Word: navajos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...teenage Navajo mother in blue jeans would come in with a baby who was suffering from a cold and ask for some medication," recalls Dr. Joe Jacobs, summoning up a scene from his days at the Indian Medical Center in Gallup, New Mexico. "She'd be accompanied by the grandmother in traditional hoop skirt, who kept silent." After examining the child, Jacobs would offer his prescription for soothing inflamed nasal passages: boil some sage leaves in water and have the youngster inhale the aromatic fumes. "When she'd hear that, the young mother invariably would give the grandmother a sheepish...
Vivian Twostar -- part Navajo, wholly feminist -- is an assistant professor of anthropology, desperately seeking tenure. As the story laboriously unfolds, Vivian gives birth to a daughter by her once and future lover Roger Williams, poet and English prof. She is a sensual, lapsed Catholic Earth Mother. Roger is Mr. Stuffy: a New England Episcopalian with neat-freak closets and a kitchen full of name-brand gizmos...
...built in the midst of a vast habitat for Kodiak bears. Other tribes have allowed waste-management companies to use reservation land for dumps and disposal sites, then suffered from the contamination of their land and water as a result. Across the vast Arizona tracts of the Navajo Nation, high-voltage wires run like silver threads to the Pacific Ocean, carrying electricity all the way to to California -- but not to the 200,000 Navajo who live beneath them...
Although the U.S. government has had a trust responsibility since 1868 to provide for Navajo education, it has done a sorry job. Native Americans in general, and Navajos in particular, have one of the nation's highest rates of illiteracy and high school delinquency. The average Navajo adult has received * only five years of schooling. Today half the Navajos on the reservation are under the age of 20, and perhaps a quarter of those teenagers are not in school. A third of all high school-age Native Americans are classified as educationally handicapped...
...school grew slowly and steadily. It offered small classes and recruited a corps of solid, no-nonsense teachers, some of whom are still there. To be admitted, Navajo students had to score at or above the 40th percentile nationally -- that is, better than 39% of all U.S. students. That may not sound too stringent, but those young Native Americans who could meet that requirement were among the top fifth of all Navajo students...