A recent issue of Time ran a one-page article concerning the Navajo Indian Movement whose message was that, despite prejudice, violence, and oppression, “the Navajos are slowly gaining a degree of prosperity and political power, and with it a renewed sense of pride.” Whites figured in the story in almost entirely negative ways: the three teenagers who murdered several Indians; the callous paraders who provoked an Indian riot by dressing as cavalrymen; the obtuse councilman who speculated that the movement was the result of Communist agitation; the exploitative tavernkeepers who cash in on the Indians’ weakness for liquor; and legions of “Indian haters.” The moral was supplied (“firmly,” in Time’s phrase) by an Indian leader: “The white people in the Southwest are going to have to get rid of their negative attitude and learn to accept us.”
But there is another dimension to this matter, to which the Time story devoted only one glancing sentence: “Today the reservation is in effect a separate nation state, subject to neither state laws nor taxes,” There are issues involved here beyond the one that solely interests Time, which reduces the whole thing to a contest between Navajos and bigots (Time is rooting for the Navajos). What is at stake is a large question that has never been resolved: namely, what is the status of the Indian in the United States? Put another way: is the reservation Indian an American citizen?
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