Impasse Immobilizes Services on Reservations : Native Americans: Hopis can’t fuel police cars, buy food for schools. Dependence on federal funds leaves tribal areas vulnerable in shutdown.

While politicians fight over the budget impasse, the nation’s tribal reservations are just trying to hang on.

Without federal money, the Hopi Reservation, for example, can’t buy gas for police cars or food for its five schools. As a result, hundreds of children may not be able to return to classes on Tuesday after the holiday break.

Police layoffs and an increase in already rampant unemployment are also looming, Hopi Chairman Ferrell Secakuku said Thursday.

Secakuku and other tribal leaders in Arizona--where the Native American population of 285,000 is the nation’s largest--say reservations are especially hard hit by the lack of a budget agreement because of their heavy reliance on federal money.

Congressional Republicans and President Clinton are involved in talks on how to balance the budget but have so far failed to reach agreement. More negotiations are scheduled today.

Perhaps the only people happy about the shutdown are those in the Hopi Reservation Detention Center: They were released Friday because there is no money for heat or food.

The majority of the inmates freed from the detention center were being held on misdemeanor tribal charges such as intoxication and destruction of public property, said Alfonso Sakeza, the reservation’s criminal investigator.

The freed prisoners were granted conditional releases and told they must return at the end of the impasse or warrants will be issued for their arrests.

“We have 1.6 million acres to oversee, and there’s about 11,000 to 12,000 people living on this land and needing services. But those services will be drastically” reduced without a budget agreement, Secakuku said.

The Hopis are living off money carried over from last year’s budget. The money will run out sometime in early January, Secakuku said.

The Navajo nation is faring better, said Thomas Atcitty, vice president of the tribe. The Navajos have the largest reservation in the country, covering about 17 million acres and spreading into parts of New Mexico and Utah. Navajos account for 207,000 of the Native Americans in Arizona.

“By using some carry-over funds, most of our workers are prepared to work into the middle of March,” Atcitty said.

The Navajos have been helped by having their own area office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs that deals only with the Navajo nation. Other tribes must deal with the Phoenix-area BIA office.

“What happens with the other tribes is there is a real tug of war for funds,” Atcitty said.

Elsewhere, the shutdown is threatening San Diego’s Native American health clinic, which provides free medical and dental care, mental health counseling and HIV testing for the area’s 17,000 tribal members.

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The state Indian Health Service Office is giving the clinic two weeks’ worth of emergency cash so that it can stay open.

“I deal with the human side of this budget shutdown,” said Ron Morton, the clinic’s director. “When an issue like health care becomes a political football, there is no honor, no integrity.”

About 75% of the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ employees were among a total of about 280,000 “nonessential” workers furloughed when the shutdown began Dec. 16. Without the BIA workers and no government funding, the agency will have trouble buying food, heating oil, trucks and other equipment and goods for reservations, Secakuku said.

And putting even a few more Native Americans out of work on reservations where unemployment is already 38% “would have a tremendous, traumatic impact,” he said from the Hopi capital in Kykotmovi in northeast Arizona.

The Hopi police force of 18 could be cut to 13 through layoffs.

If the detention center is forced to close, its 15 inmates could be transferred to other jails that are not dependent on federal money. Some may just be released.

“These are not really hard-core criminals, but they should be incarcerated,” Secakuku said.