Winter of Death?

As the chill of autumn descended on their pinon-dotted desert lands last week, the Navajo Indians prepared their hearts for punishment at the hands of their old enemy, the United States of America. When winter came--the 84th winter since Kit Carson had defeated them in honorable war--it seemed almost certain that many of them were to die.

It was a difficult thing for the Navajos to understand. The U.S. had had its chance to kill them after their surrender in 1864. Blue-clad, tobacco-chewing U.S. cavalrymen had rounded them up, marched them like cattle 300 miles from Arizona Territory to New Mexico's Fort Sumner, kept them prisoners for four years. But when the Navajos agreed to peace "from this day forward," they had been freed and helped to start a new life.

They were given 3,500,000 arid, mesa-studded acres in Arizona and New Mexico; a reservation which was gradually expanded until it was almost three times the size of Massachusetts. The tribe grew from 8,000 to 56,000 people. They had been encouraged to build a rude economy on sheep-raising; as the years passed, they accumulated flocks totaling over a million animals. There was mutton to eat and wool to weave, and silver jewelry for the wrists of their women.

But in 1933 the Government discovered that its encouragement of sheep-raising was a grave mistake. The Navajo country was so disastrously overgrazed that the land was washing away with every rain and blowing away with every wind. The U.S. ordered the Indians to begin doing away with their flocks.

Soldier's Pay. At first, the enormous change in the Navajos' way of life did not work insuperable hardship. During the prewar years, many a tribesman worked on CCC projects. After Pearl Harbor, more than 12,000 got wartime jobs off the reservation, and 3,600 young men went into the armed services and sent their pay back home.

But when the war ended the jobs ended; with living costs mounting, all but a handful trickled back to the reservation. The Government, which had all but destroyed the Navajos' means of livelihood, did nothing to help them find new ways of making a living.

Insulated from the 20th Century by the desert and by neglect, they still live, for the most part, as they did in the 1860s. Their women wear flowing skirts copied from those worn by wives of frontier cavalry officers. Their shelter is still the "hogan," a windowless, one-room log structure with a hole in the dirt-covered roof to let out smoke. They still live far from streams because unfriendly spirits inhabit them; most must haul their water from one to 15 miles.

They are among the most destitute and underprivileged of U.S. minorities. They have no vote. About two-thirds know no English (there are schools for only 7,000 of their 24,000 children). The Navajos' tuberculosis rate is 14 times that of the U.S. as a whole, but there are only 182 hospital beds for their t.b. patients (TIME, Sept. 8). There are too few doctors, only two dentists, only two field nurses on the reservation.

Bread & Coffee. But last week these deprivations seemed like minor matters. Great numbers of the Navajos are facing starvation. Only 161 of their 11,117 families own as many as 200 sheep--the number needed to maintain a mere subsistence level of living. Without big irrigation projects (which could make the reservation capable of supporting 35,000 people at most), their desolate lands are almost useless for agriculture.

Last week, the Office of Indian Affairs was doing its feeble best to bring in some food. It promised to ship two carloads of potatoes a month. But from 25,000 to 30,000 Navajos were lingering in the state between malnutrition and starvation. The whole tribe's diet averaged only 1,200 calories (the U.S. average: 3,450) and many have nothing to eat but bread and coffee. Assistant Secretary of the Interior William E. Warne visited the reservation and last week announced a ten-year, $80 million plan for solving the Navajo problem.

But all this meant nothing if Congress did not vote the money. And the Navajos had little faith in high-sounding plans. The Government had welshed on its promises before. Last year, a group of old men had gone to Congress and asked: "What is to be done with the Navajo people?" Congress had replied by doing nothing.

And even if Congress were to change its heart, there was no likelihood that it could do so before the regular session in January. By January, if the winter was hard, there would be snowdrifts on the reservation and many of the children and old men would be dead.

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