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5 Am. Indian L. Rev. 267 (1977)
The Navajo Nation Tomorrow - 51st State, Commonwealth, or...?

handle is hein.journals/aind5 and id is 273 raw text is: THE NAVAJO NATION TOMORROW- 51ST STATE, COMMONWEALTH, OR...? Theodore Wyckoff ' Introduction With 150,000 members living on 25,000 square miles of land, the Navajo Indian Nation is the largest Indian tribe in the United States, living on the nation's largest reservation. An energetic, hardy, resilient people, inhabiting a vast area of buttes, mesas, canyons, deserts, mountains, and forests, a land endowed with great natural beauty and much hidden wealth, the Navajos are today caught up in a worldwide phenomenon: a climate of pervasive economic and political ferment, a spirit of dynamic social change, and a massive movement toward self-awareness, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. The Navajos' population has doubled in the last twenty years, their school enrollments have tripled, and their literacy rate is up 20 per cent. They constitute almost 30 per cent of the half-million reservation Indians in the United States, and one out of every five Indian school children nationwide is Navajo.1 Navajo socialization to democratic politics has grown from nothing into a significant factor on the American southwestern scene. Their political voice is heard in Washington, and they are represented nearly in proportion to their population in 'the legislatures of Arizona and New Mexico. There can be no doubt about it: Navajo-land is a place on the move. One may well ask: what is the nature of the changes these people face? What is the future of this land? Are Navajos going to live as they have for most of the last hundred years, an isolated Indian tribe on a vast underdeveloped reservation? Or are they going to become integrated and absorbed into the mainstream life of this nation and of the states wherein they reside? Is their reservation, their tribal identity, and their way of life to survive, or are these going to disappear into the past? Might something *Associate Professor of Political Science, Northern Arizona University. Ph.D., University of Bonn, Germany, 1967; M.A.and M.P.A., Princeton, 1957; B.A. California at Los Angeles, 1942. The author wishes to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to many who contributed ideas and thoughts to this study, particularly to Chairman Peter MacDonald of the Navajo Tribe, his assistant, Arizona State Representative Daniel Peaches, former Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai, former Navajo Area Director Graham Holmes, Mr. Melvin Wise, Direc- tor of the Navajo Area Office of Information and Statistics, and Mr. Herbert Johnson, Of- fice of the Controller, Navajo Tribe. Responsibility for errors of interpretation of what these and others have told me, as well as for other residual errors, is, of course, mine.