PBH Project Helps Dispel Indian Apathy

The line of lavishly costumed Indians stretched across the sacred ground of a Utah mesa. In the darkness it faced east where the red morning sun would rise. As the first rays of the new sun fell upon them, the Indians dusted the sunlight over their bodies with eagle feathers and blew on shrill whistles carved of eagle bone.

It was the beginning of the sacred sun dance. Hundreds of Ute Indian families had gathered to watch it. With them was a small group of Harvard students, who kept one eye on the dancers and another on a group of Ute children--their charges at a summer camp run by the Ute tribe.

The students had come to the camp as counselors through the Harvard-Radcliffe American Indian Project, a Phillips Brooks House venture which last summer completed its third year. Camp Unitah, where the seven Harvard and Radcliffe students worked, was in Fort Duchesne, Utah, only 12 miles from the sun dance ground. Twenty-four other PBH volunteers worked with other tribes throughout the West.

Taking the campers to the sun dance promoted one goal of the PBH volunteers. It encouraged the Ute children to have respect for themselves as Indians. "We wanted them not to think of Indian as a dirty word," said Stephen L. Bayne '64, director of the project last summer. "We wanted them to consider old Indian culture as something to be proud of."

More than Gadgets

The volunteers, however, had another goal. They also wanted to show the Indians the side of American culture Indians usually don't see. "They get plenty of rock and roll, kitchen gadgets, and fast cars," said Bayne, "but they don't know about the parts of the white man's world which have more value." To fill this gap Bayne and George Goldberg '63 set up a science and music program at Camp Unitah.

The science program started with one microscope and some left-over laboratory equipment. Goldberg and Bayne, both biology concentrators, used this apparatus to teach the campers about molecules and cells, chlorplasts, and protozoa.

In one lesson instructors and campers dissected frogs and chipmunks that were eagerly provided by the Indian boys. Throughout the program Goldberg and Bayne emphasized making science something to do rather than something to memorize. They also tried to get the campers to understand nature as a rational process instead of a magical one. This second aim was set back somewhat, though, when one superstition appeared to work. The campers told the Harvard students that turning a frog on its back brings rain; and it did rain for three days after frogs had been placed on their backs for dissection.

Despite this reversal and the problem presented by short attention spans and the flirting of the older Ute girls, Bayne and Goldberg consider the science program a success. "All the campers had the thrill of experimenting," Bayne noted, "and all of them had a chance to look at nature in a different way."

Flutophones and Drums

The first accomplishment of the music program was teaching all the campers to read music. Bayne and Goldberg did by use of plastic flutophones. After the campers mastered that instrument, they went on to trumpets, drums, cornets, and the piano. By the end of the summer they were good enough to present the score of "South Pacific" to an appreciative audience of 100 parents.

Getting the parents interested in the camp was an important goal of the Harvard volunteers. Even though they worked primarily with children, the volunteers were interested in the whole tribe. Judy Norman '65, the present director of the project, stresses that the volunteers did not go to the reservations as anthropologists to study the Indians or as missionaries to convert them.

"But we do want to encourage community development and to shake them out of their apathy," she said. "For years the government has been helping the Indians do almost everything, but perpetual paternalism can't develop self-reliance and initiative. We want to encourage the Indians to realize that they can organize programs for their own children, that they can assume responsibility and do something for themselves."

Indian 'Cowboys'

For that reason the Harvard volunteers went to reservations where they were invited by tribal councils and took part in programs the tribal councils sponsored. Camp Unitah, for example, has been operated by the Ute Tribal Council five years. In North Dakota, where two students taught rodeo skills to young Indian "cowboys," they worked as part of a recreation program sponsored by the affiliated tribes of Fort Berthold. At the White Mountain (Montana) reservation of the Apache, a Harvard volunteer joined a group of Indians in clearing camp sites, building cabins, and marking trails for a recreation park. Two 'Cliffies helped the Walker River Council of Schurz, Nevada, to prepare a roll of tribe members. When this was done, the 'Cliffies taught first aid and helped the children put on puppet shows.

Judy Norman and Gary Rosenblatt '66 worked with the Navaho and Pueblo near Gallop, New Mexico--dry, mountainous country, sparsely populated by Indians and sheep. Along with Navaho college students they ran daytime recreation programs for children and helped staff a community center. One recreation program almost overpowered the two volunteers with its success. When 120 high-spirited Zuni-Pueblo turned up for games, the volunteers blanched but carried on bravely.

The Results

Project participants have no illusions that their work somehow solved the Indians' interlocking problems of apathy, alcoholism, and juvenile delinquency. But the PBH American Indian project has stirred some Indian groups to greater activity, and such efforts by Indians are the principal means by which the problems of the Indian will be overcome.

The volunteers have also won a good reputation for the Harvard project. All ten tribes who had them last summer want more volunteers back next year. And when Bayne visited tribal councils after last summer's program, he found ten more tribes willing to use Harvard and Radcliffe students.

For the volunteers themselves spending a summer with an Indian tribe was successful in several ways. As they anticipated there was a chance to get a tan and draw far away from the Cambridge grind. But, as Judy Norman pointed out, "many volunteers also learned from the Indians as well as teaching them."

"You can learn a great deal about yourself," she noted, "by spending a summer in a very different environment. And it is a lot easier to see the flaws in the way you live when you see how others live by helping them.