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"What would it be like if I didn't have a home?" That question provides the guiding principle of Robert Young's Red Feather Development Group, a nonprofit organization he founded to make a difference for the some 300,000 homeless American Indians living on reservations and the some 60 percent of those who put up with substandard housing. In the last six years, with the help of hundreds of volunteers and tribal members, and the celebrity support of Robert Redford, Pearl Jam and Oprah Winfrey, Red Feather has been able to provide and assemble two new homes on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and one new home each on the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne reservations in Montana as well as complete much-need renovations to buildings on native lands. While four homes and necessary repairs in six years might not sound like a lot, Red Feather is doing what it can, and has become the only nongovernmental program working with two million people who still call Indian Country their home.

Young, 40, admits that he wasn't spending much time mulling over the plight of Native Americans back in 1993. Rather, he was busy visiting ski mountains out west in order to drum up business for his clothing company, which designed T-shirts for various resorts. "I don't have a history of community service whatsoever. I don't even have a charitable history," he explains from his home office in Seattle, where he and his wife, Anita, serve as Red Feather's only two full-time staff members. But while on a trip to Taos, New Mexico, he came across a story in a local paper about how several Native American elders had frozen to death during the harsh Northern Plains winter due to a lack of adequate housing. Young was a bit incredulous. After all, the story hadn't been running on the networks or CNN, and from what little he knew about Native Americans, he assumed that most of Indian Country was doing well—he had heard, for example, of the success the Pequots and Mohicans had been experiencing with gaming on reservations back east. On a whim, Young decided he needed to see the state of these nearby reservations for himself. His first sojourn was to the Pine Ridge Reservation, and he was horrified by what he observed. "To say the least, it is a very difficult place—literally, Third World conditions," he recalls. "Forty percent of the homes didn't have running water, and almost all of the homes were in such bad shape."

Young's findings on that initial visit were indicative of a much larger problem. A 1996 federal assessment of the country's reservations had turned up some horrible truths: although Native Americans account for only one percent of the total US population, they account for eight percent of the nation's homeless, and those fortunate enough to have homes will often pack up to 12 people in a 700- or 800-square-foot hut. On Pine Ridge, for example, only 3,000 homes exist for the 35,000 tribal members living there.

"I knew after visiting Pine Ridge that I couldn't just walk away from it, that, by not doing anything, I'm really part of the problem," Young says. Through the Adopt-a-Grandparent Program, he began corresponding with Katherine Red Feather, a Pine Ridge elder. When Young asked about her living conditions, Katherine told him that her large family lived in a compact trailer. Designed to shield its inhabitants from the subzero temperatures of the South Dakota winters, the trailer became excruciatingly hot in the summer's 110-degree heat. As a result, Katherine said, her brood had taken to residing in an abandoned school bus during the warmer months. Initially shocked and subsequently inspired by Katherine's letters, Young decided in 1995 that he was going to build a house for her. He began talking to friends and a few carpenters, and convinced 14 of them to take two weeks off from their normal jobs to spend 20-hour days alongside tribal members making a stick-frame house for Katherine.

One of those early volunteers was friendly with Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, and convinced the rocker to join in on the project, a move that brought a good deal of media attention to Young's good deed. Just as important was the fact that Gossard provided most of the capital to complete the residence. "It was a very steep learning curve for us," Young says of that first project, "because we had to work with numerous government organizations, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Indian Health Services, as well as the tribal government in order to get that home built." With Katherine's blessing, Young took her name for his fledgling organization. Gossard, who continues to lend his support, has commented that "Serving the folks at Red Feather as a board member and as probably their least-qualified carpenter has been an honor and an amazing experience."

Red Feather's leader admits that he hardly had any idea of what he was doing at the time: "As a people, Native Americans have been promised so many things, and now they've found themselves completely disenfranchised," says Young. "It's a difficult road. I'm an Irish guy who grew up in Seattle. We had to prove ourselves." Martha Lou Bear Quiver, 38, agrees. Martha lives with her husband and four children in a four-bedroom, two-bath house, which Red Feather volunteers built last summer on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. "A lot of people on the reservation were shy when Red Feather started working," Martha says. "But by the end, everyone was happy, because I had been waiting for my home since I qualified for a loan five years ago."

At the same time that Young was learning to ingratiate himself to tribal members, he was establishing himself as a skilled pitchman for his organization. A letter from Young to Robert Redford resulted in the actor asking the attendees of his 1998 Sundance Festival to donate to the group, a gesture that helped raise over $50,000 (a significant sum, as the cost of a Red Feather–designed two-bedroom, one-bath house is $60,000). And in February of this year, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey bestowed an Oprah's Angel Network Use Your Life Award on Red Feather, giving a much-needed boost to the group's public profile.

Young sold his clothing company in 1997 in order to focus solely on Red Feather. Soon after, he partnered with the architecture schools at Penn State and the University of Washington to develop the American Indian Sustainable Housing Initiative, a model for putting the means of housing production—via affordable, energy-efficient structures that utilize straw bale insulation—in the hands of the tribal members. "Empowerment is important," says Young. "HUD [the US Department of Housing and Urban Development] does an inadequate job. They either construct the houses for the people on the reservations, or they drag trailers in and plop the buildings on a foundation and say, 'Here you go,' but that won't empower anyone. With Red Feather, tribal members have to be involved." HUD's Office of Native American Programs (http://www.hud.gov/offices/pih/ih/onap/), which has worked with some of the same reservations as Red Feather, including Pine Ridge, declined comment for this story.

Red Feather views housing as a monumental first step toward alleviating many of the hardships experienced by Native American communities, from staggering high school dropout rates (over 40 percent) to unemployment. "We want to see the reservations use their own resources, tribe members and wheat straw. There are thousands of acres to bale. And we're starting to show applications for community development—not just one house but centers, where these people can manage their own future and kids can have a space to study, too. When it's one home, it's harder to get people involved, but if it benefits everybody, people understand the incentive."

This summer, Red Feather will be building a children's library/resource center on Northern Cheyenne land and lending support to the construction of a study hall on the Crow Reservation. "At some point, you have to stop turning the page of the newspaper," urges Young. "Our nation's treatment of native people might be an ugly part of our past, but it doesn't have to be an ugly part of our future."

Want to get involved? For information about volunteer opportunities, check out www.redfeather.org, call 425-453-7188 or write PO Box 52652, Bellevue, WA, 98015.

Photography credits: Photographs by Michael Rosenberg, except Robert Redford (Corbis Sygma)