50 Years Ago | Worldwide interest in becoming a Navajo

Chet MacRorie, shortly before stepping down as managing editor of the Navajo Times for the third time, said he noticed a significant change in letters written to the paper from non-Indians.

He said the Navajo Times began to receive letters from people wanting to know how they could become a member of the Navajo Tribe, apparently thinking that membership was a sort of club that you could join by paying a membership fee.

MacRorie said the paper also began receiving letters from people who said they were born and raised off the reservation. Still, they had immediate family members who were registered members of the Navajo Tribe.

Once a year or so, he would publish one of these letters and include an editor’s note.

For non-Indians wanting to become members of the tribe, he would point out that the person would need to be related to a tribal member with at least a blood quantum level of 25 percent.

He would also explain that the tribe did not have associated members, for the people who had no Indian blood but wanted to be associated with the tribe somehow.

For people who had a close relative who was a member of the tribe, he included information from the census office outlining the steps needed to become a member of the tribe, including the need to have at least one of their parents be a tribal member.

But it wasn’t only the image of being a Navajo that was changing. For the first time, tribal governments began influencing state and national governments. And that increase in Navajo power could be seen by what happened this week 50 years ago.

For the past year, Navajo Tribal Chairman Peter MacDonald and his counterpoint on the Hopi Reservation, Clarence Hamilton, have led a coalition of environmental groups to stop the year-long development on the San Francisco Peaks.

And to the surprise of a lot of people, the tribal leaders have convinced the developer, the Post Company, to back down.

Bruce Leadbetter, president of the Post Company, said this week that the company is no longer planning to develop the peaks further, adding that the company has already spent about a million dollars to get the various approvals needed.

He said the company has been spending about $800 a day on the proposal, which would develop the land to put in between 1,000 to 1,500 homes on the peaks to create a year-round community.

The company already operates the Snow Bowl, which provides skiing during the winter on the peaks. The two tribes have also condemned that project, but in the 1960s, everyone seemed to ignore their complaints because reservation residents and their tribal governments had no real power.

MacDonald gave credit to this newfound influence to increase political power.

That changed in the last few years as Navajos began voting in state and national elections. Now, there were so many Navajo voters that state and federal government officials began to listen.

This could also be seen in the new interest by major newspapers in sending reporters to the Navajo Reservation to find out firsthand what was happening on the Navajo Reservation.

For the first time in the United States history, being an Indian was looked on as a good thing. The Times was seeing increased interest in tribal members to subscribe to the paper to keep up on what was going on the reservation.

But the biggest indicator of this new interest was the number of adults living off the reservation seeking membership in the tribe. MacDonald was in the process of getting the census office transferred from the BIA to the tribe.

In January of 1972, the Census office placed the membership in the tribe as 130,000, which was second among Indian tribes. The Cherokees were claiming a membership of 156,000. This number included thousands of members whose blood quantum level was way below 25%, the threshold required to be members of all other tribes.

For the next three decades, the Times would periodically print stories showing that membership in the Navajo Tribe was increasing more than twice the population growth of the United States.

According to Ron Faich, who was the tribal statistician for the Navajo Tribe for more than a decade in the 1970s and 1980s, this was partly due to bigger families of five children or more. But it was also was due to increased interest by adults off the reservation to get back in touch with their Navajo roots.

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