Tribe Set to Curb Farmers Aerial Pesticide Spraying

WINTERHAVEN, Calif. — Just after midnight, Fina Villicana stepped outside to retrieve her laundry from the clothesline in her backyard. Suddenly, beyond a wind-blown clump of willows, she saw a bright spotlight headed her way and heard the roar of an engine.

She ran for cover, hiding under her carport as chemicals rained down around her. The helicopter whooshed over the house where her three children slept, dropping a trail of pesticides in a fine white mist that illuminated the sky before sprinkling down on the lettuce fields that encircle her home.

All across the Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, people slam their doors and shut their windows when they hear the planes and choppers hovering overhead, launching what one tribal elder called “silent bombs.”

The Quechan Indians say they feel like cockroaches caught in a Raid attack. But in this forgotten corner of California, bordered on the east by Arizona, on the south by Mexico, the Quechan Indian Nation is no longer willing to surrender to what they perceive as an aerial onslaught.

The tribal government is planning to take the unusual--and to some, unwarranted--step of curbing aerial spraying of pesticides, enacting some of the strictest safeguards anyplace in the nation governing the use of agricultural chemicals.

The growers who farm nearly 10,000 acres of Quechan land say that if aerial attacks are banished from their arsenal, their crops, mostly vegetables, will be decimated by insects. Many say they would have no choice but to leave the reservation and seek other places to grow the food demanded by a hungry, burgeoning population.

The implication of the conflict at Fort Yuma reaches beyond the 3,000 people who make up the second-largest Indian tribe in California. It bespeaks the power of Native Americans to exert complete control over their territory.

Over a century ago, Indians were forced onto America’s most god-forsaken land. Ironically, that bestowed them with deeds to what has now become some of the best farmland in the country. Most lease a large part of their property, along with the coveted water rights, to growers for what amounts to less than a dollar a day per acre.

Today, no other Californians have the authority to ban the use of pesticides in their towns or neighborhoods. But as sovereign nations, if tribes prefer their reservations chemical-free, they have the power to make it so. Most, though, have been too passive or fearful to take on the agricultural industry, especially in Imperial County, where crops are a billion-dollar business.

“We’re our own government here and we can demand this,” said Mike Jackson, president of the Quechan Tribe. “We understand the concerns of the growers. Sure, we feed the world. But we can’t hurt our own people in the process of doing that.”

Beyond the borders of the reservation, the conflict also epitomizes the mounting tension as farm and city collide, especially in California, where suburbs sprawl into farm belts.

50 Million Acres Sprayed

About 2,300 times a day--more than 800,000 times a year--aircraft drop pesticides on crops somewhere in California. In 1995, California growers sprayed 50 million acres--about the size of the state of Kansas--with 47 million pounds of chemicals, according to the state Department of Pesticide Regulation.

Complaints about pesticide “drift”--when homeowners or farm workers are exposed to chemicals falling in unintended places--are growing in intensity across the nation as people move into places where they can readily see, smell or hear pesticides.

“It’s important to remember that the tribal conflicts are just a subset of the overall situation we face,” said Don Wood, pesticide project officer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco. “The smell of pesticides does not respect political boundaries. It’s an increasingly noticeable problem.”

Yet Native Americans often suffer the worst of it, since on many reservations only a narrow dirt road separates houses from fields.

Growers and applicators on the Quechan reservation say they take many precautions to avoid exposing people, including maintaining at least a 150-foot buffer zone around homes, spraying at night, using spotters and suspending flights when winds reach 10 mph.

“There’s no larger or lesser problems on the reservation than anywhere else in the whole United States,” said Dale Stuhr, owner of D.M.S. Agricultural Services, one of three companies using aircraft on reservation land. “We’re taking the same precautions we do everywhere else and we have very few complaints.”

But the tribe’s pesticide inspector, Emmett Hartt, says encounters between people and the chemicals occur regularly--he is investigating eight violations of pesticide rules from the past few months, including the spraying at Fina Villicana’s house in January. In the most serious incident, the EPA has launched a criminal investigation of a grower who allegedly dumped pesticide waste near homes in February. Three people claim they were intentionally sprayed in reprisal for reporting it.

“Things are running rampant out here,” said Hartt, who wants the tribal council to enact tougher restrictions and raise its $500 limit for fines against growers and applicators.

From above, the homes of the Quechan Tribe look like turtles floating in a sea of emerald green. A few footsteps from doorways, crops fan out acre upon acre. People awake to the sound of aircraft, and the next morning, they often see drops sprinkled on their cars.

Children trying to escape the desert heat splash in irrigation ditches tainted green with fertilizers, and romp between the rows of corn, onions and melons. Some pull up the flags that warn about pesticides and play with them like toys.

When Hartt, 55, and Preston J. Arrow-weed, 56, were schoolmates growing up on the reservation, there were no farms, only mesquite trees. Now almost one out of every four acres is leased to farmers.

With his wife and 9-year-old grandson, Arrow-weed lives in a hand-built adobe house, with no electricity, on 10 acres handed down by his great-grandfather. Crops abut his property on three sides. When the airplanes come, it’s “like being sprayed with machine-gun fire,” he said.

Arrow-weed, an actor and playwright who lives on veteran’s benefits, said he doesn’t care if an aerial pesticide ban means he might lose the $5,000 a year he shares with his two siblings from leasing 10 acres of land to growers.

After all, he says, the Indian way is to die leaving no mark on the land.

“I don’t think this place is worth a damn anymore,” Arrow-weed said, gazing at a farmer’s neat rows of wheat sprouting next to his mud house.

“We’ve lost our true tribal ways--that every living thing is sacred. It’s a combination of materialism and ignorance and denial. We see something wrong and we don’t do anything. We’ve got to quit blaming the white man. We can hit back, but we won’t because we’re scared.”

On April 25, the tribal council heard strong opinions about pesticides from a standing-room only crowd of 80 residents and growers--a meeting that Jackson called the first step toward banning aerial applications on reservation land except for infestations deemed emergencies.

Respiratory Ailments

The tribal leaders say they are motivated by an overwhelming--yet admittedly unproven--sense that pesticides are making the Quechan people sick. Jackson, who has asthma along with two of his three children, said he recommended the ban because tribal members seem to suffer an inordinate number of respiratory ailments.

Physicians say pesticide poisoning--which takes a high exposure--can cause respiratory irritation, blurred vision, nausea, stomach cramps and headaches, depending on the chemical and the dose.

No illnesses on the reservation have been directly linked to pesticides. But the tribe’s hospital says that of 135 patients who sought care for asthma attacks and other respiratory problems last year, 55% were sick on the day or day after chemicals were sprayed someplace on the reservation. Of 36 patients seen during the heavy pesticide season of October through December, 23 lived within a half-mile of a field that had just been sprayed, according to chief nurse Steve Champion.

People here say it seems as though every family has someone diagnosed with asthma. Asthma rates have been growing worldwide, and while chemical exposure might contribute, cigarette smoking, poverty, dust mites and other living conditions also might play key roles in the onset of the disease.

If the Quechan eliminate pesticide spraying, it would be only the second place in the United States--the first in nearly 30 years--to impose such tough restrictions. California cities and counties are prohibited from enacting their own pesticide rules under a state law imposed during the furor over malathion spraying in 1984.

“I’m not doing this to stir up trouble or make a name for our tribe,” Jackson said. “I’m doing it for the health of the people.”

Economically, the tribe and farmers are co-dependent, so limits on aerial spraying could hurt both. Senior tribal members, especially, rely on the farm leases for income. But Jackson, who earns $7,500 a year leasing 20 acres, said that if some growers pack up and leave, he is confident “others are out there waiting to farm our land.”

“The growers need us,” he said, “and we need them.”

The crops grown on the reservation are worth an estimated $19 million a year, based on an Imperial County average of $2,000 an acre.

Miguel Monroy, Imperial County’s assistant agricultural commissioner, said aerial applications “are one of the most efficient ways” to quickly stem infestations of insects. A 40-acre field can be sprayed in 15 minutes, while ground application takes several hours. Aircraft are also needed when fields are too wet for tractors.

The sprayers and farmers believe the tribe’s health fears are overblown and unsubstantiated.

‘The materials we use today barely will kill insects much less harm humans,” Stuhr said. “Our people who do the flagging and directing of aircraft are exposed probably 1,000 times over what any individual would be, and they have no problems.”

But many residents want the tribe to offer more protection, even if it falls short of an outright ban.

“I guess people are slowly realizing it’s unnatural to feel sick after the planes go by. People who grow up here just accept it,” said Patrick McCoy, who manages a mobile-home park on the reservation with his wife. “Just like Los Angeles with its smog alerts, there should be pesticide or spraying alerts here.”

For the 5,600 members of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in southern Idaho, disrespect for the dead at a sacred burial was the ultimate disgrace that triggered the outlawing of aerial spraying.

One day in the late 1960s, a funeral procession of Shoshone/Bannock tribal members, some on horseback, was “dusted” with pesticides that missed a nearby potato crop.

“There was a lot of residential uprising at the time,” said Genevieve Edmo, who grew up on the Idaho reservation and is now its land-use director. “People who reside around the farming areas were upset and concerned because there were a lot of sicknesses.”

No evidence linked illnesses to pesticides there, but in 1970, the tribe banned aerial use and later imposed other limits on ground application of pesticides and fertilizer. In response, most farmers installed costly ground sprinklers. Some chose to leave but were replaced with others who covet the half-million acres of prime land.

“We have some of the toughest monitoring of chemicals anywhere in the country,” said John Helsel, the Idaho tribe’s agricultural resource director. “We’re a lot more stringent than the U.S. EPA.”

Funded with EPA grants, a few other reservations enforce strong pesticide rules, but Helsel said most have no programs whatsoever and others are “pathetic.”

The Imperial Valley’s Quechan Tribe paid little attention until last fall, when Hartt was hired as pesticide inspector. Although the tribe has had an ordinance since 1940 requiring sprayers to stay 100 feet from homes, Hartt found that many growers were unaware that rules existed.

Now, he often sits in his truck on a dirt road in the middle of the night, watching crop-dusters “just to let them know I’m here, that I can pop in at any time.” Still, despite violations, no fines have ever been assessed.

Complaints about pesticide drift have surged as Hartt has spread the word. Still, many people fear reprisal.

In February, Breeze Holiday said she saw a man in a hazardous-material suit emptying two barrels of “neon green-yellow” chemicals in brush about 100 feet from her home. She reported it to Hartt, the EPA and an environmental group, Pesticide Watch. Traces of pesticides were found in the soil and ground water, and a grower faces possible federal charges. EPA officials say they also plan to test drinking water because Holiday said it sometimes burns her skin.

“It appeared that the dumping was done intentionally,” said Wood of the EPA. “This is a priority case and we have been working on it intensely.”

But Holiday said that after reporting the incident, the grower involved warned her that he “would make my life miserable.”

She said she was standing in her yard a couple of weeks later when a plane sprayed her with pesticide--an incident her neighbors Bob and Jeannie Taylor photographed. The Taylors say they were sprayed twice, and all three say they were sick with nausea, headaches, impaired vision and other symptoms. Holiday, 47, and her family, including her invalid stepfather, were evicted by their landlord, a grower, last month.

“I’m a Native American and I’m proud of it and I’m not going to sit quietly and be hurt by this [pesticide] anymore,” Holiday said. “It happens all the time, and not just on the reservation, but in all of Imperial County and Yuma. The farmers there are god, but I think our lives are more important than their damn lettuce crop.”