Often people have successes in their lives that they can point to, rarely are people’s lives a success story.

Not true with Wayne Newell of Indian Township.

Born legally blind on an Indian reservation run by Indian agents 65 years ago, Newell’s life is a success story. “I don’t know if I would know how to handle 20-20 vision, I’m so used to 20-200,” he said. “I only have one eye. That’s why the other eye is closed because I don’t have the muscles for it, I’ve never used it.”

Newell recently became the first American Indian in Maine endorsed by the Legislature’s Education Committee after being nominated to serve on the board of trustees of the University of Maine System.

Gov. John Baldacci nominated Newell in February to succeed James Mullen of Bangor.

“I have known Wayne for a long time,” Baldacci said. “I thought a lot of him when we first met and I think a lot of him now. I am really proud to have nominated him to be on the board of trustees. He brings a unique perspective to the board along with a great amount of experience. He came highly recommended and for good reason.”

Newell first applied to be on the board 20 years ago. “It wasn’t the right time,” he said recently from his office at the Indian Township Elementary School.

Born in the family home at Pleasant Point, Newell attended classes in a three-room schoolhouse and remembers when Route 190 was just a dirt road. When he was a boy he used to walk from the Indian village to Perry to get the mail, a 4-mile-walk round trip. There were only four cars on the reservation.

To get to Eastport, about 10 miles away, tribal members had either to walk, hitchhike or take a taxi. The taxi driver used to charge 25 cents one way and they used the old Eastport toll bridge. Eventually a causeway was built and now Route 190 is the only road into and out of Eastport.

Once he had completed his elementary education, he attended Shead High School, but it took him five years to graduate. “Mainly because I was an honor student the first year, then I got kinda cocky and didn’t study much in the sophomore year, I had to do a little growing up. At that particular point it was the best thing that ever happened to me because after that I started to study hard,” he said.

The woman who most influenced him? His Grandmother Evelyn Newell. “My father’s mother, she was very strict and very rigid, but she gave me a lot to think about,” he said. She insisted he do his homework.

“She’d say you’ve got to get an education, she’d also say to me at different times ‘don’t get too much education, it’ll drive you crazy.’ I always thought that was a paradox, but I figured it out as I grew older. I think what she really meant was don’t waste your time on little things, use your education well and that’s what I’ve always tried to do. Everything I’ve ever learned, I’ve tried to apply in this community. That’s why I always stayed here,” Newell said.

After he graduated his dream was to go into radio, so he attended Emerson College in Boston, but didn’t graduate.

Newell then got a job at the Perkins School for the deaf and blind in Watertown, Mass. “I worked with deaf and blind children like Helen Keller,” he said. He left there after he realized that he had stopped using the sight he had. “It was so easy getting around in the school without using your eyesight because everything was designed for blind people,” he said. “You didn’t have to open your eyes you just walked around, you knew where you were, it was all laid out.”

Eventually he ended up at WABI-TV in Bangor. “I was a glorified gopher,” he said with a laugh. After a time, he decided he wanted to be a cameraman. He convinced the unit director to give him a shot at it. “I made a bargain with him that if it didn’t work out he could fire me on the spot and I didn’t have any problem with that,” he said.

He worked there from 1965 to 1968. That is where he met his wife, Sandy. The couple are about to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary.

At about that time, things were happening in the area of civil rights on the reservation. “[Former tribal Gov.] John Stevens was protesting about the treatment of native people,” he said, recalling the period in the 1960s. “I kinda liked what he was doing.”

Newell moved to Pleasant Point’s sister reservation at Indian Township near Princeton.

While there he immersed himself in the civil rights movement, but a life-changing opportunity dropped in his lap. He applied for a fellowship at the Ford Foundation and received it. He traveled all over the country studying economic development and social programs in native communities.

Then Harvard University graduate school of education beckoned and he was accepted even though he didn’t have a bachelor’s degree. They were recruiting Native Americans.

“My life is a combination of funny incidents that I can laugh about,” he said. “Here I am going to this prestigious university, it was right in the middle of the anti-war movement and Harvard Square was under siege by [Vietnam] war protesters, I show up in this black suit, with a crew cut. I stood out like a sore thumb. Everybody else hadn’t bathed in a week and they were all hairy.”

After graduation, it was back to Indian Township and the elementary school where he was asked to straighten out a grant program. “The program … got funded and they didn’t have anyone to direct it,” he said. “It was a bilingual-bi-cultural education program. They said, ‘you’re as good as anybody, you speak the language’ so out of that we formed the program,” he said. That was 1971.

Newell said his life has been a “wicked good” adventure. Newell said he told the governor when he applied to become a UMS trustee that he would bring a unique view of life to the board.

Over the past three decades, Newell has held a variety of jobs on the reservation, including education posts, an administrative role at the health center, and others.

“So I bring that perspective of a native person, a person who has had tremendous blessings and opportunities in his life. I also bring a perspective of rural Maine; Washington County isn’t exactly Times Square. And we rural Mainers bring a certain wisdom to the bigger cities,” he said. “We have a certain way of looking at the world, all of us that live here in Washington County.”