Word: navajos
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Among his neighbors in the desert and mountain country around Grants, N.Mex. (pop. 2,281), husky, 59-year-old Paddy Martinez is conceded to be a well-rounded man. Paddy is part Navajo and part Spanish, stands 6 ft. 1 in., weighs 195, and has an outdoorsman's grizzled face. He runs a mountain sheep camp, works as a "head hunter" (labor recruiter) for carrot growers, talks Spanish, English, Navajo and the Laguna Indian language, has 14 children "and a lot of little fellows around the hogans" and is a dead shot with a rifle. He is also canny...
Last week in Arizona, Navajo chiefs, with the help of interpreters, held a powwow with Pilot C. S. Barnes, a onetime Army colonel now prospering in the rainmaking business. It was hard going, because there are no Navajo words for Barnes's way of producing rain. Talking Navajo, however, was a mere concession to ceremony: ten of the twelve Indians on the tribal council are college educated...
When the citizens of sedate Brigham City, Utah (pop. 6,000) first heard the news, there was consternation in town. The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs had decided to take over an abandoned Army hospital on the southern edge of Brigham City as a school for several hundred Navajo children from Arizona. Some townsmen had visions of a horde of adolescent savages. Others could see their orderly little Mormon community ringed by a fringe of tepees...
...things happened to make Brigham City change its mind: 1) a citizens' committee visited the Navajo Reservation and returned surprised and pleased with what it had learned about Navajos, and 2) the Indian Service's George Arthur Boyce arrived in town to get things going...
...shown everything: how to turn on a faucet, how to flush a toilet. When they were told to take showers, one boy took his with all his clothes on. When they were served ham on their first day, not one child would touch it until a teacher explained in Navajo that it was cooked meat...