10 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 197 



Navajo Agency census office roll is in practice at present.^* Although 

 the overwhelming majority of Navahos are still "fullblooded" Indians, 

 the absence of specific official requirements for inclusion on the Navaho 

 rolls poses serious problems for any future improvement of Navaho 

 population statistics. Furthermore, even if such criteria were speci- 

 fied, the development of operationally useful and verifiable indicators 

 of "degree of Indian blood" would pose additional difficulties. 



Before this theoretical population of de jure Navahos can be esti- 

 mated, it is necessary to give it some kind of operational definition. 

 That is, some procedure must be specified whereby individuals can 

 be classified as Navaho or non-Navaho according to the stated cri- 

 terion. Assuming that this criterion is possession of at least one-fourth 

 of Navaho blood, the following problems must be overcome. First, 

 an individual must be able to refer to some record of his ancestry 

 which indicates the tribal affiliation of his parents and grandparents, 

 as well as their admixture with other ethnic groups, if any. Even 

 where the large majority of the tribal members are fullblooded, a sig- 

 nificant minority remains whose blood quantum is unknown or not 

 reported. Thus, in 1950, over 11 percent of the resident Navaho 

 population was listed as of unknown blood quantum (including non- 

 responses). In New Mexico alone, where the degree of admixture 

 with various Pueblo peoples and others is presumably somewhat 

 higher, the proportion of Navahos whose blood quantum is either 

 unknown or not reported rose to nearly 17 percent in 1950.^^ It is 

 obvious that the inclusion or exclusion of the majority of these un- 

 knowns would greatly affect the resultant population figures. Fur- 

 thermore, it is likely that the genealogy of many of these individuals 

 cannot be determined from existing records. 



A second problem in estimating this de jure Navaho population 

 arises from the necessity of including all persons with the requisite 

 Navaho ancestry, regardless of their current place of residence. In 

 1950, about 20 percent of the total Navaho population was estimated 

 by officials of the Navajo Agency to be in temporary or permanent 

 residence off the reservation. Although this may have been an over- 

 estimate, it is generally agreed that the proportion of off-reservation 

 Navahos has been increasing fairly rapidly in recent years. Signifi- 

 cant groups of Navahos are now established in a number of American 

 cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago. As individual Navahos 

 come to share in the general mobility of the American people, they will 



"Each tribe Is empowered to establish its own rules of eligibility for enrollment of in- 

 dividuals as tribal members. The fact that these rules are not uniform maizes it im- 

 possible for the Bureau of Indian Affairs to utilize a general definition of "Indian" In 

 its own records. On this general problem, see Gilbert, 1953, and Hadley, 1952 b. 



IB Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1954 a, p. 26. Of the 48,799 Navahos whose blood quantum 

 was reported, only 626 were listed as "less than fullblooded," giving a percentage of 

 fullbloods of 98.7. 



