School Is Where You Find It

A dusty, eight-year-old boy looked on when the great General William Tecumseh ("War is hell") Sherman and three Navajo leaders signed the treaty. That warm spring day in 1868, the 7,000 Navajos promised to switch from marauding to sheepherding; in return, the U.S. pledged them a reservation, schools, and a teacher for every 30 children.

Last week the U.S. promised again to honor its promise, and might even do so at last. The eight-year-old boy, now 86, had been chief of the Navajos for 62 years--though not a Navajo himself. Chief Chee Dodge, who is half Spanish and half Pueblo, was bedded with heart trouble.

The semi-annual tribal council's conclave at Window Rock, Ariz. went on without him. But high-heeled boots and sheepskin moccasins shuffled in & out of room 201 at nearby Fort Defiance's Government hospital. The man in the peppermint-candy pajamas knew the crisis facing his people. The reservation's 17 million arid, eroded and exhausted acres could not support its 55,000 people much longer. (Navajos, multiplying faster than whites, are the largest Indian nation in the U.S.)

They had to educate themselves to white man's ways or come near to starvation. Some--like Chee's son Tom (by a Navajo wife), a Harvard-educated lawyer who married a white woman--have made the jump successfully. For most Navajos it would be impossible without more schooling: 80% of the tribe is illiterate, 57% cannot speak English.

Tasty Schools. By treaty the U.S. was to blame. There were no schools at all for 14,000 out of 20,000 school-age Navajos. But the nomadic Navajos were also at fault: they took their children with them to tend sheep flocks. To round up students from a 50-mile radius, the day schools depended on buses. But poor roads, flash floods and wartime breakdowns held up the buses. Of 50 schools, 20 were closed during World War II. Chee says: "The schools tasted good. We want more."

Last week, as the Navajo conclave ended, Indian Commissioner William A. Brophy promised to open all but one of the reservation schools.

Chee insists that many once-reluctant Navajos are now eager to go to school. One explanation: the tribe--which furnished 3,000 men to the armed forces in World War II--was embarrassed by the hundreds of able-bodied Navajos turned down for lack of book learning.

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