Hi, the Rich Indian

A few short years ago the docile Navajo Indians grubbed about in their 25,000-sq.-mi. desert reservation at the four corners where Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico meet. Disease-ridden, undernourished, ignorant, they lived in ramshackle hogans and crumbling shacks, contemplating a future as bleak as their past was romantic. Then, in 1956, big-time oil drillers on Navajo land hit the jackpot, and the dollars began gushing in. By last week, their numbers grown to 85,000 (v. 15,000 in 1868), their treasury to $60 million, their ancient weapons supplanted by grosses of ballpoint pens, lawyers, bookkeepers, geologists, oil consultants--even a pressagent--the busy, hard-driving Navajos were pounding their chests like a lusty new nation within a nation.

Thumbed Noses. Most powerful weapon in the hands of the new-rich Navajo tribal council is the treaty of 1868, signed by Lieut. General William Tecumseh Sherman for the U.S., and by Chief Barboncito and eleven other tribal chiefs for the Navajos. It allotted the Navajos their scrubby, brush-covered acreage along with treaty rights. Modern Navajo interpretation of the treaty: the tribe can disregard any state or federal law that does not suit its purposes. "A treaty sovereign," argues urbane Joseph F. McPherson. onetime U.S. Justice Department attorney who now works for the Navajos, "has a certain right of consent--and sometimes the Navajo just doesn't consent." Typically, Navajos in recent weeks:

P: Bluntly told the State of Utah (the richest oil-producing Navajo land lies in Utah) that they do not recognize the authority of the Utah Oil and Gas Conservation Commission in actions dealing with Navajo land.

P: Thumbed noses at federal laws, such as the Wagner Labor Relations Act, by prohibiting tribesmen from joining labor unions; the 74-man Tribal Council shooed organizers for the United Steel Workers and the Operating Engineers from their land by invoking an 1868 treaty provision that prohibits anyone except federal employees from setting foot on tribal lands without a permit.

P: Passed their own right-to-work law, which is tougher than similar state laws in Utah and Arizona.

P: Challenged standard antidiscrimination clauses in Atomic Energy Commission contracts by questioning the employment of Hopi Indians at a uranium mill on Navajo land.

P: Forced helpless and flabbergasted oil companies to raise their traditional 12 1/2% royalties to 16 2/3%.

P: Persuaded friendly Interior Secretary Fred Seaton to shut down oil production on their 275 wells--thereby depriving oil companies (and themselves) of hundreds of thousands of dollars--so as to force the companies to rush completion of equipment that will salvage precious gas, which was being flared off for lack of transmission facilities.

Decades to Go. Authorization center of this new Navajo nationalism is the Tribal Council, which tends to be run by two powerful figures (many of the rest cannot speak English): Chairman Paul Jones and Executive Secretary J. Maurice McCabe. Jones, a taciturn, white-thatched Indian, is a high school graduate. McCabe, a business-college graduate, is a go-getter who, like Jones, is widely respected by businessmen who deal with the tribe.

"They're very pleasant but firm," says one oilman. "Of course, they assume that the oil companies are to blame for anything that goes wrong on the reservation. If a sheep is found dead, we usually get--and pay--the bill." Oilmen who want to go on pumping the Navajo land will, with reluctant admiration for the canny Indians, keep paying the bill and be glad for the opportunity of setting foot on the reservation.

As for the Navajos, for the first time in their lives many of them are enjoying better housing, education and health (see MEDICINE), higher living standards, improved roads, new sawmills, and irrigation. Thousands still have decades to go to catch up, but they have not had it so good since the days before they established diplomatic relations with the foreign power that surrounds them.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.