Diné Experiences of Emergency Education

• In Event: Institutionalizing Emergency: Boarding Schools and the Crises of Colonialism

Abstract

On December 2, 1947, President Harry Truman declared the Navajo reservation in a state of emergency, following Secretary of Interior J.A. Krug’s initiatives for both immediate relief and “long-range rehabilitation” that included school programs. During this early postwar period, the U.S. government increased its efforts to enforce and assure standardized and institutionalized schooling for Diné youth to abate the “precipitated economic crisis.” The postwar Diné economy crumbled, while Navajos lost war-related employment and faced hardships such as the blizzard of 1947-1948. Although Euro-American contact and influence exacerbated certain death rates for Navajos beginning in the nineteenth century, specifically through boarding schools that exposed children to diseases for example, Diné population grew through the twentieth century to a point that concerned the federal government after World War II. Krug and his associates argued that Navajo land and ways of life could not sustain the population growth.

Because of the report and efforts to assimilate Navajos as a solution to this “crisis,” the Navajo-Hopi Long-Range Rehabilitation Act of 1950 passed to reinstate federal funding for Diné schools and other programs. Assimilationist policies such as relocation and termination accompanied school programs. Day schools and public schools opened on the reservation, but many Navajos still sent their youth to boarding schools. Some Navajos continued to go to distant off-reservation boarding schools.

Some Indian off-reservation boarding schools operated between the 1940s and 1950s specifically to address “a crisis in [Navajo] education.” This “crisis” referred partially to how most Diné youth were not attending schools after World War II. Federal officials initiated various efforts to matriculate more school-aged Navajos, funding more on-reservation and off- reservation educational programs. They established the Intermountain Boarding School in Brigham City, Utah exclusively for Navajos to alleviate what they viewed as a debacle in education. The “Five Year Program” embodied the government solution to educate Navajos. In this context, Intermountain— one of the largest Indian boarding schools in the United States— developed. This presentation features the experiences of Navajo students who came to Intermountain in the wake of the Navajo “emergency” and “crisis” postwar years. How did Navajo youth sense and experience an education of “emergency,” one which was premised on unraveling their ties to home(land) and Indigenous identity? Many of them sustained those ties through their learning experiences and creative works, such as arts and writing, at Intermountain.

Author

• Farina King, Northeastern State University