The volunteers admit they can't grapple with the tribe's decisions about its own future and they adjust their expectations for the summer. The children of the tribe are home for vacation, restless because they miss boarding school in town. For the older teenagers especially the summer in Supai only reaffirms their determination to leave the settlement. Parents and tribal leaders, frightened by the threatened exodus of Havasupai's young blood, welcome the PBH volunteers to Supai because they are often able to convince the children and teenagers that there is something precious about their Canyon. Harvard students often claim that their job for the summer was "building egos" -- showing 10-year-olds who want to be the cowboy in "cowboys and Indians" that being Indian is special and desirable.
For PBH American Indian Project volunteers everywhere, the summer is one of small achievements -- of solving a 10-year-old's "identity crisis," making a psychopath cry, teaching a withdrawn six-year old girl to swim, telling a four-year-old how to skip stones. The larger social problems evade solution.
The 15 Volunteers who leave Cambridge each spring may travel up Interstate 90 to Neillsville, Wisc., wind through the mountains and salt flats to Ignacio, Col., or live in a community center in Gallup, N.M., making friends with winoes and drop-outs. Yet they discover the same problem everywhere.
They all find out that Indians don't live in hogans and pueblos carved out of sandstone cliffs. They live in backstreets of little Western towns or in isolated villages of 100 inhabitants tucked away near Lake Superior, where social workers won't venture without escorts.
PBH volunteers discover ultra-progressive Indian nationalists who write a newspaper called "Americans Before Columbus," paradoxically warning other Indians not to "sell out" to the white man. They also encounter Indians who practice the tenets of the ancient Native American Church, using peyote as a sacrament.
In Supai, Ariz., and in other Indian communities, tribes suffer severe schiziphrenia: should they forget they're Indians and migrate to the cities, should they further detach themselves from industry and prosperity to maintain tribal lands in isolated places? PBH volunteers, as is to be expected, are never able to ease those problems: they work with the immediate emotional needs of those communities, with families splintered by migration and boarding schools, restless children who want to leave the floor of the Grand Canyon