ABSTRACT
Some 34 percent of the nation’s rural Indian population resided within the Southwest Poverty Diagonal in 1970, with the Navajo Reservation dead center in it. The Southwestern Indians are, as we saw in chapter 2, the poorest segment of the regional population but also the most distinct culturally. Their importance for energy development transcends their numbers—over 200,000 in 1970—and their ethnic characteristics, however. In 1973, the Navajo Reservation alone yielded 11,000,000 barrels of crude oil, 4,500,000 cubic feet of natural gas, and 10,915,300 tons of coal. These resources earned a meager $8,545,250 in royalties and lease revenues, which, in turn, comprise the major portion of the tribe’s annual income. Known reserves include 2.5 billion tons of coal, 100 million barrels of crude oil, and 23 billion cubic feet of natural gas. There are, in addition, 80 million pounds of uranium. 1 In effect, a very poor and numerically small segment of the regional population owns a significant portion of the mineral resources essential for future national development. The continued underdevelopment of Indian reservation economies, despite the extraction of these resources, poses a major problem for the future for the Indians themselves and for others concerned about their continuing poverty. In this chapter we will use the case of the Navajo Tribe to illustrate some of the reasons for the continued poverty of reservation populations in an era of rapid development of resources which they own. 2
