PROGRAM: DATE: SEPTEMBER 21, 1998
MORNING EDITION

 STATION OR NETWORK: TIME: 9:40 a.m.
NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO
 
 

WELFARE & THE NAVAJO, PART ONE

BOB EDWARDS, Anchor: In the two years since Congress passed sweeping welfare reform, more than four million people have left the rolls, a drop of over 30%. There's a big exception to this success: On Indian reservations across the country, as many as half the people are on public assistance and their numbers are not dropping significantly. The hope is that welfare reform will reverse the economic stagnation in which many Indians have lived. In the first part of a series on the Navajo reservation, William Drummond reports on how one family tries to cope with the government's push for welfare reform.
 

WILLIAM DRUMMOND, Reporter: Unless you have a detailed map, you'll never locate Shanto in Northeast Arizona. It's literally a one gas station town. No mall, no convenience store. Instead, an honest-to-God trading post where people buy on credit and Navajo women bring in their handcrafted rugs to sell.
 

(UNIDENTIFIED MAN): Pretty rugs. This one is a little crooked along the edge here. Did you make it with all natural wool?
 

(UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN): Yes.
 

(MAN): It's from your own wool?
 

(WOMAN): Yes.
 

DRUMMOND: Navajo shepherds bring wool into the trading post in plastic trash bags where it's weighed and tossed into a gunny sack taller than a man. Then it is packed down by a Navajo named Alfred who jumps up and down inside the burlap sack.
 

ALFRED, Employee: That's a dirty job I got there. It gets all over you. And then it gets into your hair, around your neck, in your nose, in your ears and in your hair. But I get paid every week.
 

DRUMMOND: Alfred, how much yarn are they likely to make from that eighty-five pounds?
 

ALFRED: $24.00.
 

DRUMMOND: (To Alfred:) For a lot of hard work that they've put out.
 

DRUMMOND: The trading post was paying forty cents a pound for wool. Selling their wool is one of the few reliable sources of income Navajos have. Reservation Navajos today make up the bottom rung of America's rural poor. Median household income is around $13,000 a year and unemployment is more than 50%. More than half the dwellings have no indoor plumbing. Despite the prevalence of poverty, only around 13% of Navajos actually receive welfare; many managing to eke out an existence through odd jobs, small gardens, making handicrafts, and Department of Agriculture surplus foods.
 

DRUMMOND: Travel on the reservation is done mostly in pickup trucks that bounce along bumpy, dusty roads which give way to dirt tracks meandering along slippery rock bases and treacherous pits of dust that turn into quagmires whenever it rains. Helen Yazi is one of the clerks at the trading post. Her house is only a short distance away, but it's still a rough ride. Helen doesn't live in the house anymore, handing it over instead to her twenty-three year old son Noland.
 

NOLAND YAZI, Son: I stay here by myself now. Everybody took off and I stayed behind, so I could feed the dogs and the cats that are still around.
 

DRUMMOND: His widowed mother Helen lives with her boyfriend, and his brothers have gone away to Utah to work. It's a scattered existence, but typical of many Navajo. Unemployed himself, Noland is the father of a one year old daughter named Nicole who lives three hours away with his girlfriend in public housing. The girlfriend receives welfare benefits from the Federal Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Program. Noland, who has had carpentry training but has been unable to hold down a job, says he wants to be a provider for his child.
 

NOLAND: I want to be there for her so she can accomplish what she wants to be and what she wants to do and I'll try to keep off drugs and all that stuff.
 

DRUMMOND: Is that from your own personal experience?
 

NOLAND: Oh, yeah. Liking that booze keeps things away from you. Makes you miserable and all that stuff.
 

DRUMMOND: Noland knows about alcohol; he still feels haunted by the death of his father who was drinking and died in an automobile accident on the reservation when Noland was still in high school. Without a father, Noland often visits his grandparents' farm nearby. Shanto Begai, Noland's uncle visiting from Flagstaff, shows me around the sheep and goat pen on the land where he was raised.
 

SHANTO BEGAI, Uncle: We only have about forty heads now. I think the largest we ever had, way back when I was a kid, was about 500 heads. We're down to this few, small flock. But it's enough to maintain this land.
 

DRUMMOND: Shanto Begai leads me into the house and we sit down in the family kitchen where his parents are finishing a meal of chicken soup and rich fry bread. Shanto Begai echoes a sentiment often heard among Navajo. Before the coming of welfare programs that first brought surplus government foods and then cash benefits, Indians were self sufficient because they worked the land.
 

SHANTO BEGAI: We just lived off the farm. Melons, corn, beans. We had a hogan just full of them. And we hunted rabbits. We had sheep we could eat. I don't remember ever going hungry or lacking anything. I ran around all summer long without shoes. With no shoes and it was all right.
 

DRUMMOND: Shanto's father, Mailboy, got his name because his father rode for the Pony Express. Mailboy has a dour expression on his face; he's resistant to being interviewed, viewing me as just another intruder from the outside world wanting to exploit and expose Navajo traditions. Reluctantly, he begins to talk in Navajo with his son Shanto translating. A Navajo medicine man himself, Mailboy talks of the white man's booze, sugar, flour, coffee. He says these items helped speed the decline of the Navajos' stature and health.
 

MAILBOY, Grandfather: (Translated) Since the coming of trading posts and highways and everything, and welfare and everything, we have compromised who we really are for convenience. Today, a lot of times people don't respond to ceremonies because inside them they're now contaminated by sweets, foreign food.
 

DRUMMOND: But the government plan is to do away with the assistance and the welfare and force people to work. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for the Navajo people?
 

MAILBOY: (Translated) He thinks it's a bad thing for the government to now say go and cut back, or eliminate, welfare assistance altogether after they've made us dependent on it. After we have sacrificed the land and we have sacrificed ourselves, our health. It's just like hooking somebody on heroin and all of sudden saying there's no more.
 

DRUMMOND: In five years time, won't the effect of the government program be to push young people off the reservation?
 

MAILBOY: (Translated) He says this is already happening. He says when he goes to the ceremonies, places, he says there's no young people left. He says the kids are heading for cities, Phoenix. And he said it's a great plan. We no longer have the population that will speak out and all that's left are the helpless and the elderly.
 

DRUMMOND: In another room, Noland Yazi listens to his grandfather's words and is disturbed by them.
 

NOLAND: If they are going to be cutting off the welfare, we should just do away with the reservation. So then it's like another lie. They said they don't want to pay us if we move into the reservation from off all the other lands we had. And now they want to cut off that deal again, so it's like an old big lie. Another broken treaty, or something.
 

DRUMMOND: Noland's reality is different from his uncle's and worlds apart from his grandfather's. Working the land is not an option. If he and others like him are to set themselves free from government assistance, they will have to find jobs. For NPR News, I'm William Drummond.
 

EDWARDS: Tomorrow, getting and keeping a job on the reservation.
 
 

(END)