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