Peace group offering scholarship to Navajos
College-bound Navajos have less than a week left to apply for a new scholarship designed to spare them the choice of trading military service for financial aid. Applications are due Aug. 1.
The scholarships worth up to $3,000 per student are courtesy of the Santa Fe chapter of Veterans for Peace. Their aim is to keep young Navajos lured by the promise of money for college out of the military.
It’s a powerful incentive, said Santa Fe Chapter President Ken Mayers, and the military knows it.
“The most common single reason given by Army, Navy and Air Force recruits (for enlisting) … is for the educational scholarships,” he said.
Armed with that knowledge, he went on, recruiters deliberately target poorer communities, where money for college can be exceedingly scarce.
With their own quotas to meet, Mayers said, “recruiters are essentially sales people,” so the strategy makes sense.
“If I were a military recruiter,” he said, “I would be doing the same thing.”
It all amounts to what Mayers calls the “poverty draft” the targeted recruitment of the poorest Americans to fight the country’s wars and it’s that practice the group’s scholarship aims to counter.
But don’t talk to Nancy Hutchinson about a poverty draft. The chief of public affairs for the U.S. Army’s Phoenix Recruiting Battalion, which oversees Gallup, gets offended by the very suggestion, and denies any targeted advertising aimed at minorities or households with particular incomes.
She’s heard it all before.
“These groups are entitled to their opinions,” Hutchinson said, “and the reason they’re entitled to their opinions is because the Army is out there defending their rights.”
The U.S. Department of Defense also challenges the claim of the “poor man’s army,” speaking instead of a military that’s “strongly middle class.”
But according to a Nov. 4, 2005, story in the Washington Post, the government’s own figures paint a different picture. The Pentagon’s latest data, it reports, show nearly half the military’s recruits coming from lower-middle-class to poor households, and almost two-thirds of the Army’s 2004 recruits coming from counties with median household incomes below the national average.
An analysis of 2004 data by the non-partisan National Priorities Project supports the Defense Department’s claims of an under-representation among the very poorest households and a recent spike in recruits among the wealthy. But overall, it concludes, low-to-middle income households are over-represented.
If poverty makes for more willing recruits, then McKinley County and the rest of the Navajo Nation should make for prime recruiting grounds. According to the tribe’s Division of Economic Development, unemployment across the reservation has hovered above 40 percent in recent years. The U.S. Census Bureau, meanwhile, reported more than 30 percent of the county’s predominantly Navajo residents living below the national poverty line in 2003, and a median household income more than $8,600 below the state average.
With a year of college running more than $10,000 at some local schools, it’s no surprise that Navajos suffer particularly low college enrollment rates. As the Veterans for Peace see it, it’s enough the make the military an exceedingly attractive option.
In the face of today’s skyrocketing tuition rates, Veterans representative Lucy Moore concedes that a $3,000 scholarship might prove little more than a “drop in the bucket” for some.
“It’s certainly not going to get anyone to Harvard,” she said, “but we hope it will make a difference for somebody.”
The Veterans would also like that somebody or however many students they can help with their $6,000 to share their goals. In addition to demonstrating their financial need, applicants must complete a 1,200-word essay explaining “how they hope to contribute to a peaceful and just society.”
Veterans for Peace will award the scholarships in honor of Lance Cpl. Jesus Alberto Suarez del Solar, the first Marine to die in the current Iraq War. He was killed in Baghdad by a cluster bomb March 27, 2003. His father, Fernando Suarez del Solar, has since founded the Guerrero Azteca Project to support active soldiers and their families and has campaigned for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
All that may cast the scholarship in the light of a protest against the war. And although Mayers makes no effort to hide his group’s opposition to the war, which he called “stupid” and “unconstitutional,” he said the scholarship itself was more a protest against the poverty draft.
Ray Hawthorne, a Navajo Code Talker and World War II veteran, has no problems with the scholarship’s aims. But he does have a different opinion about why most Navajos sign up.
“I think the main reason Navajos join the military is for the adventure,” he said, “and the benefits, like scholarships, are secondary.”
He believes they, as he did, join most of all for the adventure, and the honor of serving their country.
Mayers and Moore know there are plenty of other reasons Navajos join the military besides the promise of scholarships. After eight years of living in Chinle, Moore has seen their patriotism first hand.
“This scholarship is in no way meant to offend that patriotism, which is very strong among the Navajo people and which I respect very much,” she said. “This (scholarship) is simply meant to offer an alternative to those who would prefer to pursue their education rather than joining the military.”
Scholarship applications are available at the Office of Navajo Nation Scholarship and Financial Assistance in Window Rock.
