INCHELIUM - Martin Louie remembers when the rivers teemed with salmon and his handmade fish traps made of fir hung at waterfalls with names like Kettle Falls, Miles Falls, Little Falls, Okanogan Falls and Cascade Falls.
"Now all those dams ..." laments the white-haired 78 year old Louie, who lives in a trailer house here on the east side of the Colville Indian Reservation.
"Only Little Falls remains and no salmon come up there anymore."
He pulls down a salmon trap hanging on a wall and talks of days spent digging the black camas bulbs for eating near Kettle Falls ... of how he knows every rock on both sides of Kettle Falls ... of how wonderful it was to have smoke-dried salmon all the time.
Now, other Indians bring him food from reservation food banks, constantly check in on him, chop his wood and make sure he has the essentials to survive.
And once a month or so he gets a five-pound block of government surplus cheese.
"I hear unemployment is pretty poor now," says Louie, a retired carpenter who lives of $332 a month Social Security.
Indeed. These are tough times on the Colville Indian Reservation in Eastern Washington.
"The Lord Giveth, the Government Taketh Away," said a sign on a truck that last week unloaded government surplus butter and cheese at the Colville Food Distribution Center in Nespelem.
"Maybe it takes longer for rural areas to bounce back," remarks Arleane Aubertin about those "economic recovery" remarks she hears so often from government officials. "But we're still in a recession and I don't foresee things getting better."
Aubertin is the tribe's food program director and a tribal council member.
On Tuesday, 200 people lined up for food in Inchelium. On Wednesday, another 250 people lined up for food when Aubertin drove a one-ton truck of food to the tribe's community center in Omak across three mountain passes on the other side of the reservation from Inchelium.
Aubertin estimates that unemployment among reservation Indians is probably close to 70 percent, and may be about 30 percent for whites there.
She distributes food on the reservation from three programs — government surplus, a Department of Agriculture program, and Seattle food bank distributor Northwest Harvest.
Phil Grunlose, Colville's personnel manager and a member of the 14-member tribal council, says the depression in the timber industry has taken a heavy toil on the reservation. Reservation timber sales in 1980 were $24 million, but have skidded to $9 million this year, he said.
Between 600 and 700 tribal members are now employed on the Colville reservation, according to Grunlose. Under better circumstances, as many as 2,000 would have jobs.
"Without these food programs, I don't know what we would do," says Al Aubertin, Arleane's older brother and for nearly 10 years chairman of the tribal council. "People might rebel, and I mean that."
He says he has "never seen it worse here than it is now."
The Colville Food Distribution Center in Nespelem, managed by Arleane Aubertin, makes monthly deliveries to four outlying areas and is on 24-hour call for emergencies.
"Easily, 3,500 Indians use and need this food," she says.
For 16 months, the reservation has been affiliated with the U.S. Department of Agriculture commodity program, which provides 75 pounds of food per month per needy individual. The food arrives every three months and only those who qualify and live on the reservation are eligible to receive it.
Colville can feed about 1,500 individuals each month under USDA, but Aubertin expects that number to reach a record 1,900 during winter.
The Department of Agriculture, whose budgets have been frozen for four years, pays $95,000 annually for Colville's costs, and the tribe contributes $60,0000 or nearly 40 percent. The federal government was originally to pay 75 percent of the costs.
Twice a month, the tribe's four-ton truck goes to Seattle's Northwest Harvest where it is loaded with produce, some fresh meat and occasionally some canned goods if available. Anybody on or off the reservation shares in this food.
About 300 families in Nespelem use the main distribution center, and the reservation's food runs are made from there.
—A one-ton tribal truck makes a monthly trip to Inchelium (85 miles and over two passes) where 220 families are served. In the winter, Inchelium has 4 to 6 feet of snow and the drive is treacherous.
—The truck makes a monthly 35-mile run over one 2,500-foot pass to Omak, to help 250 familiies
—The truck makes a monthly 25-mile run over one pass to Keller, which averages 2 to 3 feet of snow in winter, to serve 125 families.
—The truck makes a monthly 60-mile run to Malott, over one pass, to help 100 families.
For emergency runs of food, a half-ton van goes from Nespelem to any place on the reservation.
For example, last Thursday Aubertin made food runs to Inchelium and Omak to feed traditional funeral gatherings of tribal members in those communities.
The reservation, which spreads out north from the Grand Coulee Dam, encompasses 1.3 million acres or 2,300 square miles of Okanogan and Ferry counties. It's high-plateau country, 2,500 to 2,500 feet in elevation. Moses Mountain, at 6,774 feet, is the highest point on the reservation. The rule of thumb is that nobody plants a garden until the peak is free of snow.
The Colville Confederated Tribes is comprised of 11 Indian bands —Chelan, Entiat, Lakes, Methow, Moses Columbia, Nespelem, Nez Perce, Okanogan, Palus, Sanpoil and Wenatchee. The reservation is separated into four districts — Inchelium, Keller, Nespelem, and Omak.
About 3,674 Indians live on the reservation, and some 2,000 non-Indians.
"I've been poor living off and poor living on it," says Marlene Hale, 41, divorced and living off-reservation in nearby Grand Coulee. She is employed seven to nine months a year as a construction flagwoman.
"Maybe I shouldn't say that, but poor and living on the reservation is worse, particularly now."
Thanks to outside funding, she sent the "only child I can afford." a 20-year-old son, to Seattle to a six-month training course in underwater welding and diving. He was the only Indian in the class. She hopes he finds a job away from the reservation.
While some leave the reservation, others, such as 84-year-old Theresa Campbell, return. She had been living on a reservation in Idaho, but recently returned to Colville where she was born. She told friends she came home to die.
"When we were young, I think we had better times than young people now," she says.
Eugene Nugent, 55, heads the reservation's aging program.
"It's terrible what these people must endure, trying to live on $295 to $340 a month," he says. "They'd never survive without these food programs."
He tells of recently finding a 74-year-old man near the Canadian border who "lived in a shack worse than my dog." Nugent found storm windows, storm doors and food for the man and is now trying to find the man a bed.
Nugent bemoans the fact there is no snowplow in Inchelium, where there will soon be 3 or 4 feet of snow on the ground. "I found a woodchopper who will do that job for the seniors but how do we get to that wood when their driveways to the wood are buried in snow?" he asks.
The Rev. Pat Conroy, S.J., 34, the Jesuit priest at Inchelium, was among the 200 people using that community's food bank delivery last Tuesday. He made his selections before going to the gymnasium to start coaching the girls high school basketball team.
"The difference between the kids in a white school and those here is the ones here don't have much to look forward to," he says. "Going to college is not so much a cultural value with the Indians. When they depart into a large and impersonal society, their normal support systems — family, community — are missing and it becomes an intimidating situation."
Economic problems on the reservation are unique, he said.
"Here, a dollar rolls over once and is gone because there isn't even one bank on this reservation. Once that dollar is spent here, it disappears outside."
Whites are now having tough times on the reservation.
On Tuesday, LaRue Fentiman, 38, visited the Indians' food distribution center in Nespelem for the first time to share in produce delivered from Northwest Harvest.
Fentiman is the wife of the Grand Coulee Church of Christ minister and the mother of four children, ages 9-16. In August, a church support system dried up and her husband's salary was cut in half to $650 a month. That same month she started working as a waitress in the Sage Room, a Grand Coulee restaurant, a seasonal job that ended with the year's tourism.
"I'm not sure what we will do about Thanksgiving," she says. "Well, I got some flour and rice today although I don't have any turkey yet. I'm not really discouraged."
She hasn't even thought about Christmas, except she spent some of the tip money she earned in the restaurant for "two gifts for my youngest, my daughter. At least she will have a Christmas."
Bill Wiley, 57, a non-Indian, has lived in the reservation's tiny community of Belvedere for 50 years. His small house has no water and has been without electricity since a 1980 fire.
Four years ago, a stroke left Wiley with a paralyzed right arm, but he shops his wood, drives a car, shaves daily with a portable razor and carries water with his remaining good arm from a creek 100 yards from his house. He showers at his sister's home less than a mile away.
"Things are no good here at all," he says. "All my life, I've worked as a logger in these woods, but lumber is just kaput, has been for three or four years."
He and his 16-year companion Babe, a miniature Australian sheepdog, exist on food from the banks, $387 a month from Social Security, and $58 a month from the Veterans Administration. Wiley is a World War II veteran.
"I don't splurge. I have no TV. I read anything I can get. I listen to the radio and I'll probably stay home for Thanksgiving," he says. "I have bought my sister a Christmas present, but it's not a big diamond or nothing like that."
"Nobody told Okanogan County the recession is over," says Clara Fain, 48, head of Community Action of Okanogan County which helps eight non-reservation food banks.
She says there will be no Community Action Thanksgiving baskets this year, and at least 300 Christmas baskets (a total up 25 percent from a year ago) are needed.
But even though times are tough people are not giving up, she says.
"The good thing about us is that the survival skills — fishing, hunting digging for roots — have been handed down from generation to generation," says Arleane Aubertin. "We will survive."
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