‘A Quiet Crisis’

A few days after Sarah Swift Hawk froze to death on a South Dakota Indian reservation, Phil Stevens sat in his Newport Beach home and penned a letter to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On the night of Swift Hawk’s death, he wrote, temperatures reached 45 below zero, and the windows of the family’s one-room house were covered with only thin plastic sheeting. The family of nine ran out of propane gas and tried to stay warm by huddling together under a few blankets. Swift Hawk, the family matriarch, didn’t make it through the night.

Such “needless death is repeated again and again on our nation’s Indian reservations,” Stevens wrote. Deplorable housing and poor medical care have created a state of emergency on the reservations, he said.

Next week, Stevens and a contingent of Native American tribal leaders will join two senators in a meeting with President Clinton in the White House. Stevens said he plans to ask for $150 million in housing and health care aid for reservations throughout the nation.

“The United States government is responsible for providing decent, safe and sanitary housing and adequate medical and health care,” said Stevens, whose Indian name is Walking Shield. “That’s what the government pledged to do in the taking of Indian land.”

Yet, he said, American Indians have the lowest life expectancy of any group of Americans, and deaths from several illnesses consistently outpace the national average. For example, tuberculosis deaths are 1,175% higher than the national average. Housing on reservations is substandard and overcrowded and often lacks indoor plumbing, he said.

“It’s a quiet crisis,” Stevens said. “They do not have the publicity of the tornadoes that rip across Kansas or the hurricanes that tear across Florida.”

But the housing and medical shortcomings are a man-made disaster caused by a “hurricane of neglect and a tornado of abuse by the federal government,” he said.

Stevens, a special chief of the Great Sioux Nation, plans to ask for $100 million to improve health care, particularly preventive medicine, and $50 million to repair about 10,000 homes that shelter more than 60,000 Indians.

He said this meeting should carry more weight than past attempts because the tribes are unified. In an unprecedented action last year, seven Northern Plains tribes joined to declare a state of emergency on their reservations. Stevens then followed through with a promise to work with U.S. senators and tribal leaders to get a meeting with Clinton.

Searching for ‘Realistic Solutions’

White House officials say the informational meeting will highlight an especially needy population.

“We will concentrate on some very difficult conditions in the Dakotas and parts of Montana,” said Lynn Cutler, senior advisor to the White House chief of staff on Indian affairs. “They are among the poorest of the poor. There is an infrastructure crisis, a housing crisis and profound health care needs.”

Clinton has nine pages of American Indian initiatives on next year’s budget proposal, Cutler said. They include 1,000 new teachers and funding increases for health services and school construction.

Several branches of government, including the Commerce Department and the Small Business Administration, also are working on initiatives. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo is planning to visit the Pine Ridge Reservation in July to help build houses, she said.

“It’s not perfect,” Cutler said. “We can’t fix it all, but we’ve made some strides.”

Cutler cautioned that a centuries-old problem cannot be solved in one meeting.

“The last thing I want to do is promise these folks something that isn’t going to come. It has happened too many times,” she said. “We’re looking for realistic solutions.”

An Advocate of Indian Causes

Stevens said the government’s recent allocations of $100 million to save salmon in the Northwest and $900 million to Hurricane Mitch victims in Nicaragua show that funding is available.

“I love this nation, and I have worked all of my professional career to defend the United States,” Stevens said. “This great nation has much to be proud of, but it certainly cannot be proud of the way it has mistreated and abused the nation’s American Indians.”

Stevens, who grew up in East Los Angeles, recalls his father’s tales of living on a reservation. Stevens’ great-grandfather, Standing Bear, fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn.

Throughout his business career, Stevens has supported Indian causes. In 1986, he founded the nonprofit Walking Shield American Indian Society to provide relief to Native American communities.

He sold his stake in the engineering firm he founded, Ultrasystems Inc. in Irvine, in 1988 and focused on improving the plight of American Indians.

The Walking Shield society, for instance, persuaded the military two years ago to donate homes from closed bases to Indian tribes. The effort has led to a continuing military-civilian cooperative effort to move and refurbish houses, fix roads and drill wells on reservations.

He received the 1996 President’s Service Award Medal, the nation’s highest honor for volunteer work, in recognition of his efforts. Stevens said he hopes such publicity will help draw attention to the suffering of Native Americans.

“In the threshold of a new millennium, it’s always fitting and proper to look backward at the past 100 years and project a new future,” he said.