Never having been forced to live within the confines of a reservation, the Indians of St. Augustine have avoided so far many of the chronic problems faced by Indians in the United States. Alcoholism, for example, is not a problem. Drinking--beer only--is done in three or four-day sprees after the arrival of welfare checks or when cousins and friends from down the coast come to visit in the summer. Rather than violence, their drinking seems to invoke depression for the most part. Drunken men wander up and down the boardwalk in front of the single row of houses, singing, wailing and tapping on window panes in search of companionship. They are simply ignored. One evening, from our broken picture window, we watched the sun disappear behind the hills up the river. Suddenly, a drunk man broke the stillness, driving his Skidoo wildly along the muddy riverbank, shouting to himself and to his wife who stood surrounded by children in the doorway of their house. The Skidoo lurched over the bank and down to where a boat was tied to a log. There he threw it and himself into the boat, announced that he was off for La Romaine (a primarily Indian town 150 miles south along the coast) and headed down the river. Three days later he was back chopping wood in front of his house.

I lived on the Indian side in summertime. By three in the afternoon, the picture windows are dark with myriad blackflies whose incessant buzzing makes silence unbearable. The scourge of the summer months, these minute beasts congregate in St. Augustine to revel in the poor drainage, ubiquitous trash and human filth. Most of the Indian children are under 12, and their resistance has not yet developed. They are beseiged with impetigo--a skin disease manifesting itself in open sores all over the body. Every blackfly bite that is scratched becomes an oozing sore, attracting more flies. Relief is guaranteed only with the coming cold weather when the flies will die.

Medicine, dispensed by the proverbial Florence Nightingale across the river, is still a novelty--therefore to be avoided. Prescriptions are seldom followed and infant mortality is high. Several times a week, the familiar orange helicopter from the hospital at Blanc Sablon, the border town between Quebec and Labrador, lands on the riverbank to collect and deposit patients on the orders of the nurse. It is not unusual for parents to try to convince her that healthy babies are in fact sick, thereby placing the child in the hands of the hospital and reducing the burden of extra dependents until the child is old enough to contribute something to the domestic struggle. In their eyes, this is not a question of irresponsibility, but simply of convenience.

Eleven years ago, the Quebec government made an abortive effort to round up the shrinking Indian population of Quebec into one town, La Romaine. It is hardly surprising that the Indians of St. Augustine, accustomed to a somewhat nomadic life in tents, were unhappy when hurled into the comparatively "civilized" French town where the already indigenous Indians were caught up in alcoholism and crime. So in the middle of a brutal Quebec winter, they left La Romaine and made their way back up the coast. Only four families survived that journey to pitch their tents near the narrow strip of riverbank where the government houses now squat. Three years ago, it was decided that tents were not, in fact, what the Indians should be living in. So 17 identical, color-coordinated homes were pulled together, each with its own toilet, snazzy stainless steel kitchen sink and modern electric wiring. Unfortunately, no one ever got around to bringing water to the pipes, and when the six-month-old generator was broken by an inebriated 16-year-old, it was never repaired. So skeletal street lamps now cast dark shadows across the boardwalk and it takes three trips to the river to flush a toilet once.

The harshness of the sub-Artic climate, the long winters and loneliness of vast expanses of wasteland have traditionally inspired in inhabitants a fear of the supernatural. Yet old superstitions seem to have died out on the whole and have been replaced by Roman Catholicism. Twice a year, the Belgian Roman Catholic priest from La Romaine spends a week in the tiny church which the St. Augustine Indians built for themselves under his supervision. To make up for lost time, he performs continuous masses, weddings and baptisms--all in Algonquian, the language spoken by the tribes of the sub-Arctic cultural area south and east of the Hudson Bay. Children eat potato chips and play tag in the aisle, baptismal water appears in a peanut butter jar, and everyone, scratching incessantly, squashes blackflies that gather at the window panes. At the wedding of the cheif's son, he and his bride sat in armchairs in front of the altar while wild dogs wandered in and out at will.

Ignorance

Life on the Indian side possesses a calm that must be closely related to the unique Indian sense of time--or perhaps timelessness. Goals and time limits rarely, if ever, enter their lives, so the concept of wasted time has no meaning. Women would sit alone in the house where I lived, staring out the window at the river for five or six hours on end, not moving, not talking. The third night I was there, still in the clutches of the American drive to be always producing, going somewhere, I sat for hours in the house of a young Indian, listening in the growing darkness to one crackling tape recording of Indian songs being sung by cousins down the coast in La Romaine. The batteries were all but dead, reducing the singing to a dull moan, so he would take them out and put them on the stove every once in a while. And it would sound like singing for a few seconds, then slow down again. A drunk man came tapping at the window, calling "Nikahan, Nikahan," who sat still in the gloom until the man stumbled away under the northern lights.

It is more than unfortunate that generations, even centuries, of the calm, unperturbably Indian state of mind has bred a dangerous inability to form a unified group and thereby capitalize on their strength as the most exploited, insensitively-treated minority that white North Americans have ever walked all over. None of the people with whom I lived are able to recognize the vital need for creative, effective leadership and solidarity, either within this particular enclave or on a larger scale. Few recognize the significant role of education in achieving these things, the need to encourage their children to take advantage of what excruciatingly limited opportunities there are--for whites and Indians alike on the coast. So that someday mysterious letters from high places will no longer go unread into the fire, and representatives sent to the Ministry of Indian Affairs in Quebec City will begin to guide the federal government out of a myopia of ignorance.