INDIANS: Now, Navajo Power

The Navajo Reservation stretches across 16 million acres of sagebrush desert and red sandstone mesas in three Southwestern states—Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. The land was ceded to the Navajos in 1868, after the Indians had been battered into submission by Colonel Kit Carson. Today the reservation is in effect a separate nation-state, subject to neither state laws nor taxes. It is frontier country, where trading posts and prejudice flourish: the reservation’s 140,000 inhabitants are still eyed by many whites as savages. But the Navajos are slowly gaining a degree of prosperity and political power, and with it a renewed sense of pride. Some Navajos these days drive cars with bumper stickers proclaiming DINE BIZEEL (Navajo Power). In the towns that ring the reservation, this new assertiveness has been happily greeted by sympathetic Anglos; but others have reacted violently. Last week TIME’S David DeVoss visited the Navajos and filed this report from Farmington, N. Mex.:

Around here, prejudice too often leads to more than insults. On April 21, John Harvey and Erman Benally died after being stripped, beaten and covered with burning rags. Six days later David Ignacio, his ribs crushed, died after a two-hour battle for breath. For the three white teen-agers who confessed to the murders, their sin was locally viewed by Indian haters as mainly one of degree. Harassing drunken Indians is considered a prank by Farmington high-schoolers.

“Farmington has more rednecks than anywhere else in the world,” says Wilbert Tsosie, 27, a founder of the Coalition for Navajo Liberation. “They kill you with their eyes first, then pick a secluded spot to beat you up.” For the past six weeks, Tsosie’s coalition has sponsored Saturday parades in Farmington to protest the murders and press for more services for Indians. The demonstrations were peaceful until the most recent one, when the Indians collided with the annual sheriffs posse rodeo parade. The drill team was dressed in old cavalry costumes, like the ones worn by the Indians’ original oppressors. The resulting fracas left one policeman injured and 31 Indians under arrest. “These people are just trying to stir up trouble,” says Councilman Jimmy Drake. “These parades could be caused by subversives, you know—Communists, for instance.”

Profiteering Taverns. The demand most stressed by Tsosie’s young militants is strict enforcement of laws against selling liquor to the obviously intoxicated. Prohibited by the New Mexico constitution from buying alcohol until 1953, Indians now find it all too easily available, and many Navajos are outraged by the profiteering taverns in towns near the reservation border. In just the past ten weeks, more than 6,250 Indians have been taken into “protective custody” in Gallup for drunkenness. “Once Navajos start drinking, an incredible wave of hostility pours out,” says the Rev. Henry Bird, director of the San Juan Mission. “The boiling sea is visible only when the defenses are down.”

Despite an unemployment rate that averages 30%, the Navajos are increasingly directing their rural economy toward a structured industrial society. In the past 3½ years, Navajo Tribal Council Chairman Peter MacDonald, 45, a former electrical engineer for Hughes Aircraft Co., has done much to improve the tribe’s financial position. Aided by the growing number of college-educated Navajos returning to the reservation, he has forced companies operating on reservation land to pay more. The Indians used to collect from uranium prospectors only if the metal was discovered, but Exxon is now paying $6 million for the privilege of prospecting on a 400,000-acre section of the reservation. By 1985, Navajo revenues from mineral leases are expected to exceed $30 million a year, and their exploitation should help provide thousands of jobs for the Navajos.

Financial gain is breeding a rare euphoria among Navajos—a feeling that they can at last stand on level ground with whites. Last month MacDonald proposed that his reservation be made the 51st state, much to the disdain of local white politicians. Plans are afoot to build a new town inside the reservation, and the Tribal Council intends to ask the Anglo owners of 130 trading posts on the reservation to sell out to Indians by next year. Says MacDonald firmly: “The white people in the Southwest are going to have to get rid of their negative attitude and learn to accept us.”