Improving Indians’ Quality of Life : Connie Stevens Is ‘Making Waves’ for a Good Cause

Dale Soxie, 14, sipped a soft drink at poolside at Calamigos Ranch in Malibu with several friends from the Pawnee Indian Reservation in Oklahoma. He was excited about going to the Los Angeles Sports Arena to see the circus. “We had a circus come through (Pawnee),” he said. “It had one elephant--and it was skinny.”

Soxie and 81 other Indian children ages 10 to 15 from around the country were in Los Angeles recently to attend a camp sponsored by Windfeather Inc.

Indians are “the poorest, most ostracized group” in the nation, said entertainer Connie Stevens, the group’s founder. Stevens, who is part Iroquois, said Windfeather’s immediate goal is to “raise their dignity a little bit.” Its ultimate goal is “trying to create a large enough wave” of sympathy for Indian rights in the public consciousness that something will be done to aid them.

In addition to sponsoring the 11-day camp, Windfeather has been active in providing college scholarships for Indians, raising money to dig wells on reservations, and helping to purchase a homeland for the Kickapoo tribe in south Texas.

Biggest Obstacle

Stevens believes the biggest obstacles to raising the quality of life on Indian reservations are providing adequate drinking water and comprehensive immunization. She said that on some reservations, people have to go more than 100 miles to get drinking water. Diseases that were wiped out long ago in mainstream America, such as polio, still exist on reservations, she said.

Later that day Stevens was at the center of the chaos while the campers boarded buses for the circus. She peered into bag lunches (making sure everyone had an equal portion of corn chips), blew a whistle at misbehaving children, wrote names on endless lists, and generally looked like a glittery fish out of water.

“Children don’t bother me,” she said, looking a bit harried, nevertheless. “The more the merrier.”

As the bus rumbled through the Westside, Jared King, 12, pointed his camera at the landscape.

“Darn,” he said. “Missed it.”

“What?” someone asked.

“A Porsche,” he replied.

He is self-assured, well-groomed and athletic. His speech has a slight Oklahoma twang. King said his reasons for coming to Los Angeles were “seeing movie stars and going to Disneyland.”

His parents are divorced. His mother works for the Sac and Fox tribe in Stroud, Okla., as a secretary. His father, a former Marine, was out of work, but was trying to get a job as a high school athletic coach.

Jared King said he wants to move to Los Angeles when he is older. On this day, he was acclimating himself to the area at perhaps an alarming pace. When Stevens asked over a loudspeaker who wanted their hair cut and styled, King’s right arm shot up. “I want it spiked,” he explained.

Alvanita Hannaweeka, 13, from Zuni, N.M., was transfixed by the three-ring cacophony on the Sports Arena floor. Like most of the other Windfeather children, she sat largely expressionless and mute against the garish backdrop. When a trapeze act reached its climax, there was no clapping from the Windfeather section.

“They’re taught to be reserved, quiet people,” said Alia Lowney, who has an unusual problem for a first-grade teacher: her class is too quiet. She teaches Indians at Heartbeat Elementary School near Browning, Mont.

Lowney, who accompanied five girls from the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana, said the Indian children she teaches have a “warped idea” of mainstream American culture shaped largely by what they see on television. She believes that while Indian and mainstream cultures already know one another from a distance, “now they need to learn to live together.”

She is involved in the American Indian Sciences and Engineering Society, a program that helps Indian children who are gifted in the sciences. “Indians are not as uneducated as some people think,” she said.

Meeting the Performers

Lowney said that her first-graders are at about the right academic level for their age, but that Indian children generally “lose a year or year and a half” by the time they reach the sixth grade. “They have a tendency to give up, some of them, if they don’t get it the first time,” she said.

She believes Indian children tend to have a self-image problem and grow up thinking they are somehow inferior to whites. “A lot of them grow up with a limited view of the future,” she said.

The circus invited the Windfeather group to stay after the show and meet some performers. The children were given an opportunity to turn somersaults alongside tumblers and juggle with a juggler.

Enjoying the spectacle more than some of the kids was Marine Cpl. Dennis Place, one of 24 Marines stationed at the Pasadena Reserve Training Center who volunteered to assist Windfeather. Place, originally from Detroit, volunteered nine of his annual 30 days leave.

He is blonde, wears a crew cut and a big smile on his face. He could have stepped off a Marine recruiting poster. The Marines set up tents, cots, showers and generators for the Windfeather camp and provided general support services. Place said volunteering his leave “was worth it.”

“It’s crowded here,” noted Michael Cannon, a husky 15-year-old who lives near Stroud, Okla., looking toward Martin Luther King Boulevard from the bus window as it sat in the Sports Arena parking lot.

Natasha Johnson, a 15-year-old Navajo from New Mexico, had a similar impression as the bus rolled through the bustling Pico-Union area. “I wonder where they live,” she said, looking out at the crowded streets, “what kind of houses they live in.” She was quiet, almost wary of voicing her opinion.

A Quiet Interlude

King said he found “all the writing on the walls (graffiti) a little strange.” He also thought the way some people dress a bit odd.

“One thing about Los Angeles is the traffic,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s pretty good.”

The camp was the first trip away from home for some of the children. “The lights went out and it seemed like a lot of them were having trouble falling asleep” on the first night of camp, said singer and actress Joanna Patrice, a camp counselor who has been involved in Windfeather for a year. “Finally, one of the girls asked, ‘Will you kiss me and tuck me in?’ Then a couple of others wanted the same thing.”

Another night was descending on the camp. Most of the Windfeather children had finished their fish dinners and were playing basketball or volleyball, splashing in the pool or talking quietly among themselves.

Al Tsoodle sat at a wooden picnic table enjoying the early evening breeze. Back home in Carnegie, Okla., “It’s about 105 degrees and humid,” he said.

He described Carnegie, a community of about 1,500 persons, as “a typical Oklahoma town.” Most who live there are farmers, although there is some industry nearby. It is at the center of the 8,000 or 9,000 Kiowas who live in the area.

He works for the Kiowa Tribe as a summer youth counselor. A graduate of Central Washington University and former resident of Oakland, he was chosen to accompany the five boys sent by the tribe because he knows what life is like outside the reservation.

“They’re seeing things they may never see again,” he said, naming a number of local attractions, including the ocean, that the Kiowa children were visiting for the first time.

He said the Windfeather camp is also valuable because the youngsters can meet Indians from other tribes. “Many had never met Indians from out of state,” he said. “Now they know there are other young boys and girls like them.”

Tsoodle said it also fostered a closeness among the Kiowa group. “Some of them didn’t know one another before we came,” he said. “Now they’re playing together like they were brothers.”

He said the trip will help them decide whether they want to be “grass-root Indians” who live on or near reservations, or “city Indians.”

Ambitious young people generally move to the city if they want a good job, Tsoodle said. “If you’re an accountant, or something, maybe you could scratch out a living (in Carnegie), but not much more.” Nevertheless, he said that a lot of Indians who move to the city eventually come back.

“I just want my tribespeople to get the most out of life,” he said as the sky grew dark and stars began to pop out overhead, “to be normal, like anyone else.”