Exactly. Nobody is going to be able to shovel that out by hand in that extreme cold. It was -30 with the wind here a couple days ago and it took my forever to shovel out the driveway because I had to frequently stop and go back inside to warm up. And that was just a small driveway with a few inches.

Also I'm not sure that every household has someone able-bodied enough to do that work.

Snow drifts can go 20 feet or higher with no place to shovel the snow to

Could they dig or melt a tunnel to the wood? If the snow were melted and then refroze as ice at the bottom of the tunnel, one could then slid the wood back to the tunnel entrance...

Hardship breeds creativity. Necessity is the mother of invention (except under excessive government intervention, which may be at the root of reservation problems).

Maybe if we could calculate the present day market value of all the land the US government stole from the Native Americans (I've heard we broke nearly every treaty we signed with the Native Americans... to our shame), that could be structural payments to encourage entrepreneurial activity on the reservation

This idea sounds like literal murder.

The odds of the snow caving in and being buried alive are far greater than the risks of waiting to get plowed out.

How much experience do you have in -30F with meters of accumulated snow? How much experience do you have digging tunnels? Because your comment reads like a literal Loony Toons episode, and I've never experienced below -10F or more than a meter of snow.

Sounds like bad idea. But assuming you have no choice and need to leave your house you still need to put the snow somewhere that you are digging out. Are you going to fill up your house with it?

The article mentions drifts as tall as houses. Even if you could get a shovel or snowblower under that, where do you put the snow? That's a ton of work!