Native American Heritage Day: See the Navajo Nation in 1948

Written By: Lily Rothman, Liz Ronk

As LIFE described the situation to readers in 1948, the Navajo Nation was “a country within a country” a reminder that Native American history courses inextricably alongside everything else that falls under the umbrella of American history.

When photographer Leonard McCombe visited Navajo country in Arizona to create the images in this story, however, he caught a people at a very specific and important point in that long and ongoing history. The Navajo Nation, which comprised about 61,000 members at the time and was the fastest-growing Native American group in the nation, was at a moment of crisis.

By that point in 1948, the land on which the Navajos lived could no longer support them and Americans were hearing reports of starvation on the reservation. However, as LIFE noted, simply sending food wouldn’t solve the problem.

The story focused on the extended Yellowsalt family, most of whom made their living by herding sheep. The family couldn’t get permission from reservation administrators—who pointed to the disappearing grass in the area—to expand the flock. By the government’s calculations, according to LIFE, the land could only support enough sheep for about 20% of the families to own enough of the animals to make a sustainable living. Meanwhile, exposure to white populations had introduced devastating diseases into the Navajo community, and government-run hospitals didn’t have enough beds to support the population.

The central questions posed by the story were inescapable: “How can technical knowledge be made available to people without destroying the fabric of their lives? How can nations which differ from each other in appearance and language and culture live peaceably together?”

“Overall, I was surprised at the general accuracy of the piece,” said David E. Wilkins, a professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota and an author of The Navajo Political Experience, considering the date and the audience for which it was written. “It was full of the assimilation language that was dominant at the time, but that wasn’t surprising.”

Wilkins has some quibbles with the story. For example, LIFE published images of bare-breasted Navajo women that strike him as strange, as he says he’s not aware of a ceremony in which Navajo women would usually go unadorned. But the big thing that’s missing, he says, is a sense of the larger context in which the Yellowsalt family was living. LIFE hints at the reasons why there aren’t enough sheep for the family to prosper, noting that when the people returned to land they had been forced from in the late 1800s, it was now a reservation “hemmed in by land-hungry whites,” and that grazing flocks on that fenced-in space destroyed the range. “As the Navajo nation grew,” LIFE noted, “the land, the basis of its existence, began to fail.” But as Wilkins points out, it was a federal livestock-reduction program in the 1930s not the natural course of things that had mandated they cut back on grazing animals on that land.

“In 1948, the Navajo Nation was still reeling from the livestock-reduction program,” he says. “It devastated the Navajos economically, psychically and culturally.”

The coming of World War II staved off economic disaster for a little while; Wilkins says that more than 15,000 Navajos were employed in some fashion as a result of the war. But in 1948 the consequences could no longer be denied. “The war’s over and they go back to the reservation and there’s nothing there because of wrong-headed policy makers who thought they were doing the right thing,” he explains. Though those policy-makers thought they saving the land from overgrazing, Wilkins says that in fact later research shows that the Navajo livestock were not a primary cause of the problems. In addition, though federal policy affected every aspect of Navajo life, it was only later in 1948 that the Arizona Supreme Court declared that the state’s Navajo citizens had the right to vote.

The best thing about this article, Wilkins said, is what happened after it was published.

Media attention paid to the crisis among the Navajo People, with popular journalistic reports such as this one, contributed to Congress passing the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act, which “helped to save those two peoples from the economically crippled situation they were in.” That, perhaps, is part of the answer to that question: How can two very different nations live peaceably together?

Seated close to the evening fire, old man Gray Mountain, 91, told his small grandchildren legends about the early days of the Navajo people.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo family living on a reservation.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Toward sunddown the Yellowsalts finished up their outdoor chores and start the fire for their evening meal. In the background is Navajo Mountain.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Yellowsalt’s son had his hair brushed by his wife.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo woman smoked a hand-rolled cigarette.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo young man.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

This Navajo woman sported Navajo-crafted silver shirt collar caps, beaded earrings, and a beaded necklace complete with silver quarters and 50 cent pieces strung together like a tie.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Baking bread, a woman knelt by the fire while a loaf cooked on a crude metal grill.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

A Navajo girl hugged her dog while she watched the sheep on the high plateau.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

The game of marbles, was explained by the boy at center to his brother and sister. This boy, who went to school, learned the game there.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock