Bridging the Gap From the Reservation to Urban Life : American Indians: A Van Nuys center helps make the transition to big-city living easier with job assistance, counseling and a link to their tribal culture.

Of all minority groups in Los Angeles, American Indians have perhaps the most difficult time adapting to an urban lifestyle. Latinos and Asians, for instance, enter established ethnic communities here that help blunt the hard transition from native country to city life.

To help smooth the transition for Indians, there are a number of resources, including 10 Indian churches in the county, three alcohol recovery homes, numerous food programs, a jumble of groups ranging from an athletic association and resource group for the performing arts to business groups, and a Cal State Northridge Indian club.

The one offering perhaps the most comprehensive program is the Southern California Indian Center, which has a branch in Van Nuys. The center, which has five branches in the region, offers job referrals and training, education and counseling. Many Indians served by the center were born and raised on reservations and have moved to the city to seek jobs, which are scarce and low-paying on reservations.

“Getting a job is the most difficult task,” said Anna Marie Joe, site supervisor at the Van Nuys center, which was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Garden Grove headquarters. “There are so many problems with making the transition. Some have problems with eye contact since a lot of tribes don’t look at people directly--it’s a matter of respect. But the white man doesn’t look at it that way. They want you to look them directly in the eye.”

The center, which has five staff members, is funded through the U. S. Department of Labor by the federal Job Training Partnership Act.

More than 50% of all American Indians live in urban areas. More than 100,000 live in Orange and Los Angeles counties, with about 10,000 living in the San Fernando Valley alone, according to 1980 U. S. Census figures. Following are the stories of three American Indians who are struggling in varying degrees to hold onto their roots while learning a new way of life.

Martha Yellow Boy sits in her box-sized North Hollywood bedroom, staring blankly at a Citizen watch ad on TV. Behind her is a window framing a dirty screen. The view is of a stained concrete wall topped with four lines of barbed wire that cut a sky the color of morning glories.

She talks of home.

“I feel like someone wild who is trying to be tamed,” said Yellow Boy, pushing a hand through limp dark hair falling around her shoulders. “I feel like I’m in jail.”

Yellow Boy, 30, a Sioux who moved to Los Angeles one year ago, lived on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation until she was 20. She lived in Rapid City for the next eight years, but spent most of her free time on the nearby reservation where she maintained contact with other Sioux.

Los Angeles, however, is 1,700 miles from her people. The ache Yellow Boy feels from the separation alternates between a numbed expression and puzzled look and warm remembrances and outrage.

Hearing that jobs were plentiful in Los Angeles, she moved to North Hollywood a year ago and works as a receptionist for the Van Nuys Health Center, earning minimum wage. She secured the job through the adult work experience program at the Van Nuys Indian Center.

She also visits the center’s counselor each week to “talk about the loneliness,” she said. Staff members there encourage her to continue her education and socialize with other Indians.

Yellow Boy pays $140 a month for her share of the rent. The remainder is paid by her boyfriend, his friend and his friend’s mother, who also live in the one-bedroom apartment. The 1980 U. S. Census figures indicate that 22% of all off-reservation Indians live below the poverty level, about twice the average for the country as a whole.

Although she longs for home, Yellow Boy said she stays in Los Angeles because of the promise of a higher-paying job as a medical assistant.

“I’m a free spirit,” said Yellow Boy, who hopes to graduate high school in February after taking equivalency courses through an Indian Center program. “I like the open land where you can walk for miles and no one will bother you. Here, I feel I’m being crushed by these buildings and bad air. I want to run in the hills and holler uksha !” (which means to yell in the Sioux language).

Yellow Boy said her main complaint with city life is that she has no place to practice rituals important to her, such as powwows and sweats, used to purify the body.

“I try to go to be alone, but in a city like this, where do you go?” she asked, looking around at her bedroom, half stacked with her roommates’ suitcases and belongings. “Here, no one can understand what I do--the sweats--and they don’t understand my dialect or my culture.

“I’ve gone to an Indian church in Los Angeles, but what is an Indian church ? When you’re used to growing up with the peace pipe and all the herbs and spirits, it’s not the same. I’m not used to opening a white man’s book and reading his words. Waktanka --God--He’s for everybody and He’s all around. Not just in churches on Sunday mornings.”

Yellow Boy said her only opportunity for quiet and isolation is often in her 1978 Oldsmobile. There she plays tapes of Sioux songs and feels comforted by a satchel of sage and sweet grass kept in the glove compartment to shield her from negativity.

Perhaps the most stressful adjustment she has made involves other minorities. Before moving to Los Angeles, Yellow Boy said she had never seen a Latino and now finds it difficult when conversing with them at work. “They all think I’m Hispanic,” she said, glancing at a picture of her boyfriend kneeling in front of Marilyn Monroe’s star on Hollywood Boulevard, and one of herself in front of John Travolta’s. “I don’t know much Spanish and they don’t know much English and not any Sioux. And being a receptionist, you’re not allowed to get mad.”

A few months ago, Yellow Boy packed up her ceremonial dresses, headband, moccasins, bead work, shawls, feathers and pictures of her family and sent them for safekeeping to her sister and father in Rapid City.

“I was afraid of losing them,” she said. “They are very sentimental. I miss the smell of them the most--the scent of sage on buckskin. It smells like home.”

Unlike Yellow Boy, the promise of a steady job did not bring Eileen Alba to the Van Nuys Indian Center. But the feeling of destitution did.

Pregnant and homeless, Alba visited the center in June, two months after she was fired from her job as a driver for Domino’s Pizza in Sylmar. A drug habit had drained her finances, so she began using her 1968 Buick as shelter. Her mother, Barbara Alba, with whom she had been living, had just secured a job at the center as an intake clerk. Both women are Paiute and Yocut.

“I just went to the center to see my mom for a few minutes,” said Eileen Alba, 31, who recently gave birth to a girl, Lana. Her mother asked her to talk with her boss, Anna Marie Joe. “I didn’t want to, but I did, and it’s made a whole world of difference.”

The center’s staff arranged for Eileen Alba to stay for three weeks at an area motel, gave her food and took her around to area food pantries. “But most of all I got a lot of encouragement and hope,” said Alba, who was born and raised in Sylmar. “I had really given up all hope and didn’t think I would be able to keep my baby. I was totally depressed. I cried a lot. Between Anna Marie and the other ladies, I completely turned my life around in four or five months.”

Barbara Alba said nothing she tried previously seemed to shake her daughter loose from her drug habit or declining lifestyle. “Things didn’t get better until she hooked into the people at the center,” she said. “Now her self-esteem is way up.

“I’ve seen what the center has done for other people. What really helps is being around other Indians--and that’s also helped me. I was born in California and was only with other Indians in school when I was a little girl. I didn’t realize how much I missed my people. We all think alike, even though we’re different tribes. Our values are the same. Family means an awful lot to us.”

After counselors at the center helped Eileen Alba kick her drug habit, she completed a resume-writing class at the center and secured a job in telemarketing through a temporary service.

“I like that,” Eileen Alba said. “I never knew about resumes, just job applications. I never knew there was this tool that could help me--how to work a resume and make it professional so I could get a better job.”

In November, she moved back to her mother’s Sylmar home.

“Being an American Indian, it’s hard to open up and talk about your life, your feelings to just anybody,” Eileen Alba said. “I really don’t know any other Indians now other than at the center and at Eagle Lodge,” a Long Beach rehabilitation house where she initially tried to overcome her addiction.

Alba continues to see a center counselor once a week--”a very nice lady who has helped me out a lot,” she said. “I’m really impressed by the work they do--how they helped me out with food, how they distribute toys to children. That has really touched me.”

John Red Hawk sits on a couch surrounded by his artwork, which is scattered around a small apartment near UCLA that he shares with his wife, Barbara Feezor-Stewart. A pencil drawing of his father wearing chaps, cowboy hat and leather vest hangs opposite him. Nearby is a detailed drawing of Red Hawk’s great-grandfather, Medicine Crow, in full war dress.

Today, Red Hawk, who is three-quarter Crow and one-quarter Scottish, is thinking of the next sun dance he must complete. He has finished three and, according to Indian custom, a fourth must be performed to complete the set. Sun dances, consisting of several days of dance and fasting, are always performed in sets of four and are thought to confer power “from the man upstairs or the Great Spirit as we call it,” said Red Hawk, who plans to perform the ceremony back on his home reservation.

“But nowadays,” he added, “power comes from higher education and a good job.”

A good job, however, can be hard to find. The Herald Examiner, where Red Hawk worked as a graphic designer for a year, folded in November, 1989. He now uses the Van Nuys Indian Center for job referrals. Although the latest lead for a job at Hughes Aircraft in Canoga Park didn’t pan out, Red Hawk said the center is crucial to his search for employment. Free-lance jobs designing brochures and sale of his artwork have provided income while he searches for a full-time job.

Red Hawk, who sometimes uses his father’s surname of Stewart, was born and raised with three brothers and six sisters on Montana’s Crow reservation. He worked as a cowboy on his father’s 2,200-acre ranch on the reservation and, after high school, took courses in welding and drafting in nearby Billings.

He has also worked for the past three years as a linguistic consultant at UCLA, where his wife, half Sioux, is an anthropology teaching associate working toward a doctorate in that field.

“He’s an excellent speaker,” said Pamela Munro, UCLA professor of linguistics. “Without John, the graduate student he’s now helping would be tremendously impaired in writing her Crow language dissertation. He’s also helped her translate some old mythical Crow stories.”

John met his wife, who was born and raised on South Dakota’s Dante reservation, in 1980 while she was living on the Crow reservation. In 1983, the couple, who are in their 30s, moved to Berkeley, where she attended the University of California, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in American Indian studies. Red Hawk received an associate of art’s degree from Armstrong College in Berkeley.

They moved to Los Angeles in 1987. Both agree that the time they spent in smaller cities eased their transition from the reservation to life in Los Angeles.

“Higher education is so important,” Red Hawk said. “Even the last Crow chief said that with education, we are the white man’s equal. Without it, we are his victim.”

Making the transition from cowboy to artist to linguistic consultant has been a matter of continually taking new risks, Red Hawk said.

“I was pretty wild,” he said, showing pictures of himself with the waist-length braids he once wore. “Most of my friends are dead and gone from drinking and acting crazy. You know, if you don’t have scars, you’re not macho.”

Unbuttoning his shirt, Red Hawk revealed two chest scars from knife wounds he received in fights while growing up. “Some of my friends are still trying to relive the myths,” he added. “They try to be like their ancestors, who would vow to die in battle. They still say hokahey --’Today is a good day to die.’ ”

Although both of his grandfathers were medicine men, Red Hawk said he feels no ties to Indian spiritual practices. Most of his boyhood friends were white youngsters who worked on his father’s ranch. The relationships, he said, helped him when he moved to a large city.

Feezor-Stewart, who is writing her dissertation on Minnesota Sioux women, said non-Indians are often unaware of American Indians who successfully balance their native culture with urban living, as her husband has, and most don’t recognize the strides that American Indians have taken.

“Today, there are 26 tribally run community colleges,” she said. “And we now have the Los Angeles American Indian Mental Health Task Force that attends to Indians’ health needs. And there’s a tight network of American Indians trying to solve the question of alcohol. There’s no simple solution because there are so many tribes with different cultures.

“In the past, it’s always been non-Indian people telling Indians what’s good for them. Today, we’re in a position to express those needs ourselves.”