Volume 12 Number 2
January 1973

Two bibliographies are now available for purchase from the Center for Indian Education, College of Education, Arizona State University, Tempe, Az. 85281:

These publications were prepared under the direction of George A. Gill, Assistant Professor of Education, ASU, and Editor of JAIE.

The Navajos are the largest Indian tribe in America and considered by many to be the most progressive. But gaining that position wasn't easy. The 300-year struggle of the Navajos for survival in the face of slave raids, land encroachment, and massacre is reviewed in a new book published by the University of New Mexico Press.

Publication of Navajo Wars was marked by tragedy. The author, Frank McNitt, died at his Connecticut home in early December when the first books were coming off the press.

A newspaperman and author, McNitt had lived in Farmington, New Mexico, a trading center for reservation Navajos. His Navajo Wars represents eight years of research, tracing the wars of the Navajos from Coronado's arrival in the mid-16th century to the Fort Fauntleroy massacre of 1861.

McNitt concluded that the treatment of the Navajos by the various colonizers - Spanish, Mexican, and Americans - was essentially alike. The Spanish, in retaliation for Navajo raids, seized members of the tribe as slaves. In later years, the Mexican and American rulers of the Southwest continued the mistreatment of the Navajos. The Americans not only permitted the practice of enslavement to continue, but also expropriated Navajo land in large chunks, as they did Indian lands elsewhere.

An earlier book by McNitt, Richard Wetherill, Anasazi, was published by the UNM Press in 1957.

McNitt was born in Ohio and studied at the Yale School of Fine Arts and the Art Students League.