Moore says he does not encourage Indians to stay on the reservation "Not to coop. But we are willing to learn. They think we have adapted to their ways. But in our own mind...I'll put it this way; the white man had a split tongue for a long time anyway...they have never crawled so low as a snake."

To the Indians, there are two minds. There are two civilizations. There are two ways of being. The Indians desire to co-exist with white civilization; yet they have no pretenses; they do not want to join white civilization. The line is a fine one; it is easily drawn too taut.

The tribe's relations with neighbors are mixed. "We have got along. The near neighbors we have here...like Eastport, Perry, Pembroke, Calais, Machias... now after you pass Machias, the people have accepted us as Indians, who are cultured, intelligent, self-sufficient. But the near neighbors, they take us as dirt." Moore explains why: "As far as I can see, these near neighbors are jealous. Due to the fact that they...oh, I don't know."

Cliff Saunders tells how Indians leave the reservation. They are attracted to the big city--the big bucks, the big luck. Many flock to the city with little education or job experience, and consequently many do not get jobs. Those who get jobs can't understand why they can't hold them.

The city is a lonely place, so Indian migrants gravitate toward the same part of the city, primarily so their children can go to school together. Busing eradicates whatever sense of community existed between Indian families in the city. Bewildered children who were swathed in the security of the reservation are dumbly walking the city's sensitive color line. Indian children are counted as either black or white depending on which race is needed to fill necessary public school racial balance quotas. They are also victims of racial hatred from both races.

Grace Roderick says her daughter went to a non-Indian elementary school outside of Maine, when their family was traveling around the country. "What am I?" her daughter would ask after coming home from school.

"Well I couldn't figure out what she was asking, then I remembered what I had gone through at Eastport High--the mockery. I told her, 'You're an Indian!'"

Grace Roderick, Pleasant Point's alcoholic counselor (and a former alcoholic) says, "A lot of the problem is the pills. If I take an alcoholic who is drunk to the hospital, the doctor will let him straighten out and when they let him go they won't prescribe 20 or 30 valiums, they'll prescribe 100 valiums. There are people who don't want any help, because they're addicted to these pills. It's a way for them to get these pills by coming to me." Valiums induce a state similar to drunkenness. "Every Indian who walks into that hospital drunk looks like a big dollar sign to these doctors," Grace says.

Alcoholism is the Indians' biggest single hurdle to progress. "Everyone on this reservation has an alcoholic in the family...it's everybody's problem. Until you sit down and try to help your parents or whoever, then nothing's going to come of it. It's just going to get worse."

Many Indians grow up on the reservation and don't leave until they have reached adulthood. Even today, many Indians go to the city for work without a high school diploma or job skills. Split away from their homes and friends, some jobless and poor, in a strange land, many Indians become alienated and withdraw into bars and never come out. Saunders says most Indians who trek to the city eventually return to the reservation to live. Grace Roderick traveled around the country for many years while her husband was in the service, building a family from Seattle to Virginia. Grace has learned to deal with her alcoholism and has returned to the reservation to "help her people."

"I can't blame anyone for my alcoholism...she said, "but I think I had the problem from the very beginning, though I never drank until I was 18. All I remember is drinking two drinks. I drank to get drunk. I think people who are unsure of themselves or have inferiority complexes are prone, because alcohol gives you false courage. But it was always there, that wasn't the problem. It was admitting it that hurt."

Grace says many Indians feel inferior, lack self-confidence. This may explain why these people are often unable to function in another world.

"Alcoholism is just a disease to me. It happens to the rich and to the poor, and it doesn't pick any particular person, it can hit anyone regardless of who they are...if we could just make people understand that it's not so much that we try to get a person to change. I think it lies in prevention at an early age."

Drunken courage fills the voids opened by basic insecurities and doubts. Indians shrink from the white experience when they encounter it. They are not prepared for it; it is foreign, they do not like it.

It seems that there is some difference between the white and the Indian that is more crucial than dress or teepees. It is something innate, locked somewhere inside the body, perhaps in the mind, perhaps elsewhere.