Kickapoos Live Under Texas Bridge : Tribe Clings Stubbornly to a Way of Life Long Past

With the passing of winter, the people called the “lost tribe” are trickling back to this dusty border town.

A few of their pickup trucks, coated with the grime of Mexico’s back roads, are parked outside the cardboard-and-cane hovels under the international bridge that leads to Piedras Negras on the opposite bank. More will come soon.

They have finished their secret religious rites of winter at the reservation in Nacimiento, Mexico, and are preparing for the harvest season, when the able workers will move from crop to crop as migrant laborers in the western United States.

But their home base will be here, at the encampment they call “Little Heart.” On the bank of the Rio Grande, next to a lush golf course, they live in squalor, as they have for more than 40 years, with one water spigot for the 40-odd wickiups that shelter them.

They are the Kickapoo Indians of Eagle Pass, a people who remain something of a mystery even now. Their trademark is a stolid resistance to change, a suspicion of those outside the tribe, a clinging to rites and ritual and language.

They might be a tourist attraction if they did not shun such attention: They are not a tribe given to selling beads and basketry to the curious. They cling tenaciously to their Algonquian tongue, the heritage of their beginnings in the northern United States, and they resort to a smattering of Spanish or English only when absolutely necessary. They are also nomads on wheels; trucks are one of their few concessions to the advance of civilization.

“In a way, the Kickapoo are like the Jews wandering in the wilderness,” said T.R. Fehrenbach, one of the foremost of modern-day Texas historians. “These people have been outsiders for more than a century. They’ve been treated like pariahs by everyone--the U.S. government, the Mexicans, the Mexican Indians and the tribes of the American Plains.”

Considered Outsiders

The Texas Kickapoos reside on American soil--either under the bridge or on the migrant labor trail--for more than half the year. But, until recent years, they were considered outsiders by the U.S. government because for years they dwelt in Mexico, a situation that clouded their nationality, even though their origins were in the Great Lakes region.

The Kickapoo way of life may be changing soon--but, then again, it may not, depending upon whether the tribe chooses to move out of Little Heart, under the bridge, to a 125-acre parcel of river-front land six miles outside of Eagle Pass. The land, bought this year with $315,000 in charitable contributions, including $114,000 from the Catholic Church and benefits by such entertainers as singer Connie Stevens, is intended as the first step toward building a better life for the Indians.

What the Kickapoos will do is unclear. There is the question of plumbing to be dealt with--there are no sewer lines or water mains yet on the land, and no structures. Tribe members also are concerned that building permanent homes and taking on American citizenship might somehow force them to relinquish their Mexican ties--important to them because their winter home is located in rough, rocky country about 90 miles inside Mexico.

And there is also the question of whether the Kickapoos really want to move from the place that has been their home since the early 1940s, a spot where they have raised their children and buried their dead.

“They won’t move for the next couple of years,” said Arturo Delgado, the Eagle Pass city housing coordinator. “The bridge is very convenient. The stores are very convenient. It’s going to be a long-term thing. The ones who will benefit are the ones coming up.”

Reticent to Talk

While the Kickapoos themselves are reticent to talk about their lives, they do have someone who does their talking for them. She is Nakai Breen, herself a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, who has devoted much of her life to the plight of the Kickapoo.

She has been given a name by the Kickapoo, Unakah, which means “bark that protects the tree.” Over the last 40 years, she has taken up the cause of the Indians, and, in 1982, her efforts and the efforts of others helped secure the passage of federal legislation that finally recognized the tribe, paving the way for government aid and citizenship. The latest step was the acquisition of the land this year.

Breen, 54, encountered her first Kickapoo when she was a 12-year-old girl in Eagle Pass. As she was walking to school, she saw a Kickapoo grandmother begging for coffee at the back door of a house.

“The people slammed the door in her face,” said Breen, whose husband, Bud, is a Western artist. “I brought her to my mother’s home.”

That encounter was in the first year the Kickapoo came to Eagle Pass, after drought and hunger forced them to move up from their land in Mexico, which had been given to them by the government for helping stave off raids by other hostile tribes in the 19th Century.

In the ensuing years, she would see the plight of the impoverished Kickapoo improve only slightly--the water spigot installed by the city, the addition of two public toilets. And she would also see such effects of Western man on the Indian as alcoholism and the petty crime that goes with it, and glue-sniffing among the teen-agers, as well as the effects of poverty, including malnourishment, tuberculosis and other diseases.

Leery of Outsiders

“They are so leery of the outsider now because everyone has taken them for a ride,” said Breen.

“A few years ago, the only help available for the Kickapoo was Nakai Breen,” said Frank Barrientos, an amateur historian in Eagle Pass.

There are about 600 Texas Kickapoos in all, relatives of tribe members who were more adaptable and live on reservations in Kansas and Oklahoma. And their story, like most involving the American Indian, is a sad one.

Once, before the white settlers came, the Kickapoo roamed over 13 million acres in the Great Lakes region of Wisconsin and Illinois. But, with the advance of the white man from the East, the Kickapoo tribe was forced to migrate to the Great Plains, where it fought some of the bloodiest battles of early American history--not against white settlers, but against other tribes protecting their own territories.

Each time, the Kickapoo were forced further south. And each time they began to grow their squash, beans and corn, they were again attacked by other Indian tribes. Eventually, Fehrenbach said, they resorted to horse stealing and cattle rustling for survival, which brought retribution from the white man.

Mirabeau B. Lamar, the second president of the Republic of Texas, ordered his troopers to “clean out the rats’ nest.” Some of the Kickapoos fled to the Oklahoma Territory, while the Eagle Pass branch fled deeper into Texas.

“They were considered interlopers by everybody,” said Fehrenbach.

In 1873, the Kickapoos were dealt what became a near-fatal blow, when U.S. troops moved across the Mexican border against the Kickapoo. Led by Col. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, 400 troops attacked the Kickapoo villages at Santa Rita, massacred their inhabitants and burned their wickiups to the ground.

‘Vanished From History’

“The Kickapoos vanished from history in the late 1870s,” said Fehrenbach. “But there have always been a few eking out a miserable existence along the border. People tend to think of them as a bunch of bums because of the way they live. But you’ve got to remember, they’ve been raised in this limbo of mistrust. They’ve been outsiders for more than a century. I think their distrust for everyone is perfectly normal, given their history. I can’t think of any other people with a story like it.”

The people living under the bridge at Eagle Pass are the tribe’s remnants, shunned by almost everyone. For years, their status in the United States remained unclear. They were issued federal forms that allowed them freedom of movement, but even those identification cards were demeaning.

The cards read, “Kickapoo Indian--pending clarification of status by Congress.” And, because the tribe’s fate was still to be decided, the cards also identified the Indians as “parolees.” That, according to Breen, caused some prospective employers to think they were ex-convicts.

For all their hardship, in recent years they have at least been tolerated by the people of Eagle Pass.

‘Don’t Bother Anybody’

“We don’t even know they are there,” said Steve Saucedo, who runs an electronics store in Eagle Pass. “They don’t bother anybody. They stick to themselves.”

But the times are changing. Manuel Moncoda, who runs a grocery store just up the hill from the Kickapoo encampment, said there was a time when most of the Indians’ mail would be sent to him. He also acted as their unofficial banker, cashing paychecks for them.

“Now, many of them have their own post office boxes,” he said. “And they don’t all come here. Some go to the H.E.B. (a Southwest grocery chain) and other places to do their shopping.”

Those are not the only signs of change. Another is that one Kickapoo youngster has joined a Cub Scout troop in Eagle Pass.

But even if the Kickapoo eventually do build houses on the new land, they will still remain a people of two nations. The reservation in Mexico is still the place where the Kickapoo go for their secret winter rites, a place they have called their own for more than 100 years. And the suspicions, it seems, will remain.

Breen, during her years of concern for the Indians, learned to speak the Kickapoo tongue, but the tribe does not want her to use it, believing she will learn too much of their way of life. That, to someone who has spent 40 years working with them.

“They thought I wanted to go down in Kickapoo history,” she said.

Undoubtedly, she will.