"Tradition is the enemy of progress." Until recently these words hung outside a school on the Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Here, in spite of many changes, the Navajo (the largest surviving tribe of Red Indians) still live as they have done for centuries. Many of them speak no English. They still go to the medicine man if they are sick and they still conduct complicated ten-day-long healing ceremonies.

After surviving conquest by the Spaniards and defeat by Kit Carson, the Navajo culture is threatened by the forced assimilation policies of recent years. Children have been taken from their families for ten months a year, taught nothing but English, and introduced to western values and Christianity. The result has been confusion, high suicide rates, alcoholism, and one trained lawyer and a handful of teachers. Now anthropologists see the key to survival in continuing tradition and not destroying it, and tonight's Horizon looks at their work and asks just what chance the Navajos have of survival.

"Michael Barnes's engrossing Horizon." (Sunday Times)
"A film made with sensitive appreciation of Navajo culture." (Daily Telegraph)