Judy Norman and Gary Rosenblatt '66 worked with the Navaho and Pueblo near Gallop, New Mexico--dry, mountainous country, sparsely populated by Indians and sheep. Along with Navaho college students they ran daytime recreation programs for children and helped staff a community center. One recreation program almost overpowered the two volunteers with its success. When 120 high-spirited Zuni-Pueblo turned up for games, the volunteers blanched but carried on bravely.

The Results

Project participants have no illusions that their work somehow solved the Indians' interlocking problems of apathy, alcoholism, and juvenile delinquency. But the PBH American Indian project has stirred some Indian groups to greater activity, and such efforts by Indians are the principal means by which the problems of the Indian will be overcome.

The volunteers have also won a good reputation for the Harvard project. All ten tribes who had them last summer want more volunteers back next year. And when Bayne visited tribal councils after last summer's program, he found ten more tribes willing to use Harvard and Radcliffe students.

For the volunteers themselves spending a summer with an Indian tribe was successful in several ways. As they anticipated there was a chance to get a tan and draw far away from the Cambridge grind. But, as Judy Norman pointed out, "many volunteers also learned from the Indians as well as teaching them."

"You can learn a great deal about yourself," she noted, "by spending a summer in a very different environment. And it is a lot easier to see the flaws in the way you live when you see how others live by helping them.