Recorded Message to the Navajo People on the Occasion of Their Centennial Banquet.

Chairman Nakai, distinguished guests, Navajo friends:

This is a proud moment for you. I speak for all Americans in saying how happy I am to share it with you.

Tonight you celebrate the centennial year of your people. It is a good time for men to gather in friendship, to look back over their shoulders at all their trials and their triumphs, to lift their eyes and hearts toward the future that is always fresh with new challenge and hope.

You knew this land thousands of years before our ancestors even knew it existed. You called a wild and beautiful country home for centuries before it was ever called America.

You helped to tame it and to shape it by your courage and your wisdom. And looking back with you tonight, looking ahead with you as the American people, the frontier people, our Nation is grateful for all that your experience and example has helped to build and will go on building.

You have much to teach us and to give us still.

We watched you last December when the terrible snows threatened you with disaster. A lesser people would have given in and perished-but instead, you gave all America a lesson in bravery and fortitude.

We have watched you bring the same unbreakable spirit to other problems in your daily lives and there are many of them.

But you do not fear them. You remember, as I do, the old Navajo legend that said that giants and demons first owned the earth and then they destroyed it.

You know, as I do, the real giants and the real demons that remain: giants of ignorance that can crush a man's hopes; demons of poverty and disease that can cripple a man's family and kill his children.

You know them as your ancient enemies but today you are going after them, you are fighting them and you are beating them as a new generation of Navajos--a modern generation of Americans. The wise men who lead you have kept the best of proud traditions.

They have joined it with the brightest of new enterprise and they have led the tribe across another frontier of endless promise.

You already run your own multi-million dollar sawmill. It gives you good jobs and better skills.

Your industrial development program is succeeding. Two large electronic manufacturers now rely on your energies and skills.

You have a strong community action program--the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity-and it has brought you new hope by its job training and its home improvement and its legal services.

Just last week your people shared in a $675,000 cash bonus from the sale of uranium leases. That is the biggest moment of its kind in our history.

Your generation can be proud of all that you have achieved, but if you feel, as I do, you will be most proud of what you are doing for generations to come.

Today you have a wonderful community school at Rough Rock. It is your school. It is built of your spirit. It is rich with your heritage and culture. It is your tomorrow. It is America's future.

The children of Rough Rock must have the learning and the desire and the opportunity to enter other schools such as high schools and colleges and the great universities. They must have the chance to better themselves and to equip themselves for the building of a better life and for the building of a better America.

Your children will have that chance.

This year, 30 new kindergarten schools are going to rise up on your Navajo lands. They will be the first your children have ever known, but I promise you, they will not be the last. We have already begun this program. In a few weeks teachers will start training the staff for these kindergartens. They will be good teachers. They will be your kind of people, trained in your language and your culture, using special materials designed for your children's special needs. They will be followed, I hope, by other Americans who come to teach and who come to help and work with you, and learn with you and from you.

I am one who has lived close to a land that is much like yours. I have known people of your dignity and I have found strength in the quality of your life. It is the natural strength of the real America, spacious and unspoiled, a place of beauty and grandeur, where a man can find renewal and a nation can find its true purpose.

The Navajo have renewed themselves and you have new purpose and its promise is a nation's happiness.

We are thankful that you built new roads and bridges to open your land to your fellow citizens and to our foreign visitors. We hope that you and those who follow you will always keep open the bridge of culture and the road of trust.

They join us now as friends. They will always lead to a life of deeper understanding and greater fulfillment for the American family.

Thank you for giving me this chance to visit with you from a distance.