open heart surgery at a hospital in Casper. He has a girlfriend now, and he’s staying with her in Riverton as he recuperates. When I call him up, he’s excited. He told me he’s about to finish his three years of supervised release with the reentry court.
“And I'm just barely finishing, almost finishing up Wind River reentry,” says Tremayne.“So, you know, all right, that's a good thing. Friday the 6th, would be my last time to check in over there. And then I graduate in July. So here we go.”
Tremayne says he’s been reading books by the wellness author Joe Dispenza and going to Narcotics Anonymous. He’s happy these days, he says.
Terri recently had her law license reinstated by the state of Wyoming. That means she’s not only helping her clients with daily life, but she’s able to help some of them deal with ongoing legal issues, too. I give her a call to check in with her, because I’ve heard she’s thinking of moving to Montana with her family. She tells me her partner worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He was going to be relocated to Billings for work. But he ended up taking the deferred resignation offer that so many federal workers are being offered right now.
“I feel like, for me, it was just a sign that I'm still supposed to be here during the reentry program, you know, like, I'm, this is a grant.” says Terri.“We still have three years left in it, so I just take it as a sign that I'm still supposed to be here helping.”
For the record, Terri says the grant that funds her program can’t be taken away by the feds as part of the federal DOGE efforts. She’s been growing into her job at the reentry program. And she was recently interviewed by National Native News, for a documentary series coming out soon about criminal justice on reservations.
“I love connecting with my clients. I've learned how to have a better work life balance. You know, especially as a person in recovery, you know, I know what doesn't work, how much before. So now I'm very big on keeping the schedule, writing things down, making sure my work life and home life don't collide. But I enjoy it, and I enjoy it, you know, my – the word is getting out a lot about the program. It's a little overwhelming sometimes, because I'll get, like, 20 calls a day, but it's just learning to be firm with people. And yeah, I like it. I honestly, like – now that I know I'm staying, I just feel like, okay, I'm supposed to be here. And I’m just excited to make the program better.”
Tremayne tells me he doesn’t like to think about where he’d be right now if Terri and her reentry program didn’t exist. And Terri says she’s getting more calls than ever from potential clients, some still in prison.
Programs like hers have proven to be effective. One analysis showed that reentry programs can reduce recidivism by as much as 62 percent. For the foreseeable future, Terri won’t be going anywhere. That means she’ll be answering calls at her office in Arapahoe, or shuttling clients to and from reentry court meetings. There’s always so much more to do. But this is a good start.