Thursday, March 28, 2024

50 years ago: Good, bad news in scholarship report

The Navajo Tribe has released its first report on its scholarship program and it appears to be a mixture of good news and bad.

The good news is that a lot of Navajos are now being able to go to college. The bad news is that most are not making it all the way to graduate. The program, as it existed in 1968, began in 1957 when the tribe placed $10 million it received from mineral royalties in a special account that would only be used for scholarships. It appears that the tribal government issued its first tribal scholarship in 1953 and for four years just appropriated money out of the general fund each year to pay for the program. But the most the program got was about $160,000.

Then, in 1958, it began getting $400,000 a year since the tribe was using the interest on the $10 million, which was earning four percent a year. That went up to $500,000 a year in 1966 when the tribe removed the money from the U. S. Treasury and placed it in an account that gave it 6 percent a year. According to the figures released by the tribe this week, between 1957 and 1968, the tribe paid out $3.2 million to Navajos to pay for college. A total of 3,059 students were funded.

Out of that number, 339 received four-year degrees and 122 completed two-year degrees for a success rate of about 17 percent.

Some delegates of the Navajo Tribal Council weren’t happy about that but scholarship officials blamed part of the problem on the fact that, up until 1964, scholarship money was given directly to the student who ended up using it to pay for a car instead of for tuition and books. Now the money goes directly to the college and scholarship officials are hoping that increases the number of graduates.

Each student gets $1,200 a year and must maintain a C average to be refunded for another year. About 200 new scholarships a year are funded, or about one for every student who applies.

To determine who gets a scholarship the office looks at the student’s college entrance exam score as well as their success in high school.

The 1968 report doesn’t mention this but it was well known in the 1970s that the program wasn’t as fair as it sounded because many of the scholarships were influenced by members of the Council and high-ranking officials.

John Martin, director of the scholarship program, admitted that the number of students who graduated could have been larger but he said many of those who graduated were coming back and getting good jobs within the tribal and federal governments.

In other news, this was supposed to be a big week on the Navajo Reservation as far as national news was concerned. George Wallace, who was running for U.S. president on a third-party ticket, was scheduled to give a speech in Window Rock but had to cancel because of bad weather somewhere along the route, which forced him to go directly to California.

This was supposed to have been a major speech on Indian issues as he was seeking the support of Native Americans in the upcoming election. He said he would come to the reservation later but by mid-August he was running out of money and had to cut back on traveling.

While it was a little late, the Navajo Times reported this week that another Navajo had died fighting in the Vietnam war. Leonard Yazzie, 23, who was born and raised in Piñon, Arizona, died on May 28. He was a 1967 graduate of the Albuquerque Indian School and enlisted in September 1967 and had shipped out just 10 weeks before he was killed.


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About The Author

Bill Donovan

Bill Donovan wrote about Navajo Nation government and its people since 1971. He joined Navajo Times in 1976, and retired from full-time reporting in 2018 to move to Torrance, Calif., to be near his kids. He continued to write for the Times until his passing in August 2022.

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