Broken Arrow

"Hardly a tomahawk's throw" from the sleekly modern Minneapolis Tribune building, wrote Tribune Reporter Carl Rowan last week, thousands of Indian families huddle in "the dark, squalid, bug-infested dwellings that fit society's idea of what an Indian wants or deserves." Flocking out of barren, overpopulated reservations in hope of finding work in the cities, reported Rowan, they soon "drift into a world of dark hopelessness." In Minneapolis, so-called "City of Hope," there are 8,000 Indians, but few employers will hire them. Jammed into rickety tenements and Skid Row hovels, said Rowan, most of them are doomed to lives that nourish "every stereotype about 'drunk,' 'dirty,' 'irresponsible' Indians."

Cause & Effect. A Negro who has won four national awards for stories that have taken him from the Deep South to the Far East, Carl Rowan, reporter and author (South of Freedom), brought to his 15-part Tribune series a mixture of shrewd news sense and a personal kinship with the Indian--the other "American who is not quite an American." In six months on the story, he traveled thousands of miles through reservations in Minnesota and North and South Dakota, talked to hundreds of Indians and white officials. His published series is not only a hard-hitting indictment of the slum conditions in the paper's own backyard but a searching examination of the deep-rooted causes and effects.

After more than a century of isolation from the U.S. mainstream, as Rowan points out, the Midwest's 75,000 Indians (who got U.S. citizenship only 33 years ago) have been encouraged by the Federal Government in recent years to quit the "rural slums" of the reservations. Says Rowan: "Most of the younger generation sees that the arrow is broken, the tribe is dead." But, poorly educated, lacking technical skills and elementary economic judgment, they enter the white man's world with "handicaps that burden no other group of Americans."

Good & Dead. "When local whites criticize the South for racial segregation," asks Rowan, "is it a case of the pot calling the kettle black?" Rowan says he found "almost no citizen who will say directly that he considers the Indian racially inferior, or inherently a loafer or a drunkard." Yet the director of an Indian hospital at White Earth, Minn. told him: "The feeling in some communities is that the only good Indians are dead Indians." In many areas Indians are denied admission to hospitals, refused police protection, turned down when they apply for social-welfare aid.

The two-week series had hardly begun in the Tribune last week when Rowan was forced to "unplug my phone to get any sleep." At least 85% of the calls and letters to the paper commended the series, but government officials at all levels greeted the opening articles with silence. Pressed for comment, Minneapolis' Mayor Eric Hoyer shrugged: "Who are we to tell the Indian he should go to work? I hope Mr. Rowan carries the series through to an investigation of the same problem in all metropolitan areas of the country."

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