William Snell
Billings resident William Snell was to be honored in Helena on Friday for his decades of work to improve the health and wellbeing of Native Americans in Montana.
Snell, currently the project manager for the Montana-Wyoming Tribal Leadership Council, along with six other individuals and organizations, is to receive a ServeMontana Award at noon Friday in the old Supreme Court chambers of the state Capitol.
The awards will be presented by Gov. Steve Bullock on behalf of the Governor’s Office of Community Service. Terry Zee Lee , also of Billings, who nominated Snell for the award, said Snell “has a long history of immersing himself in people’s lives at the right time.”
Much of his work has been done through the Pretty Shield Foundation, which Snell founded in 1997 with his mother, Alma Snell, a widely known activist for children. Alma Snell was the granddaughter of Pretty Shield, a medicine woman and prominent member of the Crow Tribe, who died in 1944.
Sherry Matteucci, a former U.S. attorney for Montana and a member of the board of directors for the Pretty Shield Foundation, said she became acquainted with Snell when she was hired more than 10 years ago to help reconstruct the Crow Tribal Court system. Snell helped her with that task and then was hired, on her recommendation, as the tribal court administrator.
“I have the highest respect for him,” Matteucci said. “He’s a truly committed individual whose entire focus is on service and projects that are done with integrity and respect for Indian culture and tradition… . He’s also just a wonderful person.”
Lee met Snell through his work with the In-Care Network and said she was “very impressed by his passion and enthusiasm for what he was doing.”
“He’s a very, very effective leader,” she said. “He is demanding and wants accountability for people’s actions and teaches them to be thoughtful and purposeful in what they do.”
At the Pretty Shield Foundation, he started cultural immersion camps, which offer American Indian youths a chance to reconnect with their tribal heritage in natural settings. These have proved to be especially powerful ways of dealing with seemingly intractable problems like alcohol and methamphetamine addictions.
More recently, Snell has been working on the Dragonfly Initiative with Floating Island International, in Shepherd. The initiative aims to restore tribal waterways through natural systems pioneered by FII founder Bruce Kania.
Bruce Kania’s wife, Anne, said in a letter of recommendation supporting the governor’s award, that though she had known Snell for barely a year, “such is his openness—and willingness to jump in with both feet—that I feel he is already a firm and trusted friend.”
In addition to all his public good works, Snell and his wife, Karen, raised three sons and 36 other children as therapeutic foster care parents.
