I've always felt you can measure the health of a people by how they treat their animals. The Navajo don't seem to be doing so well.
We camped on the outskirts of
Canyon de Chelly near Chinle Arizona for a night hoping to see some Ancestral Puebloan ruins like we saw last year at
Chaco Canyon. We didn't see much of the canyon. You need a guide to go in and you pretty much have to go in jeep or some other four wheel drive vehicle.
We did see about a dozen stray dogs roaming the campground looking for scraps. They were all malnourished and at least three looked like they were nursing pups or had recently been nursing pups.
The
Navajo ruled this part of the country for over 700 hundred years...
The Dine, as they prefer to be called, traveled down from what is now Alaska and NW Canada somewhere around 1000 years ago. They settled in the four corners area and roamed around northern New Mexico and North Eastern Arizona.
They were a powerful nation forcing many smaller tribes like the ancestral Puebloans, South and East, as they came. When the Spanish came to this area around 1600 they initially had friendly relations. That did not last long.
The Dine battled with the Spanish and their descendants for 300 years. Most of the time this consisted of back and forth raids mainly aimed at stealing livestock or trying to recover stolen livestock. The Dine got their sheep and horses from the Spanish and became an even stronger and richer people as a result.
When President Polk and other icons of manifest destiny started the Mexican war in the mid 1840's the Dine were the largest and most successful people in the Southwest and probably the entire west. They numbered around 14,000 and they were growing. They had prospered and had vast herds of sheep and horses. They were a constant threat to the Anglo and Mexican settlers in places like Santa Fe and Taos.
In short they were the most powerful force to be reckoned with west of the Mississippi.
[pic from
Navajo History for kids]
In 1846
Stephen Watts Kearny led 1700 Missouri volunteers down the Santa Fe trail with orders to take everything in his wake for the United States. The Army of the West took Santa Fe without firing a shot and soon after headed off to California with
Kit Carson as their scout. They did not have time to deal with the Dine at that time but took note of the fact that they would have to be dealt with at some point. One of the benefits of being part of the U.S., General Kearny had told the Mexicans, was that the U.S. would protect them from the Dine.
A couple of years later, another bunch of soldiers led by a fellow named Washington, (not that Washington) led a force of 700 men into the land of the Dine. They managed to kill the great Dine headman,
Narbona in a hail of bullets and shrapnel over a stolen horse. They marched headlong into the Dine stronghold of Canyon de Chelly in pursuit of the Navajo. If you have ever seen this country you know what a challenge that was. The Dine had relied for hundreds of years on the remoteness and inaccessibility of their vast territory. They could steal hundreds of Mexican sheep, cattle and horses and basically disappear into the vastness.
Well, Washington and his men kept after them in true West Point tradition, discovering many of their most sacred places and casting aside the myth of invulnerability of the Navajo. They convinced several Navajo headmen to sign some more worthless treaties and headed for home.
Some years later in the mid 1860's, Kit Carson pretty much finished off the Dine. Their defeat culminated in the notoriously brutal
Long Walk where the Dine were forced to move from their rich homeland to the Bosque Redondo in Southeastern New Mexico. I disdain this part of my adopted state as almost Texas and it is pretty much useless. No game, no grass, no water, much misery for the Dine.
President Grant did allow them to return to what is now the Navajo reservation in NW New Mexico and NE Arizona but things were never the same. The White man's disease's and religion took their toll and a once proud and dominant people were forced to live like us, adopt our laws and culture or disappear completely.
The Dine have not disappeared but they have suffered as a displaced people like most of the other tribes in the West. Chinle, near Canyon de Chelly is a typical reservation town. Some rangy cattle ambled across the main drag as we drove through. We saw lots of what seemed to be wild dogs and feral cats. They may have belonged to someone but if was unclear. The dogs roaming the campground would slink off like a coyote if you approached them.
In my world, we deal with canine and feline obesity more than anything else. There were no fat dogs in Chinle. I spoke with a ranger that lived nearby and he told me that there was no vet around but that the county offered free Rabies vaccinations for dogs and cats. I would guess that Distemper and Parvo are rampant in this area, as well as intestinal parasites. Too dry for fleas.
It's hard to place blame or to come up with a solution to what we saw. Reservation towns all over the west look just like Chinle. We could have been in Browning Montana or any number of other reservation towns. When a nation is conquered and their way of life replaced by something strange and unfamiliar, there are consequences. Consequences that can last for 140 years or more - as people struggle to assimilate, and critters suffer, too.
