by Art De Vany
Chinle is a small town in Northern Arizona that is the gateway to Canyon de Chelly, a smaller and lesser known competitor to the Grand Canyon. Chelly’s intense, pure, iron oxide reds, narrow span and sheer, even concave rocky cliffs and stark towers of rock are a sharp contrast to the broader vistas, mixed colors and sloping walls of the Grand Canyon. Some think it is even more beautiful than the Grand Canyon.
The town is deep in Navajo country, but the signs are subtle. It looks like any rural town that is just getting by; there are no pueblos or adobe dwellings, just the same kind of run down houses and gas stations that you could find anywhere in America’s back country. The houses and garages are littered with the kind of rural junk -- dead cars and tires and farm machinery, discarded refrigerators and household detritus -- that seems to infect rural America wherever you go.
The first telltale signs that this is Indian country are the blighted, government-issue housing projects that have replaced the beautiful, traditional Indian pueblos and adobe dwellings in much of Navajo country. (Can you write a government specification for adobe? Probably not, so you have to build these wretched little boxes about two feet apart and put them behind chain link.)
The second telltale sign is the absence of liquor stores. These carbohydrate intolerant, insulin-resistant peoples have tried strictly to limit the presence of liquor stores, or prohibited them outright, on lands they control. A correlated sign that the nearest liquor store is some distance down the highway are the twisted remains of horrific traffic accidents -- most of them head-on collisions -- scattered along the back lots of the town’s gas stations and garages. Some distance out of town, I saw an industrial strength liquor store surpassing even Tony’s at Westwood and Santa Monica in West LA. A drive up window, huge steel doors that could be pulled over the automatic glass entry to block late-night entry (the building also was steel), pallets of beer stacked to the ceilings, whiskey bottles of every size (some larger than I have ever seen before), and no floor or refrigerator space wasted on GatorAde or magazines.
The most chilling sign that we were in Indian country was the dialysis center. Chinle is a small town for a dialysis center, we thought, but this pattern repeated itself in many of the small settlements we passed through on our way to Santa Fe. My wife is a (juvenile onset) diabetic and we know all too well what a dialysis center signifies: near epidemic levels of adult-onset non-insulin dependent diabetes among the Amerindians of all tribes, not just the Navajo, but the Zia, and Pueblo, and Pima and all the other tribes throughout New Mexico and Arizona. Each settlement we passed through became a depressing search for the dialysis center and the government issue housing, relieved only by the beautiful country, the splendid pueblos and a surprising sign in Jemez, in the hills south of Los Alamos Labs, that read “Archery Range” (a favorite recreation for Indians, or a place to keep skills intact for an uprising?)
In Chinle, the dialysis center is on a dusty side road, right across the road from the swap meet. We wandered through the swap meet but quickly felt like intruders and left. We felt awkward standing there looking at the frank poverty displayed on the blankets, tables and pickup truck beds where goods were offered for sale. But a deeper, starker irony was this: if you looked around the ring of displays, at regular intervals you saw huge colorful bottles of sweet syrups on large tables. They were there to flavor the ice cones the children were eating. Nearly a quarter of all the booths were selling icy, sugary syrup, setting the kids up for the dialysis center just across the road. Adults were drinking sugary cokes; there was not a diet drink to be found. (They may not be all that great either, with their foreign proteins and sugary-mimicking properties.) The other substance being offered at food booths was Navajo fry bread, a tortilla-like flat bread made of refined white flour (government issue, straight from the subsidized, carbohydrate producing giants like Archer Daniels Midland) and some shortening made of partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
Judging from what is for sale at the swap meet (never the best food anyway) and the convenience store, where at least 90 percent of the calories on the shelves are simple carbohydrates, the Navajo diet has them on the fast track to adult-onset diabetes. You and I would have diabetes if we ate like this.
Professor Art De Vany, of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California at Irvine, is currently working on a book called Evolutionary Fitness, from which this piece is excerpted.
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by Weston A. Price, DDS
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