Word: navajos
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...Navajo, Ariz. (pop. 24), has much to offer: history (it was Arizona's first territorial capital), location (on Interstate 40 just south of the huge Navajo Indian Reservation and east of the popular Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park) and profit ($100,000 a year from its motel, café, service station and general store). As a result, Navajo has six new owners: Don and Rita Schwinghamer of Phoenix, Don's cousin Frank Schwinghamer and his wife Ann, from Canada, and their close friends Len and Betty Siebert of Bellevue, Wash...
...group decided to bid for Navajo rather suddenly. Rita Schwinghamer saw a newspaper story announcing that the town would be sold at auction the following day by its owners, a family of local ranchers. "We thought it would be a good idea to buy," says Rita. They did not have time to visit Navajo, a 250-mile drive from Phoenix, but did look it up on a map. Their bid of $615,000 was the best submitted by eleven prospective buyers, including a Baltimore nightclub owner who wanted to turn the town into a haven for retired strippers...
...coal lies on Indian lands, areas that have also been proposed as sites for future synthetic fuel plants. But in recent years, legislation has been proposed in Congress to limit the control of Indians over their own land and natural resources. In April next year, ostensibly to settle a Navajo-Hopi land dispute, hundreds of Arizona Navajos will be forced to move--the largest Indian relocation since the 1800s--to make way for a massive strip-mine. In South Dakota, where the Sioux are fighting to prevent uranium mining in the Black Hills, Indian activists have been harassed, jailed...
...partition plan now under consideration will reserve much less land for the Hopis than they now officially possess. But it will eventually force thousands of Navajos and some Hopis to leave where they live and take what some call "the second Long Walk." For many caught on the wrong side of the meandering new line, life is about to turn into a latter-day Palestinian partition story. Some traditionalists have refused to go, despite a substantial offer of resettlement money. "I live inside four mountains, and I pray to them," says Navajo Katherine Smith, 60, who spent a night...
Percy Deal, 29, a strapping, strong-willed Navajo who studied civil engineering for two years at Eastern Arizona College and represents his nation at relocation hearings, understands the legal justice of the case. "I realize the Hopis want to make use of what is rightfully theirs," he says. "But there are human beings out there. The stress on them is tremendous." Percy knows well. He is one of Ella Deal's children, and was unable to return to the family land after his schooling because new grazing permits were unavailable and new housing was forbidden. "We've lost...