Out There in America
Quaintance, James C Rosapepe, John 7. Schell, Daniel Zwerdling, and Charles W.
OUT THERE IN AMERICA Tidewater Populism Richmond, Virginia In the racially turbulent 1950s and 1960s, when work ing-class whites felt increasingly threatened by the de mands of blacks,...
...No big deal, it wasn't a big concern," Hammond says— although in proportionate terms it was as if 15,000 Washingtonians had dropped dead one night...
...Quaintance is a retired biologist who has conducted extensive research on forestry problems...
...Had the turnout among low-income whites been as high—forty-eight per cent—as it was among blacks, he would have won the election...
...I've been in Indian homes around here where I wouldn't put animals...
...The former governor won narrowly by capturing larger numbers of high-income whites, the twenty per cent of voters earning more than $15,000...
...Half the Indian families in Aroostook survive on less than $3,758 a year, and many live in frigid tarpapered shacks...
...Millions of kilograms of DDT have been sprayed during previous moth epidemics...
...Because that gave them the notion they could just sit back and have everything done for them—without working for it...
...Since then, the AAI has won thousands of dollars in Federal grants, set up summer camps for Indian kids, sponsored basket weaving courses at the adult education program in the local high school—and made off-reservation Indians an issue, if not exactly a force, which the town must reckon with...
...One family used a hole in the floor as a toilet, another had a bucket full of slop," he says, his face cringing with disgust...
...Among all whites earn ing less than $15,000 (more than sixty-five per cent of the voters) he virtually broke even with Godwin...
...Almost half of the Indian homes, according to the report, were "poor"—meaning they were constructed of rough board or logs, covered with asphalt paper, heated by a stove or fireplace, lighted by some gas lamps or a single electric bulb, with perhaps a single cold water faucet or pump, but often no running water at all...
...He thinks the BIA and Wounded Knee takeover tactics were "all wrong—I think it hurt the cause...
...Mary Ellen Emery remembers the incident with special hostility...
...Census will tell you, for example, that there are at least 3,887 Indians in Indiana, 44,406 Indians in North Carolina, and 2,222 in Connecticut...
...However, moving down the income scale and into levels of Howell's greatest support, the turnout fell off until it dipped to thirty-five per cent among whites earning $5,000 a year or less...
...The timber industry, and state forestry departments dominated by the timber interests, have mounted an intensive campaign to persuade the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to release DDT for spraying the firs, on the grounds that DDT is the only proven Tussock Moth killer...
...Battiste has always eschewed militant politics...
...The laboratory-raised viruses appeared to be almost 100 per cent effective, but only small quantities were available...
...But almost seventy per cent knew he opposed the sales tax on food, and fifty-seven per cent knew, he fought utility rate increases...
...A post-election survey of non-voting white working people in the city of Fredericksburg showed them overwhelmingly for Howell...
...Secretary Earl Butz, with his agribusiness background, has indicated he favors DD T use...
...This is one reason why the townspeople have not regarded him and the Association as more of a threat...
...She means a problem for the whites...
...It now has seven Republicans in Congress and only three Democrats...
...Life on many of the Eastern, state-recognized reservations is just as bleak...
...Exorbitant costs of food and fuel—the "energy crisis"—have sapped their hungry budgets to the desperation point...
...The AAI has hired a white full-time lawyer who defends, without fee, virtually every Indian arrested...
...Washington political analyst Vic Fingerhut, who conducted the survey, explains, "They saw that Henry Howell was for working people and Godwin's busing spots did not change people's minds, but they just are not used to voting...
...But except for passing references in historical texts about the colonial era, most of these Indians have ceased to exist—at least, according to the Federal agency where it counts...
...But for now, the most important hope for Eastern Indians rests with pending court suits—especially a Penobscot-Passamaquoddy suit against the Interior Department which argues that the Government has no right to deny Eastern Indians BIA benefits...
...Three years ago, Maine's Department of Indian Affairs surveyed the state's off-reservation Indians...
...muses Police Chief Donald Dow, model of the friendly small-town cop with white hair and tepid manner...
...Most people will say they're lazy—if you give them some bedding, they'll just go and sell it for more booze...
...Such chemicals as Zectran (duPont) and microbial preparations were tried by the agencies in the face of the ban on DD T during the summer of 1973...
...he hesitates a few moments in his tiny headquarters in the basement of the Houlton fire department...
...If it had been white people," Hammond says, "the whole town would have gone into mourning...
...But the clear message from last fall's gubernatorial election in Virginia is that the Roosevelt-Populist coali tion is alive and, if not well, at least on the road to recovery...
...It would be very romantic," Haskell says...
...The Pop ulist coalition of blacks and working-class whites, built so effectively by Franklin D. Roosevelt, appeared to be permanently unraveling...
...If they do, the coalition will be restored to good health, as well...
...CHARLES W. QUAINTANCE (Mr...
...Do we have an Indian problem...
...An Oliver Quayle survey taken late in the campaign revealed the food tax ahead of busing as the most important issue in the campaign by thirty per cent to twenty-two per cent...
...Eastern Indians get nothing...
...Another poll, taken about two weeks before the election, found that despite Godwin's media campaign, which outspent Howell's by two to one, fewer than twenty-five per cent of Virginians believed claims that Howell supported busing...
...In our interview she said, "When people told them [Indians] 'Yes, we broke your treaties and we owe you something,' I think that's the worst thing anybody could have ever said...
...However severe the present epidemic, it appears to have passed its peak, and the Northwest fir forests have survived other Tussock Moth infestations in the past...
...A look at the economic and racial breakdown of the Howell-Godwin vote starkly demonstrates this point...
...Virginians saw Howell as the champion of the average citizen, black and white, more than as an advocate of progressive social programs...
...We have a definite problem of space—we have to cover twenty-five square miles," explains editor Marshall Hammond of the Houlton Pioneer, which bills itself as the only paper in the world that cares about Houlton...
...Half the families, the agency reported, have members who are unemployed...
...The Maine tribes have also sued the state of Maine, which they claim has illegally seized vast amounts of Indian land...
...Those voters, perhaps as threatened by Howell's Populist economic stands as by his liberal racial views, voted for Godwin by an overwhelming margin of three to one...
...Nevertheless, there were small voices even in La Grande, Oregon, at the heart of the outbreak, opposing the resurrection of DDT...
...Turnout...
...Battiste was the second Indian to graduate from the Houlton high school, and after serving in Vietnam he became the first to graduate from college...
...Commission on Civil Rights last spring, warned of the "critical problems facing on and off-reservation Indians"—and urged emergency state and Federal aid...
...In Virginia, with its history of machine politics and "massive resistance" to desegregation, economic issues cut deeper than racial ones...
...With considerable difficulty, I finally sorted out the facts: The two VISTA volunteers strode into the office of Mary Ellen Emery, the Houlton welfare director for fourteen years, and "loudly insisted" on their right to represent some poor Indians who needed a food order...
...These reports were not carried in the local newspapers...
...and half of the employed Indians drift in and out of wretched-paying seasonal jobs in the potato fields, potato warehouses, and blueberry patches...
...In the face of a well-financed, race-oriented cam paign, Lieutenant Governor Henry E. Howell, Jr...
...NBC's election figures show Howell received ninety-six per cent of the black vote and more than sixty-six per cent of the low-income white vote (those earning less than $5,000 a year...
...Howell captured voters in such George Wallace strongholds as rural Southside and the Tidewater cities of Portsmouth and Chesapeake, despite a well-funded, carefully crafted campaign aimed at dividing his constituency...
...Legislators, Congressmen, and even writers for science magazines were flown to La Grande and indoctrinated...
...put that coalition together again...
...The BIA exhibits a bizarre bureaucratic myopia, because down the street in the Commerce Department, the Census people have not only seen the Indians east of the Mississippi, they have even counted them...
...There may be some discrimination by landlords and for valid Reasons...
...They left soon afterward...
...Throughout the fall, Godwin's television and radio commercials hammered away at Howell's alleged support of busing "for racial balance...
...While he narrowly lost the election to the Republican candidate, former Gov ernor Mills Godwin—by 15,000 votes out of more than 1,000,000 cast—he showed that straightforward appeals to the economic interests of black and white working people can overcome traditional racial appeals aimed at dividing them...
...Life on the Western Federal reservations is meager and sorrowful...
...Then the big blowup came, and to hear the whites describe it, the two volunteers brought the town to the brink of upheaval and revolution...
...If they win the suit, it could bring them substantial new territory or money...
...She has always given out public doles with a tight fist...
...He is the local Indian who made good, and everybody in town knows his name...
...In 1969, he and a friend—the first Indian to graduate from high school—formed an Association of Aroostook Indians...
...Recently, delegates from about forty-five Eastern tribes held their second annual conference of the Coalition of Eastern Native Americans...
...The chemical industry, the timber industry, and agribusiness want to break EPA...
...Well, if there's an Indian problem, it's largely of their own making...
...The battle is over the use of the condemned insecticide, DDT, against a serious epidemic of the Tussock Moth in the fir forests of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho...
...Why, then, did Howell lose...
...He is sympathetic, in a paternal way, to the Indians ("Fellows in the legislature," he has said, "asked me when I'm going to get my headdress...
...The off-reservation Indians in Aroostook County are fighting an even bigger battle...
...A bill in Congress seeks to return the power of decision on insecticides to the Department of Agriculture...
...John T. Schell, now practicing law in Washington, D.C., was a counsel to Lieutenant Governor Henry E. Howell, Jr...
...I don't even know how many live in this area, actually" "They're dirty," Hiltz confides to me with a sigh...
...But the rest of the Indians in Maine, mostly Micmacs and Maliseets, live off reservation—and consequently at the bottom of the social heap...
...There is growing belief that DDT not only is not a proven control, but, on the contrary, that its wide use has aggravated epidemics and decreased the time interval between successive moth eruptions in the same forests...
...No one denied this at the EPA Seminar in Seattle, November 15, 1973, where both opponents and proponents were given an opportunity to produce evidence...
...If there is any proven agent that will stop the pest, it is the native polyhedrosis virus...
...Oh, how I don't like to say that—but they are...
...The Houlton Pioneer did publish a small item when twelve Indians died in convulsions one night after drinking sterno down by the town dump, where little Indian kids forage for food and other white garbage...
...Encouraged by a dynamic white professor, Battiste turned full time to the fledgling Indian rights movement...
...Some, like half of the 2,195 Maine Indians, live on state reservations— which entitles the Maine Passamaquoddies and Penobscots to an average of $600 a year in such benefits as milk allowance, educational assistance, and a traveling nurse...
...On television, Godwin was pictured surrounded by small white children as he told them he opposed busing them far away from their homes...
...Other Indians don't get much," Battiste says, "it's just that we off-reservation Indians don't get nothinV DANIEL ZWERDLING (Daniel Zwerdling, a Washington-based free lance writer, recently visited Aroostook County...
...A poll early in September indicated that the most important reason voters supported him was that he was "for the common man...
...The Roosevelt-Populist coalition is still alive...
...The Campaign to Resurrect DDT Portland, Oregon A battle has been raging for many months here in the Pacific Northwest over a war that was thought by ecologists to have been won several years ago...
...Their case should be bolstered by a Supreme Court ruling in February which held that Arizona Indians living near (but not on) Federal reservations are entitled to general BIA benefits—opening the door, perhaps, to off-reservation Indians everywhere...
...None of this should suggest that life for red Americans will be much better when Eastern Indians finally gain the recognition and benefits which Western Indians receive...
...Naturally this consortium does not tell Congress that DDT does not kill Tussock Moths in epidemics...
...Throughout the campaign, Howell's polls had shown voters more concerned about economic issues than racial ones...
...The AAI has tried to lobby for off-reservation rights with the Maine legislature, mostly through the Houlton delegate, a kindly, white-haired leading citizen-abouttown and shoe store owner named Floyd Haskell...
...First the VISTA workers fomented discontent among Indians who worked the potato fields—a crucial source of income which is dwindling rapidly as mechanized harvesters rumble into town...
...Another report, by the Maine Advisory Committee to the U.S...
...NBC analysis on election night showed that blacks turned out in good numbers...
...The heavily financed campaign by the industry redoubled in intensity...
...Before you can give them better housing, you've just got to teach them responsibility...
...The Oregon Student Public Interest Group, the Sierra Club, and the Audubon Club as well as other environmental groups hit hard at releasing DDT...
...He turned back a decisive, racially-oriented campaign and brought working whites and blacks together again in a coalition...
...Yet on election day, these white voters stayed with Howell...
...Off the Reservation Aroostook County, Maine The long subfreezing Aroostook winter is thawing and the Indians who subsist in this northernmost Maine county rejoice that it is over...
...He preempted news of the Advisory Committee's warnings with such front-page headlines as "PUBLIC HEARING SET ON DOG CONTROL...
...Indians don't plead guilty any more," says Battiste...
...and doesn't understand why local Indians don't start their own businesses, like dressing up in moccasins and head feathers and hiring out to white tourists as tour guides...
...Some western Congressmen, caught up in the frenzied campaign to use DDT, now threaten to override a new ruling by the EPA, if it is not favorable to industry...
...But that is not the only state report on the "Indian problem., , The Maine Regional Medical Program has pointed with concern to the Indians' "high infant mortality, low life expectancy, high morbidity, and numerous infectious diseases due to impoverished physical and sanitary conditions...
...In April 1973, William D. Ruckelshaus, then head of EPA, denied the request to use DDT for that year...
...Local social workers who work with her told me of cases in which she denied assistance to an Indian couple struggling on $37.50 a month in workers' compensation payments, or resisted giving stove wood to another...
...This is the first time that Eastern Indians from different tribes in different states have gotten together," says Coalition director W. J. Strickland, a Lumbee from North Carolina...
...But that is exactly what Henry Howell did...
...For a month and a half before the election, white working people heard a consistent message from the Godwin campaign: "Howell is for the blacks...
...They made up a larger share of the electorate than in 1972...
...The conference was small enough to fit into several basement rooms in the Washington, D.C., national 4-H center, but its impact will be much bigger...
...One major Oregon newspaper, the Salem Capitol Journal, one state legislator, Pat Whiting, one magazine, The Oregon Times, tried to stem the tide to revive the use of DDT...
...The risks to the total forest environment from the renewed use of DDT, especially as unproved as it is for the specific purpose, are simply too great to permit the threat to this magnificent Northwest land...
...HENRY HOWELL SAYS 'YES.'" Godwin repeatedly called attention to Howell's black support and attacked prominent black leaders...
...The moths eventually died out, generally in the third year of their outbreak...
...On election day, his campaign workers plastered white neighborhoods with posters reading "BUSING...
...Under the 1921 Snyder Act, the Federal Government promised to give special "benefit, care and assistance" to all Indians "throughout the United States"—which the Bureau of Indian Affairs has defined in bureaucratic newspeak to exclude all but 15,000 of the Indians living in the Eastern half...
...The analysis also showed a high turnout among high-income whites—sixty-two per cent of registered voters with incomes over $15,000...
...After that outrage, the city council voted to ask the state government to pull the VISTA volunteers out of Houlton...
...Those VISTAs went around preaching that working for the white potato growers wasn't good enough at $1.80 per hour," Hammond complains...
...The BIA handouts scarcely begin to dent the abject poverty of Indians in the Western states...
...The only time the local townsfolk and the local press became upset about the Indians' plight was when two VISTA volunteers tried to change it...
...JAMES C. ROSAPEPE and JOHN T. SCHELL {James C. Rosapepe was a legislative assistant to former Senator Fred Harris, Oklahoma Democrat...
...You put them in the nicest home, and they'll wreck it...
...His attacks on utility overcharges, special breaks for the banks, and the state's sales tax on food proved more impor tant to them than Godwin's hard-hitting racial charges...
...The only question remaining is whether or not enough working whites make it to the polls...
...Small stirrings among Indians in Aroostook County and Indians in other states east of the Mississippi hint that the day when the Federal Government and the public start recognizing Eastern Indians may be coming soon...
...There aren't enough Indians here to be much of any problem," says Virginia Hiltz, chief of the Bangor News bureau in Houlton...
...Do we have an Indian problem...
...Maine's four Indian tribes are among the 180,000 to 250,000 Indians sprinkled throughout the twenty-six states east of the Mississippi River...
...Virginia voted Republican in five of the last six Presidential elections...
...OUT THERE IN AMERICA Tidewater Populism Richmond, Virginia In the racially turbulent 1950s and 1960s, when work ing-class whites felt increasingly threatened by the de mands of blacks, it became a widely held misconcep tion that the whites were so bigoted they would vote on the basis of race ahead of all other issues...
...The future of off-reservation Indians in Aroostook County has seemed less bleak since Tommy Battiste came back to town...
...It may well be the least likely state in which to try rebuilding the old Roosevelt-Populist coalition...
...There is one catch to this scenario: There is no hard evidence that DD T stops Tussock Moth epidemics...
...Most of them live clumped here and there in the wooded and hill-twisted country around Houlton, a town of 6,000 whose major businesses are potatoes and Ricker College...
...It won't be...
...We're getting to learn about each other and discover who we are...
...When the industries state that DDT is the only proven agent to control Tussock Moth epidemics, they are being less than candid...
Vol. 38 • April 1974 • No. 4
