ROCKY BOY -- About the only thing Ken Morsette couldn't print in the Stone Child College's print shop is the college's own tribal history book.

Not for lack of equipment. There are new machines to print artworks with 200-year archival ink, machines to make banners and T-shirts, and binders to enclose catalogs and magazines as well as copying presses. An established Cree Indian artist, Morsette knows the demands of the printing world.

"Word's getting out of what we're capable of doing here," he said. "There are some UM (University of Montana) professors who are looking to outsource printing work here. Now we're looking at contracts where we'll need a few more bodies to come in and help."

Stone Child is another translation of the Chippewa Indian leader who gave Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation its name. The place literally leaps out of the prairie, a volcanic extrusion of timbered mountains 140 miles from the Rocky Mountain Front. It lies between the relatively major cities of Great Falls and Havre, on a road where it's common to pass more antelope than cars.

The Chippewa and Cree tribal members who live there belong to what used to be two of the largest Indian nations on the continent. How they wound up on Montana's smallest reservation, and how one band known as the Little Shell Chippewa never got a homeland at all, highlight a big reason for compiling the tribal histories.

Two years ago, Stone Child College and the state's six other tribal colleges took on the Montana Tribal History Project. Their mission was to provide the backbone material in Montana's Indian Education for All program a constitutionally mandated duty the state's schools had ignored for almost four decades.

But as anyone who's looked up their family tree knows, history projects have a tendency to change lives. In the tribal colleges' case, the Montana Tribal History Project was like a membership to an academic health club. They came away with new strength and more flexibility to serve their people.

Morsette has draft pages of "The History of the Chippewa Cree of Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation" stored in his computers, although publication stalled for months in disputes among tribal leaders. The hardware Stone Child College bought with its history project funding is already making an impact.

"The council is realizing how important education is," Morsette said. "We create all these jobs."

Surprise bonus

Across Montana, the Tribal History Project has produced similar unintended benefits for the colleges that undertook it. At Fort Belknap Community College, students are learning video production with the cameras and editing programs purchased for producing elder interviews.

At Fort Peck Community College in Poplar, researching the tribal government helped topple a controversial council chairman and spark the first redrafting of the reservation constitution in almost 50 years.

"This has been a big boost for the pride of our college and the pride of our people," Chief Dull Knife College President Richard Little Bear of Lame Deer told state legislators last summer in Helena. "It was the first time many of us had done anything like this. We learned how to do research at various museums, and developed writing skills for people who were afraid to write. We learned to edit books. Community colleges often do not have enough personnel to do everything. We ended up doing a quality job in the very short time we had."

There was also an air of challenge. As Fort Peck Community College President Jim Shanley put it, "People put us in positions where we're going to fail, and then say: 'See, you people can't handle those things.' We weren't going to let that happen."

Far-flung project

Montana's seven tribal community colleges are spread around the rim of the state. To reach them all requires a journey of nearly 1,300 miles. Shanley skipped last summer's legislative update on the tribal histories where Little Bear spoke. Leaving his office in Poplar for a two-hour meeting at the Helena Capitol typically involves a three-day trip. By air, it's the same distance as traveling from Boston to Washington, D.C.

The colleges serve anyone wishing to attend, but they live for the more than a dozen American Indian tribes that call Montana home. Indians make up Montana's largest racial minority, about 66,000 of the state's 1 million residents.

At 6 percent of the total, they're also Montana's only noticable minority. And they're hard to notice, because more than two-thirds of them live on those isolated homelands.

Giving reservation communities a sense of forward motion is a big part of Margarett Campbell's job at Fort Peck. One Thursday afternoon last October, the college's vice president drove 56 miles from the campus in Poplar to pick up students in Culbertson and Brockton so they could see a truck show in Wolf Point, 20 miles in the opposite direction. She often mounts "search-and-rescue" trips to find absent students and cajole them back to class.

Campbell also serves in the state House of Representatives, where she will be House Democratic floor leader in the 2009 session. She's one of seven tribal members in the Legislature.

"Five of those seven Indian legislators had close connections with their local tribal colleges," Campbell said. "They lobbied that those were the intellectual centers of each tribal community. That set in motion the decision to have the colleges handle the job."

College with many hats

Those community colleges already have significant jobs. Serving between 200 and 1,000 students, each provides a mix of academic muscle and social glue. Blackfeet Community College historian and former president Carol Murray put it simply: "Our institution is open the most hours and longest hours of any institution on the reservation."

Like community colleges throughout the nation, Montana's tribal colleges specialize in rapid response to student needs. When the Wyoming oil fields needed truck drivers, Little Bighorn College -- located 44 miles from the Wyoming border -- expanded its commercial driver's license training.

The colleges also serve as a safety net for those seeking four-year degrees.

"There's a lot of culture shock," said Ed Stamper, Stone Child's director of foundations and research. "These kids have never been off the reservation. No one's there to tell them what to do. So they end up back here finding some success and then going on to achievement. We train people to get four-year degrees. They take their first two years at Stone Child as a block and then enter the university as a junior."

Many see their community college as a community center. They may take or teach the occasional class, work on its staff or use the campus as a meeting place on reservations that often have no restaurant or hotel. Most campuses have a mix of Native and mainstream instructors and professors, making them one of the few multicultural places on otherwise racially isolated reservations.

And the colleges are a financial center. Separate from the tribal governments, they have their own sources of federal dollars from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security Administration, Department of the Interior and Department of Education.

"This is the one place on many reservations for real free thought," said Salish Kootenai College President Joe McDonald. "It's not under threat from the tribal council or chair. It's a place where people can take a breath."

Making waves

Tribal colleges and tribal governments typically keep an arm's-length relationship. The Tribal History Project got mixed receptions on different reservations. Gros Ventre and Assiniboine tribal council members participated in Fort Belknap Community College tribal studies professor Sean Chandler's video interviews.

Rocky Boy's leaders created three unrelated "cultural committees," each believing it had editorial control of the Stone Child College history book.

At Fort Peck, researching tribal history at the college put a spotlight on the reservation council actions.

The college campus in Poplar appears to cover about two city blocks. In fact, it owns dozens of buildings scattered in this community of roughly 1,000 people. On a tour of his domain, Shanley walks in a short-stride shuffle that covers a surprising amount of ground in hurry.

He pops into a former house that's been turned into a hazardous materials disposal classroom. In a warehouse on the edge of Poplar, he opens a door to reveal a nearly finished medical office. When Fort Peck Indian Reservation's health center needed a new pharmacy building, Fort Peck Community College carpentry students built it as a class project inside their warehouse.

Shanley has led Fort Peck Community College for a quarter-century. The last five of those years have been politically tumultuous, with tribal council Chairman John Morales elected and removed from office twice. It was also the time when college historians were interviewing people all over the reservation about their experience with tribal government, and what they remembered about the old constitution's drafting in 1960.

"He had factionalized the government," Shanley recalled of Morales' administration. "He was advocating for change, but he was very authoritarian. He thought the tribal chairman should have complete authority.

"Opposition to him helped push the constitutional convention, and that sprang out of the history project. This is one of the first democratic machinations that has occurred on the Fort Peck Reservation."

Shanley led the way into the tribal government office. The council chamber was dark but full of people, as an out-of-state energy company representative displayed a PowerPoint map of the reservation's potential oil drilling sites.

"Prior to 10 years ago, you could ask people on the street and they'd say, 'Constitution? We have a constitution?' " Shanley said. "Now we have a more educated voting public in terms of how the structure is supposed to work. Now we're going to have better citizens."

Click here to view the multimedia site available online.