The following piece is drawn from a visit with a family on the Passamaquoddy Reservation on the Canadian border in Maine. The Passamaquoddy, along with the Penobscot tribe, are now suing to regain possession of more than half the land of the state of Maine.

They are strewn across a desolate landscape along the Maine coast like pebbles on the beach. Looking like scattered desert plants, wooden shacks and suburban pre-fabs just out of the ground with random incongruity. The paths have no names, few of the houses are numbered. This is an Indian village, changed, yet unchanged from centuries ago. Children play, dogs breed wild. Noises, the restless sea, the rush of a lonely car, wind. People are building.

The Passamaquoddies lived in the wooded foothills beyond the village when they first met white men. Today, 400 years after they encountered settlers from Canada, they have been pushed into this inlet near the sea, where they now live in the hope of their resurrection.

Eastport, Maine is just across the bay from New Brunswick. It is cold there in October. The foliage spins colors in the mind's eye that dazzle and edify, that warm the senses.

At 5 a.m. you wait for the sunrise. Your hands prickle from the subzero cold. You turn on the radio--there is nothing out there. Just scratches.

Standing at Eastport's tip, you are the first American to see the sun rise on October 8, 1977. This is the country's easternmost point, tucked away where the suns and moons are never shrouded by the city's dust.

Indians have constructed primitive fishing nets called "weirs" in the shallow waters, recalling ways of an older day. The hampered cry of the whale hangs in the night, preserved; sharks swim in the bay.

The only tall tree on the reservation stands impassively, a salient chronicle; a well-weathered, persevering Indian, threatened by the bare earth around him but still alive. Indians have always been here.

Over 500 Passamaquoddies live on this 99-acre strip of land. It is all the white man has left them. They wear white man's clothes, speak the white man's language, as well as their own, indulge in his pleasures, suffer from his problems, and learn from it all. The pain of time's cultural incarceration has grown numb; undaunted, they are happy, and they are building.

"I hate to tell you this, but this is the way I really feel. You people have almost destroyed us, but we are coming back to our own way, our own way of thinking," the Lieutenant Governor of the reservation intimates, with a deep, buttery, Indian voice which somehow dissolves all doubts. Raymond Moore is fortyish, with a big, barrel-like frame from which his voice bellows, interpreted by a benign stern face. Raymond Moore is the kind of man who can tell you stories that scare children and men equally.

"This has been 'reservation' since the 15th, 16th century. Now for instance like, you take that cross over there, by the ledge...now see that cross over there? Well there's one big cross and there's three small crosses. Now I hate to say this, but I think as far as history goes, that's where three missionaries were hung at that time." The bodies were dangling from the cross up on a hill, overlooking the bay which was populated by French ships. The devoutly passive Passamaquoddies lost control, erupted--telling their intruders to go away, saying they didn't want their Catholic religion.

"At that time, we didn't accept Christianity. We worshipped whatever we had. If the hunt was successful, we worshipped the hunt. We worshipped the sun, we worshipped the moon, we worshipped the ground we walk on, and I think it should be that way. This is the way I feel. Because we have believed from way back," Moore says. Today, most Passamaquoddies are Catholics. Some say they are Catholics before they are Indians. The reservation's public school, which holds classes up to the eighth grade, was a parochial school five years ago. Nuns still work at the school. Peering down on the school and the adjacent rectory from a knoll is the old iron cross. But there is no hostility.

"Well, I'll put it this way...we've lost it [our Indian culture], but it's coming back now. See the reason why I said we've lost it is because there was a certain stage there, a pause, where we say this next generation will stop and embrace whatever there is that the white man has adapted to us, and then the method they used we didn't like it, and we want to go back, because we want to be the way we are.

"For instance like, you take 40 years ago, there was no such thing as money. We didn't have these modern furnaces. Everything was based on trade for food. Me myself, I think if we were left this way we would have been much better off than what we are now. We have adapted almost to white culture."

Converting to a religion was much easier for the Passamaquoddies than converting a way of being.