PBH Volunteers Strive to Understand Problems, Fears of American Indians

To reach Supai, Arizona, you turn off Highway 66 at Peach Springs, follow the mail truck 65 miles across the desert to the edge of the Grand Canyon, and then wind your way by packmule to the Canyon floor a mile below.

Supai is inacessible all winter: the dirt roads are washed out and the cliffs are slicked with ice. The Havasupai Indian tribe close the half-dozen tourist cabins they operate, send their children to the government boarding school, and tend their few sheep.

There are only 250 Havasupai in the Canyon now; brothers and cousins have gone to Flagstaff, to Albuquerque, to Los Angeles. Still tourist trade is good during the summer. The men lead packmule trains up and down the Canyon and the women maintain the cabins.

One white couple lives in Supai; she teaches primary school while he serves as postmaster-doctor-county agent. They are gossiped about but the Havasupai share with them the scrawny produce of front yard gardens.

Each spring, two Harvard-Radcliffee students descend the Canyon walls to spend three months in Supai. Usually the students have never been farther west than Pittsburgh. The West, they think, must be no more complex than jostling down a narrow trail on a donkey piled with gear, or pulling catfish out of the Colorado River above the rapids.

They enter the Canyon with no notion of what they are to do for the summer. Phillips Brooks House has promised to pay for their maintenance while they "assess community needs" and develop projects to "mobilize community interest."

Yet the Havasupai are not open about their needs or articulate about their ties to the valley and their overwhelming curiosity about the world beyond Peach Springs. The Havasupai are particularly sceptical about any white man's wanting to pass a burning summer with them, shut away from the world.

Harvard volunteers are received graciously by the tribe, but the Havasupai are reluctant to confide their fears about what is happening to their dwindling poulation, to their tenuous economy, and to the precious Canyon that is threatened by a dam upstream.

For Supai simply isn't as isolated as its location might indicate. The students quickly learn that some welfare checks are spent on liquor and that the "battered child syndrome" exists outside Soc Rel 150 texts.

This particular kind of poverty is as unfamiliar to Harvard students as the West and the Canyon. The Huvasupai subsist on Stone Age agriculture. What they know of towns and civilization is the backsides of the silver boomtowns on Highway 66: cheap wine, pool halls, dusty '51 Pontiacs parked near pseud-adobe cafes, hostility from merchants who won't give Indians credit.

Only in the desert and within the walls of their plateau, property of the tribe for centuries, do the Havasupai feel comfortable. Yet the world beyond Highway 66 is now beginning to shatter that security. The Grand Canyon Dam is rising up river, meaning water and power for California. The Havasupai lands won't be flooded, but their rapids will disappear and the familiar will be rendered strange.

Weeks pass beroe the PBH volunteers understand the tribe's particular schizophrenia. Women befriend them, confide a husband's concern about his brother who is picking oranges in California. A member of the Tribal Council confesses his complete inability to present the Havasupai's case to a government determined to go ahead with plans for the dam.

The volunteers realize, after a month, perhaps, that they can't "mobilize community interest" and solve Supai's problems. The Havasupai have begun to understand the decision they must make -- whether to commit themselves to maintaining the tribal ways in their canyon or to abandon Supai and follow the already-flown. But they postpone that decision.

PBH volunteers are not authorized

The Harvard-Radcliffe students quickly learn that some welfare checks are spent on liquor and that the "battered child syndome" exists outside Soc Rel 150 tests. to confront the federal government and argue against the dam (Stuart Udall's "baby," they observe). The tribe has no notion of how to organize itsel

The volunteers admit they can't grapple with the tribe's decisions about its own future and they adjust their expectations for the summer. The children of the tribe are home for vacation, restless because they miss boarding school in town. For the older teenagers especially the summer in Supai only reaffirms their determination to leave the settlement. Parents and tribal leaders, frightened by the threatened exodus of Havasupai's young blood, welcome the PBH volunteers to Supai because they are often able to convince the children and teenagers that there is something precious about their Canyon. Harvard students often claim that their job for the summer was "building egos" -- showing 10-year-olds who want to be the cowboy in "cowboys and Indians" that being Indian is special and desirable.

For PBH American Indian Project volunteers everywhere, the summer is one of small achievements -- of solving a 10-year-old's "identity crisis," making a psychopath cry, teaching a withdrawn six-year old girl to swim, telling a four-year-old how to skip stones. The larger social problems evade solution.

The 15 Volunteers who leave Cambridge each spring may travel up Interstate 90 to Neillsville, Wisc., wind through the mountains and salt flats to Ignacio, Col., or live in a community center in Gallup, N.M., making friends with winoes and drop-outs. Yet they discover the same problem everywhere.

They all find out that Indians don't live in hogans and pueblos carved out of sandstone cliffs. They live in backstreets of little Western towns or in isolated villages of 100 inhabitants tucked away near Lake Superior, where social workers won't venture without escorts.

PBH volunteers discover ultra-progressive Indian nationalists who write a newspaper called "Americans Before Columbus," paradoxically warning other Indians not to "sell out" to the white man. They also encounter Indians who practice the tenets of the ancient Native American Church, using peyote as a sacrament.

In Supai, Ariz., and in other Indian communities, tribes suffer severe schiziphrenia: should they forget they're Indians and migrate to the cities, should they further detach themselves from industry and prosperity to maintain tribal lands in isolated places? PBH volunteers, as is to be expected, are never able to ease those problems: they work with the immediate emotional needs of those communities, with families splintered by migration and boarding schools, restless children who want to leave the floor of the Grand Canyon