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2. First Americans, Last in America
- University of Missouri Press
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CHAPTER 2 first Americans, Last in America 31 P rivate Juan Vigil returned home after World War II to a small pueblo in New Mexico with “two Bronze Stars, the American Defense Ribbon, the Combat Infantry Badge, and the Good Conduct Medal,” along with “the Asiatic-Pacific Ribbon for thirty-nine months of service.” But this Hopi soldier’s service did not carry with it the right to vote. New Mexico and Arizona denied First Americans that right, even though the Navajos had the highest percentage of voluntary enlistments in the nation.1 In its 1947 report, the President’s Committee on Civil Rights wrote that “our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle” in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds around the world. “Those with competing philosophies have stressed—and are shamelessly distorting—our shortcomings .”2 Although discrimination against African Americans received the lion’s share of publicity in the Cold War, they were not the only minorities who also faced inequality and discrimination. Indeed, in some ways, their plight more clearly portrayed the United States as an imperial power. As historian Paul Rosier has written, three major themes surrounded Indian-white relations after World War II. First, whites intended to renew their attempts to get Indian land despite long-standing treaties with the Native Americans (a movement to terminate the reservation system was seen by many as an excuse for a landgrab). Second, such attempts on the part of whites would have repercussions internationally given the United States’ new global obligations; and finally, Native Americans could help the United States in its quest for moral authority in the world by forcing the government to honor its obligations at home. All those themes played out in the national and international press.3 Shortly after the war, President Truman got his first opportunity to correct the perception at home and abroad that the nation had not dealt 32 thE OPINIONS OF MANKIND fairly with Indians when a bill creating the Indian Claims Commission came before him. Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug advised Truman that the bill would “be widely viewed as a touchstone of the sincerity of our national professions of fair and honorable dealings toward little nations.” Indeed, as Truman said in his statement announcing passage of the bill, the establishment of the ICC was a sign that the United States did “respect . . . the rights of little peoples.”4 The extent of that respect for “little peoples” would be sorely tested at home in the next few years. As it happened, an appalling crisis was confronting the nation’s largest tribe, the Navajo, in the postwar period because of government ineptitude, if not treachery. Dorothy Pillsbury detailed their plight in a series of articles published by the Christian Science Monitor between February and September of 1946. Pillsbury chronicled how the Navajos, who had raised sheep for generations on arid land in New Mexico and Arizona, were facing slow starvation because of a policy by the Office of Indian Affairs that limited the number of sheep a Navajo could own to ten per family member, an unsustainable level. With many Navajos off the reservation for the war effort, starvation had been avoided. But with the end of the war and the Navajos returning home, they were faced with the prospect of supporting, on largely nonarable land, some fifty thousand people whose numbers were increasing at the rate of one thousand per year.5 Part of the problem was that only about 10 percent of the Navajos spoke English, making it difficult for them to find work off the reservation. Compounding the problem, only one-fourth of their twenty thousand children were in school. As early as 1868, the federal government had promised them a school and teacher for every thirty children, a pledge unkept.6 A similar story was told to a million or so readers of Time’s foreign editions , and millions of others abroad with access to alternative news sources. After encouraging the Navajos to raise sheep, Time explained mordantly in November 1947, the government reversed itself in 1933 because overgrazing was causing soil erosion and ordered them to dispose of many of their animals, whence came much of their livelihood. Though vast, the reservation could support no more than thirty-five thousand residents, yet fiftysix thousand were attempting to eke out a meager existence, the result of thousands of Navajos returning to their old homes following military service or after defense industries closed...