Word: navajos
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...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...
Until last summer, House, a former Marine Corps and All-Service welterweight boxing champion, was one of two instructors in Navajo language and culture at the Navajo Academy in Farmington, N. Mex. This fall there are three, but House is no longer among them. The academy draws its students from the vast, mostly desolate Navajo reservation next to this charm-free oil-and-gas town. The school has a Navajo headmaster and an all-Navajo board of trustees. It is the only Native American college-preparatory boarding school...
...time when the Indian Self- Determination Act was passed, when the Federal Government was encouraging Native Americans to take their education into their own hands. Until the 1970s, the dominant principle of the Bureau of Indian Affairs was assimilation, and the government was content to let Navajo culture wither away...
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...