The Oil Money Flows

On their arid, windswept reservation at the corner of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, the Navajo Indians dragged on for generations in disease-ridden, edge-of-hunger poverty. Untrained for the fast changing white men's world, they seemed resigned to everlasting subsistence-living and stagnation. Then, a year ago, money began flowing in as U.S. oil companies scrambled for gas and oil leases in the Southwest's vast Paradox Basin, much of it lying in the Navajo and Ute reservations.

By tradition and legend, poverty-gnarled Indians who suddenly come into oil money--as in Oklahoma in the 1920s-throw it around in wild spending sprees, and the off-the-reservation Navajos have done their part to keep the legend alive. Near Farmington, N. Mex. last August, a Navajo family living on its own outside the reservation celebrated an oil-lease bonanza by throwing an alcoholic blowout for friends and relatives. As the party rolled on, the wife sent to Farmington for 17 pickup trucks as gifts for the guests. Finally, after a fortnight of roistering, the party broke up in a brawl, the guests scattered--and the host's wife lay dying, her skull bashed in.

Wheelchairs & Rams. The tribal system that kept the Navajos surviving in the years of poverty has saved most of those on the reservation from yielding to such impulses when the oil starts to flow. Among both Navajos and Utes, money from leases on reservation lands goes not to individuals but to the tribe, and the tribal councils, with approval of the U.S. Government, have taken a firm grip on the purse strings. Last week, as the 74-member Navajo council pored over the $12 million fiscal-1958 budget at the tribe's octagonal headquarters in Window Rock, Ariz., a Federal Indian Affairs Bureau official remarked: "They're looking over each dollar as if it were a newborn lamb."

In a real tribal New Deal, the Navajo council has resisted the temptation to ease poverty with cash handouts: divvied up among the 86,000 Navajos, last year's $35 million tribal oil income would have meant only $400 apiece. Under the leadership of grey-haired Chairman Paul Jones, 62, a full-blooded Navajo, with a full count of glittering gold-filled teeth, the council spends very little for outright charity, devotes most of its budget to education and development projects. Items: P:A $5,000,000 fund to provide 400 college scholarships a year.

P:Some $500,000 for clothing for schoolchildren so that the poorest Navajo youngster can go warmly dressed to school.

P:Reservoirs and other land-irrigation projects adding up to $3,000,000. ^f A model farm for teaching irrigation techniques.

P:A ranch for breeding high-grade rams to improve Navajo herds.

Big Things & Thugs. With the oil income going for scholarships instead of firewater, things are looking better for the Navajos than at any time since the day when Coronado hove into the area in 1540. "We are shooting for big things," says Chairman Jones. "Within a few years we hope to have every Navajo child over six in school. We want to send our young people to college. We want them to come back to us, too, and we will use oil money to make places for them as doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers."

What worries Jones and other tribal leaders is the lurking threat that, as landowning Navajos outside the reservation get hold of oil-lease money to spend any way they want to, envious Navajos inside the boundaries will insist on getting rid of council control and dividing up the oil income among the individual families. That kind of pressure is already violent among the neighboring Southern Utes: a few weeks ago Indian thugs jumped Southern Ute Council Chairman John Baker, No. 1 opponent of the clamorous share-the-wealth faction, and beat him unconscious.

But so far loyalty to the prosperous tribe and abiding faith in its future are running strong. "We are growing," a Navajo leader explained last week. "Indian tribes may be declining in some places, but the Southwest will have to deal with the Navajos forever."

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