(9 of 11)
ARIZONA: Where the Baby Cried Legend has it that the People of the Blue Water were driven from their ancestral home a thousand years ago by the rapacious Apache. They wandered for years through the desert and came finally to a vast canyon, at the bottom of which they found lush cottonwoods and rushing water. The shamans had no sign from the spirits that they should stay, and the People were about to leave when a baby began to cry insistently. That was the sign, and the Havasupai stayed. Today the babies are still crying. Perhaps the smallest Indian tribe in the U.S., the 300 Havasupai are besieged by an enemy far more devastating than the Apache.
Like most of America's 500,000 Indians,* the Havasupai are slowly losing their traditions with nothing to replace them but isolation. Indians who move to the cities frequently become the most passive and ponderous of alcoholics; on their squalid reservations they live to an average age of 44, v. 68 for whites. Many of them die of cirrhosis of the liver or in automobile accidents. On most reservations, mental retardation, illness and violence have taken a fearsome toll. Indian suicide is 15% higher than that of the general population. The "Red Power" movement aimed at retaining tribal customs and generating income for Indians begun by the Cherokees of Oklahoma and the Sioux of the Dakotas has not yet descended to the Havasupai, whose kids, at the weekly movie, screened by the P.T.A., cheer for the U.S. Cavalry to kill the Indians. One boy recently startled his Head Start teacher by announcing: "When I grow up, I want to be an Indian."
Hand & Arm. From the ghettos to the Grand Canyon, the plight of the poor seems like the inescapable obverse of the American dream. Yet poverty in the U.S. is ultimately curable—if not by money alone. Dozens of welfare agencies, public and private, are pumping up to $8 billion a year into the lower depths, but reaching only 8,000,000 of the poor. The very structure of welfare in most cases militates against job-seeking and normal family life, as AFDC's "man in the house" regulation makes all too clear. Welfare rolls would be even longer if more poor Americans knew what they were entitled to receive. While the white poor often reject welfare as "nigger programs," the foreign poor simply do not know how to go about getting it: almost all Spanish-speaking immigrants to the U.S. have hardly a word of English when they arrive.
Though potentially of much greater social value than the Depression-born dole. Lyndon Johnson's much touted War on Poverty has proved a holding action at best. The Office of Economic Opportunity, supervising programs ranging from Head Start to Foster Grandparents, has carried the main burden of combat, but even its staunchest supporters admit that it has barely made a dent in the problem. As a Chicago Negro says: "The only helping hand a black man will find is at the end of his own arm." Under the paring knife of a parsimonious Congress, Los Angeles' Deputy Poverty Director William Nicholas maintains that the OEO is becoming "just another social-service agency." While stressing individual achievement and mobility, the OEO programs have permitted only the nimblest of the poor to scramble up from the lower depths, leaving the hopeless and the riot-prone in control of the ghettos.