Volume 7 Number 1
October 1967

Vice President Hubert Humphrey

I AM HAPPY to have this chance to come to the land of the Navajos, to meet with the leaders of the Tribe, and to see and hear first hand what your problems are and what we are doing to solve them. When I say that we are working together, I am referring to the cooperative efforts of the Navajo Tribe and the Federal government. For the problems which you face are serious and it takes our combined efforts to overcome them. Government programs imposed from the outside, without local involvement, are doomed to failure even though they may be well-intentioned.

At the same time we must recognize that Indian tribes lack the resources to cope on their own with the serious problems of poor health, inadequate education and lack of employment. A true partnership between the Tribal and Federal governments can indeed provide us with what is needed: Federal technical and financial assistance and the understanding of local problems which comes from active Tribal participation. This partnership concept is a cornerstone of the policies of President Johnson, whether we are dealing with States, cities, or Indian tribes. Underlying it all, though, is a concern for people—for people in need and for people with problems.

It is for that reason, under the leadership of President Johnson, we are trying to help local communities change this situation. For we cannot shrug our shoulders and look the other way when we are faced with school-age children for whom there are no schools, with persons in need of medical care for whom there are no hospitals, with persons in need of housing for whom there is no home.

We know the problems of our Indian people, including the Navajos, and we are pledged to pursue programs and policies designed to elminate these problems. We recognize that our first and foremost task must be to end the scourge of chronic unemployment. We are an aware of the fact that your land base is not adequate to support your entire population in agriculture. Sheepherding could sustain a great many Navajo families when your population was much smaller. It is simply not adequate to sustain a population of 100,000.

To be sure, with the cooperation of your Congressional delegation, you have been able to obtain the assurance of desperately needed water through the Navajo Chama diversion project. This will provide you with a new area of arable land and will permit fanning where agriculture has in the past not been feasible. But, considering the needs of your people, this is clearly not the whole answer.

Some people have suggested the best way of helping Indians is to get them to leave home and move to the large employment centers. During my early years as a member of the United States Senate, I did, in fact, watch the efforts of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to encourage Indian people to move off the reservations and into the large cities. And I saw the results of the movement to the cities first-hand in my home state of Minnesota.

If the people from the Chippewa reservations had education or training, they were able to make a good adjustment to life in Minneapolis. But those who lacked these essential ingredients—and there were many of them—simply converted an Indian reservation problem into an Indian city problem.

Your tribal leadership and the leadership of other Indian tribes were correct in questioning the relocation program as a basic solution to the problem of Indian poverty. In the crisis which our cities are now undergoing, we recognize that the migration of the rural poor to the large metropolitan areas—unprepared and untrained for life in the cities—serves only to make a bad problem worse.

Your own Chairman, Mr. Nakai, and other forward-looking Indian leaders, have pointed out for many years that an important answer to the problems of Indian poverty lies in the location of new industries in the Indian country. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has, for the last six years, fully supported this new effort to improve living conditions on Indian reservations.

In your own case, the cooperative effort of your tribal government and the BIA has brought the new Fairchild plant to Shiprock. In a short while, General Dynamics will be opening a new plant at Fort Defiance. Other industries, we hope, will follow—thus creating employment centers, offering permanent, year-round job opportunities at decent wages right here on the Navajo Reservation.

Some of these new industries have employed only women in their plants in the cities. They will have to be taught about the available labor supply on the Indian reservations, so that jobs are offered on a truly non-discriminatory basis and young men and heads of families have an equal chance to find jobs.

Nor have you waited for outside industry to shoulder the entire burden of providing industrial employment. With your own efforts, and your own resources, you have built the impressive sawmill which now employs hundreds of Navajos. You are to be congratulated for this outstanding example of self-help.

THE COOPERATIVE efforts in industrial development have been accompanied by cooperative efforts in other public services as well. Let me cite a few examples:

(1) At long last there is a desk in a classroom available for every Navajo child. The massive school building program authorized during the last six years has closed the education gap which permitted thousands of Navajo children to grow up without having had an opportunity to attend school. While formal school education must be coupled with other training, training in the family, to make a whole man, there is no doubt that formal school education is essential for the younger generation that will be living and working in the America of tomorrow.

I have spoken of the new schools which have been built in recent years. But buildings, brick and mortar, are only the foundation on which an educational program can be built. Ultimately, it is the program itself that counts.

(2) With the assistance of the United States Public Health Service the Tribe has made major strides in reducing the incidence of death and illness from communicable diseases. Tuberculosis, a serious threat ten years ago, has now been almost stamped out. Infant mortality has been sharply reduced. The sanitation program, financed by the Federal government and the Navajo Tribe, has for the last six years provided an increasingly larger percentage of Tribal population with clean drinking water and sanitary sewage facilities.

(3) Hospital care can cure illness; it cannot prevent it. Inadequate and unsanitary housing conditions can often breed disease. That is why the housing program initiated by your Tribe with the help of the Housing Assistance Administration provides you with another milestone on the road to progress. The 200 homes which have been built so far, the 400 homes now under construction, and the additional 500 homes which have been authorized, make the Navajo Reservation program one of the largest federally-assisted housing programs in the southwest. Yet it is only a beginning. I certainly hope that you continue with your efforts to eliminate all sub-standard housing on your reservation.

(4) As you know, President Johnson has a deep personal interest in the programs initiated under the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. He will be glad to know that the Navajo Reservation has been one of the important beneficiaries of this law. The Head Start, Home Improvement, Job Training, Legal Aid and other programs are all designed to accomplish one goal: To enable the Indian people, the members of the Navajo Tribe, to have the same opportunities, to enjoy the same benefits, which our country offers to the rest of the population.

Some outsiders might raise questions about the wisdom of the programs which I have mentioned on the ground that they do not fit in with tribal traditions. Let me say that I am a firm believer in the principle that, under our democratic system, every group wishing to preserve its cultural heritage has the right to do so. That is why I feel that in your case, particularly, it is so important there be active local participation in federally-assisted programs. We want to be sure that the programs which we have begun are really wanted.

With this one safeguard built in, I have no concern that you will not reach conclusions which are in your best self-interest.

I HAPPEN to believe that, beyond all cultural differences, there are desires which are common to all human beings. A man who is hungry wants to eat, whether he lives in Minneapolis or Tohatchi. A mother whose child is ill wants the child cured, whether in Phoenix or in Tuba City. A father with family responsibilities wants to be able to provide for his wife and children, whether he lives in New York City or in Shiprock.

These needs and aspirations are common to most people in our country. And most of them, I am firmly convinced, want to use their own abilities to obtain their goals. But—and this is the key to the problem—circumstances of geography or family or both, circumstances beyond a person’s control—prevent some people from getting to the starting line at which most others begin.

For many decades the opportunities which our nation has offered to most of its people have by-passed the Indian country. This has meant that Indians, by and large, did not begin at this general American starting line but substantially behind it. The programs and policies which your Federal government has followed in recent years, in close collaboration with your Tribal government, have had the purpose of bringing the Navajo people, and all people suffering from disabilities of the same kind, up to that starting line.

My purpose in speaking to you today is to pledge to you the determination of your President to continue on the road on which we have embarked. When President Johnson announced in his first State of the Union message that we would wage war against poverty, he made it clear that that war will be fought until it is won. And that means that it must and will be won everywhere, including right here in the Navajo country.