"DOUG JOHNSON: The two thousand ten nationwide population study in the United States shows continuous growth in America’s minority population. Native American populations in the Southwest are among the expanding groups. However, the largest American Indian reservation in the country shrank in population by three percent. We visited a town in the huge Navajo Nation to find out where people were going. Jim Tedder has the story.

JIM TEDDER: Ganado, Arizona, is in the central part of the sixty-seven thousand square kilometer Navajo Nation reservation.

The inside of Ganado High School is busy with children hurrying to classes. But the rooms are not nearly as crowded as they once were. Principal Tom Rowland says he is losing about one hundred students a year.

TOM ROWLAND: "I’m looking at a school that in the mid-two thousands ran about eight hundred fifty students. And now were down to about five hundred seventy-five to five hundred eighty.”

Evelyn Begay has worked in the school district for twenty-eight years. She thinks she knows why the population is falling in Ganado schools.

EVELYN BEGAY: “Families can’t find jobs here. They go to the urban areas to look for employment, and that’s where they move their families.”"

Get the Story:
Young Navajos Leave Reservation Life Behind to Seek Jobs (Voice of America 6/30)