Indian Talk

The Navajos are no vanishing tribe. Second in numbers only to the Cherokees, they have increased tenfold in the last 150 years, now number 50,000 (total of U. S. Indian population: 351,000). They live on a 16,000,000-acre reservation--as big as Belgium and The Netherlands--in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah.

Isolated from the world, the Navajos have no paved roads, no movies, no electric lights, dwell in mud-&-log hogans, seldom leave their reservation. Because they have no cows, Navajo squaws nurse children many months after birth. Nearly three-quarters of the Navajos speak no English. In the last few years, the U. S. Office of Indian Affairs has built more than 40 Navajo schools, sent out about 150 young women teachers. To drum up business, the teachers invited squaws to their schoolhouses for hair-washing parties (the schools have pumps, a luxury in the arid Navajo country), then persuaded them to send their children. Communication was difficult, for the teachers knew no Navajo, their pupils no English.

Recently the language difficulty reached a crisis. Though the Navajos are famed silversmiths and rug makers, their livelihood depends largely on sheep raising. The Government found their lands 40% overgrazed, their soil rapidly becoming eroded, concluded that the Navajos must be persuaded to reduce their stocks. But how to tell them? The Navajos had no written language. The Government's experts had developed a scientific jargon which they called Navajo, but the Navajos couldn't understand it. In their own vernacular, the Navajos had no words for such paleface facts as "sheep units," "wholesale," "retail." Navajo translation of "candy": a word meaning "that which is striped."

Thereupon the Office of Indian Affairs created a new Navajo language. Its authors: Novelist-Ethnologist Oliver (Laughing Boy) La Farge and Smithsonian Institution's Dr. John P. Harrington. The new language used the English alphabet, created words which resembled the scientists' jargon and the Navajos' vernacular closely enough so that both sides could make head & tail of them. Last week posters drawn by Navajo artists and designed to teach Navajos the language by means of pictures and text (see cut) were displayed all over the reservation. Passed around in Navajo classrooms was the first Navajo primer, a fairy tale:

Di 'ashkhi yazhi hasthin tl'izi lani biye',

Ni di k'ad do 'anlts'isigo

Do do nthah hotsaz dagoh,

Do do hah 'ant'i dakoh

'Inda dlo ba'an guya do khah dinyagoh

'Ei bah dats'ih bahane, do yididla dah.*

*This little boy is Mr. Many-Goat's son. If you do not believe his story it is because You are not short, Nor fat, Nor slow. And never, never have you been down a prairie-dog hole.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.