Montana Blackfeet

ELOUISE COBELL

Yellow Bird Woman

Elouise Pepion Cobell, also known by the Blackfeet name Yellow Bird Woman, left an indelible impact on communities far and wide. A tribal elder, rancher and accountant, her story stands out in history as that of what President Obama called “A Champion of Native American rights.” For VISIONS, she represents the model of an engaged citizen, and she connected us to the land, history and community of the Blackfeet Nation in a profound way.

Elouise’s legacy as a tribal activist developed from her career in banking. She served as the Treasurer of the Blackfeet Tribe for more than a decade, founded the first national bank located on a reservation and owned by a Native American tribe, and won a MacArthur Genius Award for her work on Native financial literacy. Her credentials do not end there, and most notably Elouise was the lead plaintiff in a landmark class-action suit against the U.S. Department of the Interior and Department of the Treasury for mismanagement of Indian funds.

While Treasurer, Elouise discovered irregularities in accounting that showed the Federal Government had been short-changing tribes across the country since the 1800s. She spent more than a decade seeking reform in Washington D.C. before she and other Native American representatives filed the suit in 1996. We now know this case as Cobell v. Salazar, which was ultimately settled in 2009 for $3.4 billion. By then it had spanned three presidencies, engendered seven trials and gone before a federal appeals court ten times. The settlement was allocated to paying personal damages, repurchasing land for reservations and communal tribal ownership, and a scholarship fund for Native students named the Cobell Educational Scholarship Fund in honor of Elouise. In the aftermath of the settlement, the Secretary of the Interior created a new commission to evaluate the Indian Trust system and in 2016 President Obama awarded Elouise with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Elouise was an inspired communicator. And every summer she took time out of her rigorous schedule to meet with VISIONS students, who were riveted by hearing her account of Blackfeet struggles and the throughline relationship of those struggles to the injustices that had been propped up by the case . We were also honored to hear about the Cobell case directly from Elouise, who always brought clarity to complex and century-old issues.

In the early 2000s, Elouise invited our program to be the summer caretakers of a beautiful conservation ranch on the reservation, a responsibility and homebase that we continue to honor today. After Elouise passed in 2011, the ranch was renamed the Yellow Bird Woman Sanctuary. Although she is no longer with us in body, Elouise is part of our program through spirit and family. Her brother, Dale Pepion, managed the ranch and was a beloved friend until his passing in January 2019, and her niece Joan Cobell is our dinner cook.

To learn more about Elouise’s impact on VISIONS, read here what our Executive Director, Katherine Dayton, shared after Elouise passed. And to learn more about Elouise’s work, check out the documentary, 100 Years.