ON THE LINE

...After my first month, I decided that my study of anthropology had nothing to do with real life," she says...

...He's attracted by the two dozen local jobs US Ecology has promised...

...Measles, whooping cough, and strains of influenza were being introduced, and wiping them out...

...Valadez developed an approach she now calls human-thropology—a method of creating bridges through the researcher's direct participation in the subject culture...

...It's not my place to second-guess geologists," he says...

...Conspiracy to Save a Culture SANTIAGO IXCUINTLA, MEXICO As a college student at UCLA, Susana Valadez was disappointed when, after a trip to Mexico that stimulated her interest in Mexican art, she could only find three pages about it in her art history texts...

...Winn was scheduled to receive HUD subsidies for repairs and maintenance...

...Valadez settled into the Huichol community of San Andreas with a scholarship from UCLA and a small living stipend to continue her work...

...Seven separate wetlands occupy 42.6 acres...

...What would the ripple effect be...

...Both People for Progress and Save Boyd County have offered $2,500 rewards for conviction of the gunman...

...They now see the value of their own symbols...

...The 320-acre site slopes a mile and a half north to Ponca Creek...

...Since New York and Michigan are suing to prevent construction of regional repositories, Boyd County could in 1993 become the dump for the entire Middle West...

...Once the mortgage is bought out, HUD's use restrictions end...

...At first we were a little concerned that we had a cultural taboo—not so much that Mariano was marrying this white gringa outsider, but that he married somebody from this other community...

...By incorporating her ideas, she found a way to integrate Western medicines into the Huichol healing system without infringing on the integrity of the shaman...

...Armchair scholars can talk all they want about the unethical anthropologist who interrupted the cycle—let them talk...

...Your knowledge is great...

...I've got my work cut out for me here," she thought...

...The 3,200 residents of Boyd County live almost exclusively from agriculture: grain farms, cattle ranches, and small towns scattered along Ponca Creek...

...Getting the Jump on the Dump BOYD COUNTY, NEBRASKA US Ecology plans to dump radioactive waste just up Ponca Creek from Lowell Fisher's ranch...

...Terrible things happen to them when they leave their homeland and come to these coastal towns to work...

...Bush appointee Jack Kemp, now HUD's Secretary, has needed to rebuild public trust...

...Many would die...

...There were times I didn't want another meeting," recalls Backus...

...In 1987, it disposed of almost half the nation's low-level waste in Beatty, Nevada, and Richland, Washington...

...This presented a serious threat to their culture...

...At the center, they also provide instruction in traditional crafts and make scarce materials available...

...she scoffs...

...Their geometrical and visionary art spoke to me...

...Besides ecological disaster, Boyd County residents fear declining land values, negative impact on farm products and future economic development, and perpetual liability...

...The tenants created an association, Castle Square Tenant Organization (CSTO), elected leaders, and then assembled an impressive technical and legal team to help them negotiate with the new owners...

...Ultimately, CSTO won ownership of the land under the complex, thus guaranteeing long-term control, and agreed to lease it back to the new owners...

...And as for Governor Orr's pro-dump stance, Lowell Fisher adds, "In New York and Michigan, the states are doing it for the people...

...For years, tenants fought Druker to make needed repairs and deal with rising crime...

...Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat, has joined Governor George Mickelson of South Dakota in demanding, so far without success, that US Ecology release siting information to Boyd County residents...

...The struggle began in the summer of 1987, when rumors circulated that the Dru-ker Company, which had owned the complex for twenty years, would buy out its mortgage, subsidized by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and sell the property to Winn Development, Inc...

...Their history and religion are vibrantly expressed in their artwork, yarn paintings, and cloth designs...

...Governor Mickelson said at an April rally that he would sue Nebraska unless representatives of South Dakota state, county, city, and tribal governments are permitted to join the Monitoring Committee, and unless siting information is released...

...It became obvious to me that these designs were becoming extinct," Valadez says...

...In 1981, they opened the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and Traditional Arts in Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, a rural Mexican town where the main economy is harvesting tobacco...

...The promise of jobs doesn't impress teacher's aide Connie Boetcher...

...But when I saw it fifteen years ago, the women were embroidering Mickey Mouses and Volkswagens onto their beautiful costumes instead of the all-powerful two-headed eagle, the sign of the shaman...

...The fund, part of which will be invested, will provide for some tenant services, repairs, a permanent operating budget, and an eventual tenant buy-out...

...Although the terms of many such mortgages are thirty or forty years, HUD allows developers to buy them out after twenty...

...Boyd County, which celebrates its centennial this year, is a narrow strip of hills and plains nestled between the Niobrara and Missouri rivers in northern Nebraska...

...Areas with a known or suspected high water table should be avoided," say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's 1988 guidelines for selecting low-level radioactive-waste sites...

...There's just no way...

...My interest in the Huichol people came through the ethnobotany class, and looking at the art they produce," Valadez says...

...He was from a different region from the one where I had been accepted, and marrying this boy from the other side of the tracks was major stuff," Valadez recalls...

...The Reagan Administration gutted the department, slashing its budget by 81 per cent, and the recent scandals substantially weakened its already thin credibility...

...Is that something to aspire to...

...Governor Kay Orr, a Republican, has repeatedly promised the dump won't be built over community objections, but she still backs the dump...

...Now co-chaired by farmer Craig Zeisler and electrician Rick Schmitz, the group's members fan out across Nebraska and southern South Dakota, meeting with city councils, Indian tribal leaders, county commissions, anyone who will listen, enlisting help in their fight...

...They were also angry that Druker had leased out a parking garage, intended for their use, to Tufts University...

...The area's sleepy calm was shattered last December...

...In five years, tenants will become managing general partners, and by the year 2002, they will be in a position to purchase the complex...

...On April 2, somebody fired six shots into Marcum's home, and tensions have escalated...

...The Boyd County site is a hundred miles from the nearest four-lane highway, and about as far as one can get from the nuclear power plants of Arkansas and Louisiana...

...Boyd County was chosen, in fact, says Fisher, because it is "remote, low population, and far from the big media...

...In addition, tenants learned that Druker intended to sell the parking garage and adjoining commercial property separately...

...Senators...

...Don't waste Boyd County...

...They could throw [radioactive waste] out there on the ground and I would live next to it and it wouldn't bother me a bit...

...Tenants often face massive rent increases, evictions as developers convert apartments to condominiums, or the uncertainty of a sale to new owners...

...For tenants, it was an education process," recalls CSTO co-president Deborah Backus...

...The pilots would drink out of a communal water gourd, and soon the children would get sick...

...In the late 1960s, Druker, like many private developers, obtained this subsidized mortgage in exchange for keeping rents affordable for low-income people...

...The plan does have its backers...

...Valadez soon discovered that this was a culture at risk...

...That's what CSTO needed to bring the buyer and the seller to the bargaining table...

...Inspired by the Indian people she had seen and determined to put their culture more prominently on record, Valadez left her English major for the world of anthropology and ethnobotany—a decision that eventually led her to aoanaon ner miaaie-ciass American way of life for a different world...

...Through color photocopies," she explains, "we have used modern technology from our culture to save art that could very well have become extinct...

...Dope pusher, dump pusher, same thing...

...That and his support for tenant ownership and willingness to deal forcefully with corrupt and absentee owners of HUD-subsidized properties provided an opening for the tenants of Castle Square...

...He has toured nuclear facilities, courtesy of US Ecology, and he thinks they are safe...

...And 1,107 of the 1,499 people who voted in the last general election in Boyd County have signed an anti-dump petition...

...Allegations of closed meetings, as well as acceptance of what opponents call "bribe money," have prompted citizens to petition for a grand-jury investigation of the Monitoring Committee...

...It was history repeating itself," Valadez says...

...Because its original agreement with HUD promised the garage would be available for tenant use, tenants found they could hold up the deal by demanding the garage and commercial property be included in the sale...

...We will beat it," he says flatly...

...It's a political decision...

...Housing expert Cushing N. Dolbeare says the "outlook is already grim" for the millions who cannot afford a decent place to live...

...Before that there was Maxey Flats, Kentucky, and Sheffield, Illinois, both closed in the late 1970s because they leaked...

...Because it serves Huichols from all five Huichol communities, the center has become a mini-embassy, where people from rival communities eat and sleep under the same roof, and are beginning to communicate...

...The Monitoring Committee has canceled meetings because members fear for their safety, Marcum says, and he refuses to sign a committee-approved plan for a socioeconomic impact study...

...About 70 per cent of the tenants are Asian, most of the rest are African-American, and a few are white or Hispanic...

...At the time of the Spanish conquest, they escaped into a remote region of the Sierra Madre, terrain so inaccessible that their Spanish pursuers, assuming the Hui-chols would perish anyway, gave up the chase...

...They also had to become expert in all the fine details of how such mega-deals are made...

...For Castle Square tenants, the prospect of a sale was not altogether unpleasant...

...When you see enough of these cute little babies getting sick, you throw your scientific objectivity out the window," Valadez says...

...Tragic things were going on in the Huichol culture because of recent contact with the outside world...

...The NRC document also says sites should have "easy access to an interstate or limited-access highway," and be "approximately in the center of major LLW generators...

...She is down to a 39 per cent approval rating...

...The tenants of Castle Square, located in Boston's Southend near Chinatown, have a brand new agreement to become the eventual owners and managers of their 500-unit apartment complex...

...Both US Ecology and People for Progress refuse to participate in these community meetings, and US Ecology officials did not respond to my questions by phone...

...They get sick with insecticide poisoning...

...The Huichol people are the labor force that comes to pick the tobacco leaves," Valadez explains...

...The center provides meals, legal services, and medical aid to assist Huichols who are working and living outside their homeland...

...Linda Lazare (Linda Lazare is a free-lance writer in Lafayette, California...

...With contributions from Druker and Winn, the tenants will create a $2.7 million equity and repair fund, the largest in Massachusetts history...

...CSTO also won space in the parking garage and additional street parking the city will make available...

...Many large springs, some as close as a mile from the site, indicate significant hydrostatic pressure...

...But Fisher, founding chair of a group called Save Boyd County, says it won't happen...

...ON THE LINE Tenants Take Charge in Boston BOSTON "I'm still trying to absorb this," says Ann Moy, numb from the two-and-a-half years it took to organize, negotiate, and win perhaps the most significant tenant victory in Boston history...

...Keep it.' "You can't keep a culture from changing," she continues...

...and US Ecology out of the county and into jail...

...US Ecology, formerly Nuclear Engineering Company, has a long history with nuclear dumps—a history of failure...

...Living in the house of a nurse the Mexican government was providing for the tribe, she noted diseases coming in because of a new airstrip...

...The Low Income Housing Information Service estimates that in the next fifteen years, upwards of one million families in the United States could be affected by such buy-outs...

...Pursuing this interest in 1974, Valadez set forth on a two-month field trip to the Huichol homeland...

...Bread basket or waste basket...

...Because of their isolation, they were able to live in peace, as they have for hundreds of years, practicing their polytheistic belief system, going on peyote pilgrimages and vision quests, expressing themselves in art, living in harmony with nature...

...It's not going to be built...

...In the course of her work, Valadez met and fell in love with Mariano, a Huichol yarn painter and son of a shaman...

...While living in this community, she realized the traditional Huichol art forms were disappearing...

...All but complete, the deal awaits HUD approval, which is expected in the months ahead...

...It's strictly economics," he says...

...If it was freezing or it was 100 degrees, we had to show up [every Wednesday for meetings] because we knew what it meant...

...Once the art goes in this culture, since it's such an important part of carrying it through the generations, then the rest will go with it...

...Housing advocates say the crisis will come to a head this fall, when a two-year Congressional moratorium on the sale of HUD-subsidized units ends...

...So the center directs itself to their needs...

...The Huichol people call themselves Huichalica, which means "healers, prophets," and view themselves as carriers of the high priesthood of ancient Meso-America...

...Tenants realized they had effective veto power and site control," says Michael Kane, director of the Boston/HUD Tenant Alliance (and no relation to the writer...

...just across the Missouri lies South Dakota...

...Brian Kane (Brian Kane is a free-lance writer based in Rochester, New York...

...They also worry because the Office of Technology Assessment now says the nation needs only three or four dumps, and because the "emergency clause" of the 1985 Amended Waste Policy Act empowers the NRC to force a state to take waste from outside its compact...

...he also chairs the Boyd County Monitoring Committee, an appointed body that is pro-dump...

...A tongue of the Oglala High Plains aquifer underlies the site, and the water table is as close as five feet from the surface...

...Valadez put away her pencil and pad and started participating in Huichol life, going into the fields with them...

...The two highways which bisect the county are lined with scores of hand-painted signs: Dump the dump...

...Save Boyd County gathered twice the necessary signatures in three days...

...Helping to cement tenant unity was their insistence that negotiations be conducted in Chinese as well as English...

...Your artistic creativity is admired throughout the world...

...The Hui-chols have an ancient culture that dates to pre-Columbian days...

...Chairing People for Progress is retired veterinarian Jack Marcum...

...Your language is wonderful...

...Meanwhile, Save Boyd County, founded in November 1988 when second-grade teacher Paulette Blair began circulating an informal petition, has grown to include more than 1,600 dues-paying members, including South Dakota's one U.S...

...More than twenty city, county, and tribal governments in Nebraska and along the likely transportation route have passed resolutions opposing the dump...

...Tenant leaders and Kane attribute the victory in part to HUD...

...For Valadez, the desire to help raised ethical questions...

...Mariano and Susana became a team, both as husband and wife and as co-conspirators to preserve the Huichol culture...

...Writing papers wasn't going to help...

...In the Huichol homeland, they wouldn't cross over those lines...

...Who wants their kid to unload waste trucks...

...The materials weren't readily available to do the stitchery, and the designs preserved on old rags were deteriorating...

...In Nebraska, the people are doing it for the state...

...Representative and both U.S...

...It had to show HUD that tenants supported the renovations it planned...

...Jerry Wilson (Jerry Wilson is a free-lance writer who lives in Vermillion, South Dakota—down the Missouri River from Boyd County...

...Butte farmer Ken Reiser is vice-chair of People for Progress, which receives $80,000 a year from the compact commission "to educate people that nuclear power can be safely handled...

...They provide traditional patterns to those who want to learn, and teach marketing skills as well...

...As another season unfolds in Boyd County, the chief crops are anger and determination...

...We had to get past the stage of 'I want a new refrigerator' and 'My roof leaks.' We also had to take time to get to know people...

...Did she dare interrupt the ancient process...

...They faced down high-powered developers and negotiated a sophisticated plan to take gradual control of the Federally subsidized property over the next few years...

...They migrate and come here to make money picking tobacco, but they don't make money at all...

...The day after an Omaha World Herald poll reported that 62 per cent of Nebraskans opposed playing host to a dump, US Ecology announced it had chosen a site here for a low-level radioactive-waste dump for five states from Nebraska to Louisiana...

...Maxey Flats still costs Kentucky taxpayers more than $1 million a year, and cleanup at Sheffield may run over $100 million...

...Areas are not suitable for LLW disposal if ground water discharge features such as springs, seeps, swamps, or bogs are present...

...We're trying to create a situation where they can leave the tobacco fields and stay in their homeland, make beautiful works of art, not get sick, not become alcoholic, to be mirrors of the gods...

...I think what we're doing here with this humanthropological project is giving them back their identity, having somebody from outside tell them, 'You are wonderful, just the way you are...

...Hold on to it...