Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression.

Navajos had the lowest life expectancy in the country, an infant mortality rate ten times the national average, and the highest tuberculosis rate in the country.[58] Education was a central need for the Navajo Nation in the postwar era, and in 1945 the Navajo Tribal Council acknowledged the Nation was "handicapped with poverty, poor health, limited resources, inability to speak English, and lack of training for improving our condition."[59] In 1947, President Truman declared poverty in the Navajo Nation a national emergency, prompting the government to take significant action. In 2020, the Native American Voting Rights Coalition published "Obstacles at Every Turn: Barriers to Political Participation Faced by Native American Voters" as a compilation of the historic and current inequality of voting rights in Indian Country. Eventually the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) worked with other tribal members to form a Navajo Business Council that survived and evolved into the present Navajo Nation government.[30] Distrustful of the federal government, Northern and Southern Utes were initially opposed to or uninterested in forming IRA governments. It was, he argued, a means for the government to dodge its responsibilities for Native people and an attack on tribal governments and their sovereignty.[63] Termination policy overtly influenced how Utah lawmakers and the Utah Supreme Court assessed Native American political status. [Extracted from the article]