Dibbs in the Snack Shack
I own the Snack Shack. It’s a little food shop near the high school here in Browning. I’ve been running it for four months but today is the first day I opened it as the owner. I just bought the business. This is actually the second business I’ve owned. I used to run a pizza delivery company here in Browning. That only did so-so. I wasn’t making a lot of money, but I got by. You can still see the sign for that business. It’s a couple streets over from here.
This town has so much unemployment and very few business owners. There are two franchises here on the rez, Subway and Taco John’s. Those are both white-owned. Everything else is somebody taking a chance. So even though there’s 80 percent unemployment, people find ways to open up places now and then. The Town Pump Gas Station is white-owned too. The only really successful Indian-owned business in the town of Browning is Sinclair’s Gas Station.
Out here on the reservation, all the state jobs that you can get are for non-Indians. That’s because they only hire educated people. But I think it’s really the lack of development and loans that makes unemployment so big here. To start this business, I got no loans from any financial institution. I went to school for accounting at the University of Montana, so I know all about this stuff. I was born in Washington and my mother and dad are both Blackfeet from Browning. When I was three, we all moved back here. After high school I moved to Seattle for a while, but I came back and worked for my uncle in Babb, another town here on the rez, for a couple years. Then I got in a really bad car accident. It damn near killed me. I was physically unable to work, so I went to college in a wheelchair for the first semester and crutches for the second. I had no insurance at the time, so I got no settlement at all. I really lost out there. It was a weekend party thing that caused the accident. There are lots and lots of drunk-driving crashes here.
This place, the Snack Shack, is like a convenience store for the high school kids. I got a 600-student client base right there. We paid extra money, like goodwill, to the school for the right to serve the kids. Teachers come over too. The candy and stuff pretty much sells itself, but the number one item that these kids like is cheese fries and nachos. I get the cheese out first thing in the morning when I get here and start getting it heated because I know at lunchtime there’s going to be a rush on the nachos and cheese fries. They like pretzels too.
LLOYD “DIBBS” DEVERAUX
