Indians Scaling Economic Ladder With Groups’ Help

In most ways, Charles Knifechief’s childhood in Santa Ana and Anaheim was as normal as any other American boy’s.

He did reasonably well in his studies and enrolled at Santa Ana College after graduation from Magnolia High School in Anaheim.

But as Knifechief recalls, there were no role models, no one to fuel his desire to achieve something, to do something more than work at a trade. High school counselors “were not real supportive,” he recalled, and although he “always had been interested in medicine, they said I wouldn’t make it.”

Today, Dr. Charles Knifechief, a full-blooded Pawnee, practices medicine at a clinic at the University of Oklahoma’s Tulsa Medical Center and plans to return to California in July to practice at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla.

In a group whose unemployment rate remains far above the national average, Knifechief’s experience is still an uncommon success story.

However, aided by a number of private programs, American Indians in recent years have been entering professions and starting businesses at perhaps the fastest rate in history.

For urban Indians, and that includes most of the Indians in Orange County, private organizations like the Orange County Indian Center and the United Indian Development Assn. in El Monte have helped thousands of Indians blaze a trail through the urban terrain.

Steve Stallings of Laguna Niguel, president of the nonprofit UIDA, said there are about 800 American Indian-owned businesses in California, compared to about 50 in 1970, when UIDA was formed.

Stallings, a San Luiseno-Shoshone, is not overwhelmed with that apparent progress, however. “Indians are at their infancy in business and economic development,” he said. His organization’s mission: “We’re simply trying to get more American Indians involved in the business world.”

In Orange County, that world is a $55-billion-a-year economy, large enough to make it the 40th largest industrial power in the world if the county were an independent nation.

But regardless of the area’s industrial might, many American Indians without skills find themselves mere spectators on the economic scene.

Statistics sometimes tell a numbing story--one that appears devoid of hope and filled with suffering.

According to the latest figures made available by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, a division of the Interior Department, 51% of the Indians in Southern California do not have a job. The bureau says that almost 7,000 Indians live on or near the 28 reservations in Southern California and the Census Bureau counted about 16,000 Indians in Orange County, which has no reservations, and 53,000 more in Los Angeles County.

For 94 years, the BIA has been the matriarch of American Indians, overseeing about 300 reservations and assisting tribal organizations with such things as timber management and water problems. In addition, the bureau also provides financial assistance to Indian business ventures, but California’s plethora of smaller tribes “are probably less able to avail themselves of programs than larger tribes,” said Vince Lovett, a spokesman for the bureau in Washington.

And the BIA has been shrinking for the last half-dozen years, terminating some services and transferring others to the private sector. Under legislation designed to balance the federal budget by 1990, further cuts seem certain.

The isolation of most reservations and the reluctance of many employers to locate businesses on them has perpetuated a continuing cycle of stunted economic development. With a limited formal education, many reservation Indians find the transition to city life and work a difficult endeavor.

Behind their characteristic shyness, many Indians are “just unskilled,” said Celeste Roubedeaux, an outreach worker at the Orange County Indian Center and a member of the Otoe-Missouria tribe. “A lot of them are not the type to speak up for themselves. Our people mainly play it very low key. They come to our office for someone they can relate to.” In addition to training and employment services, the center also serves meals to elderly Indians and distributes food to the needy.

Some tribes have successfully shaken the shackle of poverty by starting their own businesses on the reservations. Indians at the Morongo reservation near Banning run a bingo parlor, the Pala reservation in San Diego County has a sand and gravel operation, and the La Jolla tribe has a successful water-slide recreational park at the base of Palomar Mountain, about 60 miles northeast of San Diego.

Urban Indians are also banding together to help individuals to get ahead economically.

Mary Humeyumptewa Maynard, a Hopi from Arizona, didn’t have much going when she walked into the Orange County Indian Center in Garden Grove, which assists several hundred Indians each year with job training and employment. The center arranged for Maynard to take a clerical and data-entry course and then helped her to land a job.

The nonprofit center, which is a United Way agency, supports itself with municipal, state and federal funds, private donations and volunteer labor.

“California has the largest number of reservations and the largest number of Indians,” said Jack Stafford, a Choctaw and executive director of the center. Although Los Angeles and Orange counties have the largest urban Indian population in the nation, it is largely an “invisible” population, said Stafford, who cited figures showing that Orange County has 25,000 to 30,000 Indians, considerably more than indicated by the Census Bureau count.

Unlike other minorities, the strong differences among many of the 504 American tribes preclude a united movement for improved job opportunities that, for example, black Americans have mounted. That number includes 197 Alaskan native villages.

But with the help of the center and UIDA, Mary Maynard’s success story is being duplicated all over Orange County and the state.

Six years ago, Bob Clark, an Athapascan, took his accumulated knowledge from working construction projects overseas and formed his own company, R. R. Clark Inc., an architectural, engineering and construction concern based in Costa Mesa. UIDA helped the infant company make some contacts, and today R. R. Clark employs 18 people and recently won a $3-million contract for work on a uranium-enrichment plant in Ohio. The contract is “probably the biggest engineering contract an Indian company has ever gotten,” said Walter Hare, a Yankton Sioux and regional vice president of UIDA.

“The business is going very well,” said Clark, who also is a partner in a mining venture in New Mexico.

Other American Indians have quietly found a niche in the business world. After 18 months of “real struggle,” Rudy Crews’ Western Printing, Artistry and Graphics in Orange began posting a profit six months ago.

Tim Whetstone, an Oglala Sioux, saved his money while working as a petroleum engineer and, in 1983, bought a failing clay and ceramic business in the City of Industry. With some advice from UIDA on procurement, negotiating contracts and putting together a business plan, Whetstone rebuilt the business and now makes ceramic tile in addition to supplying clay to the ceramic industry. For the fiscal year ending March 31, Whetstone, who lives in Westminster, expects the Clay Dragon Trading Co.’s sales to double from the prior fiscal year. For the fiscal year ended March 31, 1985, the company had sales of about $200,000 and Whetstone expects sales to more than double again for the coming fiscal year.

After 18 “very tough months,” the business began turning a profit at the end of 1984.

Most discussions of Indians in business in Orange County eventually evolve to Phil Stevens, founder, chairman and president of Irvine-based Ultrasystems Inc., an engineering and development company that specializes in power-related projects and defense and space systems activities.

Stevens, the great-grandson of a Sioux warrior who fought Gen. George A. Custer at Little Big Horn, is active in many projects that work to improve prospects for American Indians. This summer, Stevens plans to return to his ancestral home at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota to “try to do what little I can to be of assistance.”

Stevens lends quiet support to “just about every Indian activity,” said Stafford, the Indian Center’s executive director.

“On an Indian reservation, although material wealth is low, there is an abundance of love,” said Stevens. “In an urban environment, that disappears.”

And so, American Indians seem to be at their most significant crossroads since they decided to help the Pilgrims. With high rates of infant mortality, accidental deaths, alcoholism and joblessness, American Indians are “clearly the most disadvantaged minority in the U.S.,” said Stevens, and yet “the Indian culture just doesn’t ask for a handout.