Reservation Mary
| 🪶 | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 35-50 |
| Home | Window Rock, AZ |
| Demographic | Native American, Navajo |
| Lean | Swing voter |
| Race | other |
A Navajo mother of four at Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, whose life is administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She represents the cast's Native vote, which was enfranchised recently and is governed more directly than any other vote in it.
Who they stand for
The 1960 census counted just over half a million American Indians, and the Navajo Nation was the largest tribe among them. Arizona and New Mexico were required to let reservation Indians vote only from 1948, and Arizona's literacy test kept many Navajo people from voting until 1970. Federal policy in 1961 was still termination, the 1953 doctrine under which the government dissolved tribes and relocated their members, already applied to the Menominee and Klamath tribes.
During the 1960s, federal policy partially reversed this doctrine, although termination itself was never formally abandoned. The War on Poverty sent money to the tribes directly for the first time, bypassing the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Navajo opened the Rough Rock school in 1966, the first school a tribe ran itself. The Indian Civil Rights Act followed in 1968. Against this, President Kennedy allowed the Kinzua Dam to flood Seneca treaty land in 1964, and uranium companies mined the reservation under leases granted by the Interior Department. Bracero Miguel and Chinatown Grace are her nearest counterparts in the cast, voters the government acts upon more often than it consults.
Playing to them
She responds well to funding that goes directly to the tribal council rather than through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, schools the tribe runs itself, the formal abandonment of the termination policy, treaties honoured even when costly, mineral leases that require the council's consent, and a president who mentions her people by name in a message to Congress. She judges a president by what reaches Window Rock, not by what is announced in Washington.
She does not forgive a new dam project, a mining lease signed over the council's objection, a relocation programme, a Bureau official who administers the reservation with little regard for tribal self-government, or a president who meets tribal leaders and then takes no further action. Her support is difficult to win and never comes cheaply. Winning her support loses Ranch Hand Clyde, whose leases and water rights compete with her land claims, and Texas Oil Jack, whose interest in Interior's leasing policy is the opposite of hers. Prairie Ruth sees any such support as another federal programme. Faculty Eleanor and Campus David take her side, and Bracero Miguel tends to vote as she does.
Where they live
The five states where Reservation Mary makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- Alaska
- South Dakota
- Arizona
- New Mexico
- Montana