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The snowcapped mountains surrounding northwest Montana’s Flathead Reservation are a sign winter is coming.

Mary Lefthand pulls her truck up to a warehouse in the valley below.

She’s driven over the town of St. Ignatius, to pick up free food from the commodity program run by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

Tribal commodity food programs are federally funded, but weren’t impacted by the federal government shutdown.

Unlike SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), which was very much under threat.

During the government shutdown, SNAP’s 41 million recipients didn’t know if they would receive benefits for November.

Lefthand receives SNAP. She prefers it to the commodities program, because with SNAP she can go to the grocery store and pick out her own items.

But during the shutdown, she became increasingly anxious amid the uncertainty over SNAP payments.

She decided to switch to the tribal commodity program.

“Because I have three growing grandkids that eat a lot,” she explained. 

Lefthand relies on food aid for her entire grocery budget. But often it still isn’t enough for her and her three grandchildren.

“Toward the end of the month, I feed them plain rice and whatever I can find,” Lefthand says.

When the Trump administration said it wouldn’t send SNAP payments for November, tribes scrambled to fill the gap. Any disruption to food aid can hit American Indian communities particularly hard.

“More than 60% of Native people rely solely on that source of food as their primary source of food,” says Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, professor of medicine and rural health at Oklahoma State University.

Research indicates that forty-six percent of Indigenous Americans struggle with food insecurity every year, compared to about 10% of the general U.S. population.

SNAP has resumed regular payments, but tribes and their members may continue to see financial strain from the disruption to the program.

For some tribes, the commodity food programs provided a partial backstop. Tribal members who live on reservations are allowed to enroll in a commodities program, or SNAP, but not both.

A lot of people on the Flathead Reservation, like Lefthand, couldn’t wait to see how SNAP payments would play out, said Nicholas White, who manages the Salish and Kootenai Tribes Commodity Program.

“I got a pretty good stack of individuals,” he says, flicking through a thick stack of applications. “That’s the number of people that are coming over to our program.”

Tribal communities who don’t participate in the commodities program were left scrambling to prevent families from going hungry.

The Blackfeet Nation in northwest Montana declared a state of emergency, and slaughtered 18 buffalo from its herd. Tribes across the West also killed more bison than they otherwise would have.

However, many tribes are in the early stages of growing their herds. Any animals they kill now can significantly slow down that growth.

Tescha Hawley runs the Day Eagle Hope Project, a nonprofit on the Ft. Belknap Reservation in northeastern Montana.

She was able to divert some grant funding to help buy up cattle, and sent that meat to temporary food banks throughout the reservation, home to the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes.

The grant money was originally meant to help tribal farmers and ranchers sell their food locally. Many tribal communities are food deserts, so tribes and nonprofits who work with them have been trying to increase access to local food sources.

During the shutdown, many tribes also increased the amount of food they handed out through their self-funded food aid programs as well.

Tribes and nonprofits won’t get reimbursed for the extra money and resources they expended, says Yadira Rivera, director of Native Agriculture and Food Systems Investment at the First Nations Development Institute.

“That’s going to leave them with a future problem,” she says.

Some tribal food programs will continue to be stretched thin through the holiday season, traditionally their busiest time of the year, Rivera says.

Tribal families may still be feeling a cascade of financial impacts after the disruption, even though the SNAP program eventually received a full year of funding in the deal that ended the shutdown.

During the weeks of uncertainty, families may have skipped rent or another bill to put food on the table, Rivera points out.

Studies have shown when people lose access to food assistance, they suffer other financial consequences.

“There are a lot of people who get evicted when they lose food aid, because they spend their money on food, you got to eat,” said Georgetown Law Professor David Super, who studies welfare law.

Another example: Losing SNAP can force people to choose between buying their medications or food, according to Super.

Lefthand was grateful she was able to switch quickly to her tribes’ commodity program. That prevented her from getting behind on bills, she says.

“I am going to stay on commodities for a while. When they do get the food stamps back on, I’ll probably get back on that,” she says.

But there’s a bureaucratic hurdle she’ll have to navigate first.

To enroll again in SNAP, Lefthand will have to drop off the tribal commodities food program for at least a month, in order to qualify.

This story comes from ReadNOW’s health reporting partnership with Montana Public Radio and KFF Health News.