48 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 197 



soon dropped from 75 in 1883 to 19 in the following year, and remained 

 below 50 mitil 1890. (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1870-90.) With the 

 advantage of hindsight, the basic difficulty can be easily seen. The 

 notion of abandoning one's children to the care of strangers, particu- 

 larly non-Navaho strangers, was anathema to the Navaho. The Euro- 

 pean system of formal education simply had no counterpart in Navaho 

 culture. To achieve the active cooperation of the Navaho at this 

 stage, it would have been necessary to first educate the parents, an 

 undertaking clearly beyond the existing facilities of the educators. 



Neither the 1892 enactment of the Compulsory Education Law for 

 Indian children nor the development of the Day School System by 

 Commissioner Leupp during that decade had much effect upon the 

 progress of Navaho education. The Navaho acquired the Little Water 

 Day School in 1895, boosting the capacity of all Navaho educational 

 facilities to 130 pupils. The gross inadequacy of these facilities is 

 best shown in noting that at least one-third of the total Navaho popu- 

 lation was within the usual "school ages" (from 6 to 18 years of age, 

 inclusive) . This means that the total population of school-age chil- 

 dren from which these few pupils were selected numbered between 

 4,000 and 6,000 during the period from 1870 to 1890. Thus only about 

 2 percent of th& Navaho school-age population could be accommodated 

 by the school facilities in existence at this time, while in fact, no more 

 than one Navaho child in a hundred was in attendance at school at 

 any given time throughout this period (see table 9, p. 52). 



Mere attendance figures do not reflect either the quality of the in- 

 struction offered or the conditions under which it was received. The 

 following quotation gives us some appreciation of these factors. In 

 his report on the condition of the Navaho school in 1894, Inspector 

 J. W. Cadman (MS.) wrote: 



[attendance 165.] [^] The buildings are not in good repair. . . . 



The dining room and kitchen were clean, as were the . . . dormitories. 



The food ... is well cooked and plenty of it, though very little variety. 



The teachers here are very good ones, but many of the children speak too low. 



The children here are much neglected in many respects — they steal . . . have 

 sore eyes. 



The girls . . . are lousy. 



. . . their clothing are covered with vermin. 



Not a word of English is spoken by the children. 



The turn of the century witnessed a new beginning in the education 

 of the Navaho. Existing school facilities were expanded, and three 

 additional schools were opened: at Blue Canyon, St. Michael's Mis- 

 sion, and at Moencopi, a Hopi village. By 1905, average attendance 



^ The Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for that year showed an enroll- 

 ment of 212 and an average attendance during the year of 115 (Bureau of Indian AflEairs, 

 1894, p. 499). 



