WEITCHPEC, Calif. — On her occasional trips to Washington, Yurok tribal Chairwoman Sue Masten hears the same wearisome question from federal officials: So, how are you surviving those California power blackouts?
Her answer shocks them: "The Yurok people would love the luxury of a temporary power outage," Masten says. "Because most of our reservation exists without either electricity or telephones."
This isolated swath of Indian land tucked behind California's Redwood Curtain, 350 miles north of San Francisco, is a place both Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison forgot. Here amid a landscape of rolling old-growth forest, 1,500 native Yuroks labor mostly as sustenance fishermen, catching Coho salmon along the graceful sweep of the Klamath River.
Just hours away from the Silicon Valley--America's symbol of technological savvy--many Yuroks continue an arduous life fashioned from an earlier century.
Nearly half of the reservation's 500 homes exist without the simplest phone or electric service. Many families use kerosene lamps and gas-powered generators for light and heat--relying on radio phones and citizens band radios to keep in rudimentary contact with the outside world.
Here on "the Rez," as most residents call it, some students do their homework by the glow of a flashlight. Many have only the dimmest concept of the World Wide Web because there are no phone lines to connect classroom computers to the Internet.
On this finger-shaped reservation that runs 47 miles northward from the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity rivers, elderly residents such as Lorraine Wilder resort to wood-burning stoves when their unreliable generators fail them on cold winter nights.
In the Yurok language, no word has evolved for electricity, elders say, because there has never been a need for one.
This lack of modern convenience may have even cost lives. A 5-year-old boy drowned while swimming in the Klamath River earlier this month, and tribal elders said the boy might have been saved if they'd had a reliable land-based telephone to summon help.
"We couldn't get the doctors here in time," says tribal Vice Chairman Howard "Louie" McConnell. "And now a baby child is gone."
In recent months, the Yuroks have made strides to join the modern world. They successfully petitioned the state Public Utilities Commission to approve more phone service for a handful of households, and the tribe is devising ways to raise the $8 million needed to extend electricity to the entire reservation.
But with an annual budget of just $14 million--almost entirely the product of federal grants--tribal leaders cannot afford the matching funds needed for additional government grants. The tribe's valuable stock of redwoods has been logged out. And with this year's drought, even the salmon are in short supply.
"People should know--we're living under Third World conditions here," says Masten. "We feel like a forgotten tribe."
Few Places in State Endure More Hardship
Across California, 535,000 homes still have no telephone service, many of them in remote unincorporated areas, according to the state Department of Finance and data from the 2000 census.
About 83,000 homes statewide lacked any type of fuel--either gas or electric, according to the 1990 census, the last year for which such information is available.
But few places--even among the 102 Indian reservations scattered across the state--endure more hardship than the Yuroks.
More than 85% of them live below the national poverty level, surviving on a median household income of $8,000 a year. Unemployment hovers at 80%.
Many reservation roads are little more than gravel tracks. California 169, the main paved artery, is a narrow one-lane thoroughfare with numerous blind curves where residents tangle with lumbering logging trucks.
Masten says the real losers of this primitive reservation life are the tribe's schoolchildren, most of whom find themselves ill-prepared for college.
"In this technological era, our kids are falling behind--they can't compete without phones and electricity," she says. "The so-called Digital Divide is wider here than any other place in California."
Standing just outside the town of Weitchpec, which in Yurok means "where two mighty rivers meet," McConnell gazes up at what he calls the last power pole--the point where electric officials stopped their work more than 20 years ago.
The former long-distance trucker gestures toward the forest, saying that all the homes beyond the pole are on their own when it comes to phones and electricity. And that makes him angry.
"Why didn't they keep going?" he says of power officials. "There's all kinds of isolated places in this state with electricity. Why not here? Because this is a reservation? Were they afraid we didn't have the money? Maybe they thought that just because we're Indians, we could build campfires."
Extending Power Lines, Adding Phone Service
