The Invisible Minority : Often Unrecognized, Elderly American Indians Struggle to Maintain Tradition, Continuity in L.A. Melting Pot

“We are an invisible minority in Los Angeles County,” Lincoln Billedeaux was saying. “We have no geographical neighborhood, such as Koreatown, or Little Tokyo or East Los Angeles. People think we are from some other group, because we come in all colors. Sometimes people come up and speak to us in Spanish.”

The invisible minority Billedeaux was talking about is L.A.’s Native American Indian community (some prefer the term Native Americans)--a group which, ironically, is larger here than in any other urban area in the United States, larger than anywhere outside of a reservation.

But it is one, continued the 75-year-old Billedeaux, which has been dogged by poverty (American Indians nationwide have one of the highest poverty rates of any ethnic group) and plagued by the identity crisis which is one of Billedeaux’s favorite points. Less likely than other groups to be concentrated in an identifiable area, they are scattered throughout the Los Angeles area, with small population bulges in communities such as Cudahy, Huntington Park, Bell Gardens, parts of Long Beach, El Monte and Maywood.

And, as with the rest of U. S. society, an increasing percentage are elderly. Estimates are that of the 75,000 to 100,000 American Indians thought to be living in Los Angeles County, more than 4,000 are age 60 or older. But this is a census count--its accuracy hotly disputed by many American Indians here who feel their true numbers are much higher.

Billedeaux, who is chairman of the Los Angeles County American Indian Council on Aging, Inc., a private advocacy group, lives in Los Angeles, but was born and reared on a Piegan-Blackfeet reservation in Montana.

He points out that many elderly American Indians in Los Angeles came, as he did, from somewhere else, many are poor, and, because of ignorance or language barriers, don’t avail themselves of existing aging programs.

And there are signs that the continuity which has characterized American Indian family systems for generations is fragmenting in the smoggy impersonality and pressures of day-to-day urban life.

One recently completed study, for example, found that among older American Indians interviewed most no longer live in a multi-generational family household. They are more likely, according to study director Joan Weibel-Orlando, a professor of anthropology at USC, to be empty-nesters who live alone, with a surviving spouse or in some other small family group.

What is urgently needed, said Weibel-Orlando, who has studied the lives of elderly American Indians for 15 years, “is a social support system and a way to be connected to services they will need as they continue to age.”

But there are exceptions to even the most stubborn trends--and nowhere is that more apparent than in a small house a block away from railroad tracks in Huntington Park.

There is only one bathroom, the roof of 63-year-old Josephine Nilima’s house leaks when it rains, and the whistles from passing freight trains almost make the place jump.

None of the 10 family members in the home complains. “It is traditional for Indians to keep a family together,” said Nilima, who is divorced and retired a year ago from a minimum-wage clerical job.

While not among the oldest old, Nilima is nonetheless a grandmother, a full-blooded Creek Indian who is doing her best to perpetuate what has for centuries been the way of her people.

Last December, she said, one of her four daughters, who is divorced and had been living with a friend, moved into the house with her three teen-age children. Months later they were joined by another daughter--who had separated from her husband--and her four small children, who had been evicted from their home.

With the bedrooms in the Nilima house all accounted for, the second daughter and her children--ranging in age from 14 months to 11 years--were given the living room. “It has become my house,” Gwendy Sinohui said, looking at the nearby dresser which held the family’s clothes. “I sleep on the couch, the kids sleep on the floor.”

One of the resident daughters works for a savings and loan, the other receives $788 monthly from Aid to Families With Dependent Children; Nilima gets a $355 monthly Social Security retirement check.

Nilima, who came to Los Angeles from Washington State in 1955, said she never has lived on a reservation, but knows from talking with other seniors here who have made a move to cities, that one problem is the cultural shock of the faster pace of life, plus often having insufficient money to cope.

“The income of most I know is near or below the poverty level,” she said.

“What we all badly need is a center where we can gather, and perhaps those elderly who don’t know how to get certain services could come and learn,” Nilima said. “The Latinos have centers, the Asians do, the whites do--why are we left out?”

As things are now, get-togethers of seniors are limited to homes or public facilities not really meant for such meetings. “On Memorial Day we had a powwow at a park in Bell Gardens,” she recalled. “Hundreds were there. Some were in costume. We danced to drums and ate our favorite foods.”

Like many others of her people here, Nilima resents lack of identification: “Someone will walk up, take a look, and start speaking to me in Spanish. And I have to say I’m sorry, but I don’t understand that language.”

Her 16-year-old grandson, Victor, mentioned that if he finds himself saying that he is Indian, “they look and say, ‘Oh yes, the high cheekbones.’ ”

There certainly isn’t much privacy in the modest house in Huntington Park, but within its walls Nilima is the architect of a cultural continuity that social scientists such as Weibel-Orlando say is missing in the daily lives of many American Indians here. She cooks fry bread and Indian tacos, and makes it a point to remind her family that, no matter what else, they can always say they are Americans. The original ones.

“One of the problems of elderly American Indians here is that they tend to be non-assertive and shy, particularly with public-authority figures,” said Weibel-Orlando. “Rather than press and confront and insist on their rights, older Indians will back away.”

For two years, Weibel-Orlando has been studying the needs of elderly American Indians in Los Angeles County, looking particularly for those not benefiting from the limited social welfare services network.

“In order to locate them, we hired five older American Indians from the community, who were familiar with the situation,” Weibel-Orlando said, explaining that she and her assistants went into communities where they knew older American Indians were concentrated. The effort reached 328 American Indian respondents in Los Angeles County, with a median age of 58. Although not a scientifically balanced sample (the anthropologist refers to her study population as “an opportunistic sample”), her undertaking culminated recently in a lengthy report to the federal Administation on Aging.

Among her findings were that:

*”The stereotype of the large, multigenerational Indian family household does not epitomize the household pattern of this sample.” As it turned out, only 73 of the 328 respondents live in households of four members or more.

In an interview, Weibel-Orlando qualified that finding only slightly: “Even though many older people may not be living in close proximity to their families in Los Angeles, that doesn’t mean they don’t keep in contact. It does mean it is much more difficult to keep up traditional and expected family ties in this urban setting.”

*”Los Angeles Indian community leaders have argued that the 1980 census was a serious undercount of American Indians in Los Angeles. To test that theory,” Weibel-Orlando said, “we added the question, ‘Were you contacted and asked to complete a 1980 census form?’ to the questionnaire . . . only 42% replied that they had received a census form in 1980.”

*”Relatively low incomes during their work careers, reduced incomes upon retirement, fixed incomes subsequent to retirement, inflation, the rising costs of real estate in Los Angeles and medical care generally all work against a financially secure old age for many urban Indians.”

Of those sampled, 122 said their monthly incomes don’t cover all of their living expenses. When asked, “How do you make ends meet,” respondents gave such answers as: “We are going deeper into debt,” “We have to continue working,” or family and friends “help us out.”

In fact, Weibel-Orlando’s random sample found that 23% of those living alone had incomes of less than $4,800 a year.

“I know for a fact that many elderly American Indians here are impoverished,” Billedeaux said. “A lot of them never had vocations. Many had agricultural jobs, unskilled and low-paying. Some never were in the Social Security program.”

And Billedeaux and other experts believe that under-reporting of their true numbers has resulted in less attention to the problems of elderly American Indians and fewer public and private social services than are available to other racial groups.

“When it comes to the allocating of federal funds for programs for the elderly and others, it is done by population count,” Billedeaux said. “Besides, a census count should be accurate, period.

“I remember when I was on the reservation in 1970, the census lady came in and put me down as a white, without even asking. When I spoke up, she replied that I didn’t look like an Indian,” said Billedeaux, who added that he and his organization are working with 1990 census-takers for more accurate reporting.

Another finding of Weibel-Orlando’s study was that diabetes is a particular problem among her respondents, occurring “more than four times as often . . . than in the general national population.”

Based on such findings, Weibel-Orlando said her report recommends, among other things:

*Setting up a diabetes testing and referral service in the local American Indian community, along with nutrition and exercise classes for those who are overweight or otherwise at risk for diabetes.

*Creating a senior citizens’ newsletter which would offer social-service information, be updated monthly, and made available to older members of the community.

*Offering low-cost home-repair loans, low-interest mortgages or mortgage supplements, and rental subsidies for low-income families--all strategies to help aging American Indians remain independent. According to Weibel-Orlando, most American Indians (89%) in Los Angeles say they would prefer to live in their homes rather than in a senior-citizens housing complex.

*Building a multipurpose senior citizens’ center for American Indians. According to Weibel-Orlando, 93% of those in her study said they would like to spend some of their leisure time socializing with other American Indians.

“We would like to mingle with other American Indians in Los Angeles, but frankly we don’t know where most of them are,” Bessie Printup was saying.

Printup, 82, lives with her husband, Harold, 81, in a modest home they own in Venice. On the living room wall hangs a painting done by their son, depicting a scene from the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona.

But the Printup’s son, Harold, Jr., no longer lives at home, nor does their daughter, Katheryne.

The Printups--he is a Seneca born on a reservation in New York; she was born in Fort Apache--exemplify a trend affecting not only American Indians, but many other ethnic groups as well. The tradition of multigenerational families under one roof, or even in the same city, is bowing to the pressures of American society, in which young people move out, and often away, to carve out lives for themselves.

Which, as is the case with many seniors, is just fine with the Printups.

“We have a son and a daughter, and both are married and have moved out,” Bessie said. “They both keep in close touch, but we don’t want to have to live with them. We want to be as independent as we can for as long as we can.”

The Printup family history is a particular kind of American saga.

She came to California in 1922 to attend school in Riverside; he came to Culver City in 1928 as part of a singing quartet. They met at the home of a mutual friend, were married in 1930, and went to live in Fort Apache.

Thirteen years later they returned to California so that their children could attend school here. Harold became a construction worker, Bessie a cook at Venice High School and, by most odds, they wound up in better economic circumstances than many other American Indians who had left reservations for urban life.

“What we need now is some kind of a social life with other American Indians,” Bessie said. “Sometimes we go to a powwow in a gymnasium or recreation hall, and we eat fry bread and watch dancers in costumes, but it would be nice to have one place that we knew was ours all the time.”

Like others of his people, Harold said he wishes more Angelenos knew that the melting pot also includes American Indians: “Too often I am mistaken for a Latino or an Asian.”

But the Printups , who participated in Weibel-Orlando’s two-year study, have no quarrel with the way family arrangements have changed from what they were decades ago.

“For our part, we have been assimilated into the community,” Harold said. “Our lives are pretty much like those of any other seniors, I guess. And our children spent their formative years here, so they are Californians, and this is the 1980s.”

Every two years or so the couple return to the reservation, drive past their old house, and let their eyes feast on the running waters and the hills, and a gentler way of life.

And although they could go home again, they say they won’t. Even though it would mean once more having a clear identity.

Why the concentration of Native American Indians in Los Angeles County?

Some came earlier, but many arrived here during the 1950s, spurred by an Eisenhower Administration program designed to encourage migration from reservations to the cities. Once there, according to historians and other observers, they were expected to take advantage of job-training programs.

“They were taught such jobs as bricklayers, but then there was no demand,” said Jeanette Costo, publications editor of the American Indian Historical Society, headquartered in San Francisco.

Billedeaux echoed that: “A lot who came to Los Angeles took such things as welding jobs. And how many welders were needed, either then or now? They drifted from job to job, getting older and never making much, never being able to put aside anything for their old age.”

Weibel-Orlando said that when the American Indians came to Los Angeles, “for the most part, they could get only low skill jobs. Many plateaued early in their earnings, which haven’t kept up with costs here.”

As for health care, since 1955 the federal government has run the Indian Health Service (IHS), which offers low-cost services, “mostly on reservations, but we also have 33 urban clinics,” Anthony D’Angelo, director of the Division of Program Statistics, said from Rockville, Md.

The only one in the Los Angeles area is at 1330 Long Beach Blvd. in Compton. There are other clinics, D’Angelo said, in San Diego, Santa Barbara, Bakersfield and Fresno.

And, according to Bill LaRoque, chief of Urban Health Services for IHS, attempts are being made to reach American Indians with information about federal programs and other social services.

“Say an Indian elder lives with an extended family,” LaRoque said. “Maybe that person is eligible for Medicare or Medicaid, but doesn’t speak the language. Through our outreach program, we will go to that person. Referral means we will help an American Indian go through the system to get something. Often, they don’t know how.”

But equally important to a healthy body is a healthy outlook on life, a need whose fulfillment taxes the resources of many residents in a city the size of Los Angeles. Ben Harrison, now on the staff of the American Assn. of Retired Persons, worked two years on the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians Reservation.

“When American Indians were on a reservation, they had a social identity,” he said. “Then they are suddenly faced with finding one in an urban setting such as Los Angeles. Especially for such a person who is older, there is a big problem finding a substitute support network. Often, because of a lack of anything else, they find this within their own family or in other families.”