American Indian Law Review Volume 5 | Number 2 1-1-1977 The aN vajo Nation Tomorrow--51st State, Commonwealth, or…? Theodore Wyckoff Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/ailr Part of the Indian and Aboriginal Law Commons Recommended Citation Theodore Wyckoff, The Navajo Nation Tomorrow--51st State, Commonwealth, or…?, 5 Am. Indian L. Rev. 267 (1977), https://digitalcommons.law.ou.edu/ailr/vol5/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in American Indian Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Oklahoma College of Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. THE NAVAJO NATION TOMORROW- 51ST STATE, COMMONWEALTH, OR...? Theodore Wyckoff ' Introduction With 150,000 members living on 25,000 square miles of land, the Navajo Indian Nation is the largest Indian tribe in the United States, living on the nation's largest reservation. An energetic, hardy, resilient people, inhabiting a vast area of buttes, mesas, canyons, deserts, mountains, and forests, a land endowed with great natural beauty and much hidden wealth, the Navajos are today caught up in a worldwide phenomenon: a climate of pervasive economic and political ferment, a spirit of dynamic social change, and a massive movement toward self-awareness, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. The Navajos' population has doubled in the last twenty years, their school enrollments have tripled, and their literacy rate is up 20 per cent. They constitute almost 30 per cent of the half-million reservation Indians in the United States, and one out of every five Indian school children nationwide is Navajo.1 Navajo socialization to democratic politics has grown from nothing into a significant factor on the American southwestern scene.