Navajo Indians, although educated in a white man's world, can keep from sinking and glide in the direction they want if they use the Navajo culture as a canoe.
"For those people that don't have a canoe intact down deep inside their hearts, then there is a tendency to always have to deal between the values of dominant and Navajo cultures," said Peterson Zah, former Navajo tribal chairman and currently one of four candidates for the position."If we are to become a good nation, a nation we can be proud of, the first thing I think is important is a Navajo tradition," he said in his keynote address at a Brigham Young University symposium Friday.
The two-day symposium, titled "Navajo-American Culture - Anglo-American Culture: Interaction, Change and Continuity," was organized by the BYU Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and was funded by a $6,000 grant from the Utah Endowment for the Humanities.
People should never lose sight of who they are and where they came from, Zah said. But often, "The white society in its process of educating the Indian people take and want to put you in the mainstream of American people.
"If they teach them what the dominant culture has to offer, the process of simulation will take place because they make it look like a better life outside of the reservation."
Teachers are not doing a good job of counseling minority students, particularly Navajo students, to see what their desires are and to help them see what they are all about, he said.
Conflicts between cultures occur when there is interaction between people who don't understand another person, Zah said. "Dealing with the dominant culture is something we really need our students to master."
If the Navajo culture is not taught at home, then it should be taught at school, he said. "We are not doing that enough. The Navajo people have survived thousands of years. What allowed that was the culture and language and the heart I'm talking about. We need to pass that on so we can have those qualities passed on."
Often when a tribal member leaves the reservation for schooling and later returns, he comes back with no sense of social responsibility, no grasp of wrong and right, Zah said. That must be corrected in the education system.
He also said discrimination still exists. "It may not be in the same form as in the '40s and '50s, but it is still there and being practiced in certain ways."
The Navajo people should become involved in their communities in a meaningful way and be allowed to do so, he said. In San Juan County, where many residents are Navajos, white men should not be afraid that the Navajos are taking over. "That's not what we want to do."