David Francis, director of the Pleasant Point Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) Program, says Catholicism and the old Indian faiths share fundamental values.

"We respect life, the nature...we worship land, to me it is sacred. Take care of the land, it keeps us alive. We are from nature, too, there is a balance."

Francis is an easy-talking elder of the tribe. He has known the reservation since childhood. Plucking details from the back of his mind, he can feel the expanding encroachment of white ways into Passamaquoddy culture.

"We went along with the white man over the years...when I was a kid, sheez, everybody talked Passamaquoddy, very little contact with the white man. We lived in...[shanties], we did whatever farm work there was, planted a garden, get income from making fish-scale baskets.

"I missed the old way of living," he says halfheartedly. "We were more happier, there was a sense of community. People stayed on the reservation and helped each other out. People went hungry together, and everyone chipped in. Alcohol wasn't much a problem here then...no cause. But now we are gradually losing our language and traditions."

Today, the Indians have set their priorities. They are building suburban pre-fabs to house their large families efficiently (often as large as 13 or 14), they send their children to Eastport High School after eighth grade, although only a quarter of the entering Indian freshmen graduate.

A typical house is decorated with colonial furniture, plastic fruit, fluffy floral armchairs, commercial and authentic Indian crafts. The television forms the pulpit of the living room: children crowd around to absorb its technicolor wisdom. In the driveway is a small car, an old Honda Super Hawk; bicycles lie on the back lawn, dogs mope around the fear porch. Raymond Moore and his wife bake some bread in the kitchen. Mrs. Moore, looking fresh, models tight blue jeans and a printed t-shirt. A girl short-cuts through the back yard filled with dogs, wearing a "Smoke Colombian" t-shirt, a headdressed chief puckering a thorough hit over her breasts.

David Francis says, "The only way to get ahead is to get educated and keep Indian values, language, arts and crafts."

Cliff Saunders '69, a Sioux who is the executive director of the Boston Indian Council (BIC), clearly defines the immediate goals most of his people have set.

"We want to ensure that Indian people will survive as Indian people. The services here (at BIC) aren't designed to turn Indians into whites. They're meant to teach Indians how to cope with white culture and be Indian at the same time."

Francis Nicholas is the thin, terse man who is the governor of the reservation. His wispy appearance is hardly that of the first-rate green beret he once was. He is a reserved, silent man, saying only that he was in "the service" before his three years as governor of Pleasant Point.

The governor says "education is a top priority," that adequate education is the only way his people will cope with the white world. "We don't like them to coop [live] on the reservation," he says, "but we like them to learn and teach the people on the reservation here the things they have learned."

Cliff Saunders lived in Lowell House when he was at Harvard. He capitalized on his opportunities here and ended up graduating from law school at the University of Southern California. He could be pushing paper and people at a New York law firm, but instead Cliff paces the floors of his modest office at the BIC, stopping to gaze at the Veterans Hospital outside the window. Quite apart from the bulk of his co-aspirants in the law, Cliff wears his straight brown hair past his shoulders, dons leather around his wrists, exudes Indian brave. Cliff, too, feels that education is top priority for Indians these days, but expressed hope that the Indian community will remain a community; that the learned will teach their brothers and sisters back on the reservation.

"We don't encourage them to coop back on the reservations, just to go back and help their people. The only way Indian people are going to survive is if they help each other. You can't forget where you came from."

"Education, I'll never destroy," says Moore. "Education is always reached for, and I'll always fight for it. We need it...but you have two minds here, like I say. You have two minds, You have to think Indian and you have to think English, to learn, to adapt."