Word: navajoized
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...series of technicolor flashbacks, "North Forty" tells the occasionally exciting, occasionally plodding story of the resistance of an isolated band of Wyoming sheep ranchers to the usurpation of their grazing land for a Navajo reservation...
...problem of the displaced white settler, "North Forty" mirrors forty years in the turbulent history of the Snopes family and its fight for survival. Pioneer settlers, the Snopes are forced to sacrifice first their flocks, then their land, then even their daughter to the alien customs of immigrating Navajos. The movie is climaxed in an effective juxtaposition of the old and the new; the last of the Snopes attempts to shear their few remaining sheep while an 11,000 man, three-day Navajo fertility rite sweeps over the fields. Only an act of Congress finally saves the settlers...
...many a sun-drenched trading post around Arizona and New Mexico's 16 million-acre Navajo Reservation, Indians were trooping in last week to buy such sweets as canned peaches or candy. To the experienced trader, these innocent purchases meant only one thing: a peyote party was in the making. Soon, at some secret hideaway far out in the desert, men, women & children would be enjoying the transitory delights of a powerful drug. After the party they would have a dismal hangover. The sweets were to help straighten them...
Peyote is the fruit of the mescal cactus (Lophophora williamsii), which grows abundantly in Mexico and in parts of Texas. Dried, the fruits look like buttons of half-dollar size, brown with a pale center. For 15 years the peyote habit has spread. Alarmed as early as 1940, the Navajo Tribal Council outlawed peyote, but the ban could not be enforced. The peyote button had been adopted as a Communion host by the Native American Church, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wary of a "religious freedom" issue, refused to interfere...
Plentiful Supply. There have been many reports of sex crimes, some against children, committed under the influence of peyote. Last week Dr. Clarence G. Salsbury, longtime medical missionary among the Navajos (and longtime foe of the Indian Bureau), reported that he had just heard of two cases of infanticide and one of fatal child neglect caused by peyote. At Flagstaff's Navajo Ordnance Depot many Indians were unable to work for days at a time after peyote jags. At least one-third of the 61,000 Navajos are estimated to be addicts...