50 Years Ago: Don't let your children play with reservation dogs and cats

Posted by Bill Donovan | Sep 3, 2015 | 50 Years Ago |

Most members of the Navajo Nation probably won’t remember this but at one time, the Navajo Nation had a thriving lumber business located in Navajo, N.M. In fact, the town grew because of the plant there – the Navajo Forest Products Industries.
Fifty years ago, Navajo officials were just beginning to see just how successful the plant was going to be and because of this, 1965 marked the time when people at NFPI and people in the Office of Navajo Tribal Chairman Raymond Nakai began discussions on how to make the community more friendly to the people who lived there.
Several meetings were held in early September about what kind of community services could be made available in Navajo to improve the quality of life for the residents, who were mostly workers at the plant.
Among the things that were discussed, according to the Navajo Times, was a supermarket, service station, more housing and a school so the students didn’t have to go to boarding school or take the long trip to and from schools in Window Rock and Fort Defiance.
Plans had already been made to hold an official groundbreaking for an elementary school in the community and there were hopes that one day the community would have its own junior high school and high school.
The Gallup-McKinley School district has allocated $351,000 for the building of the elementary school — a price that today wouldn’t even pay for a parking lot — and district officials promised that the school would be open for use by the time the fall semester started in 1966.
Yes, the sky was the limit for an industry that because of the vast forests on the Navajo Reservation would provide employment to future generations of Navajos forever. Or at least that is what people felt then.
A Times’ crusade
In other news, the Navajo Times this month started its own crusade to warn tribal members that the danger of catching the bubonic plague was not over although officials for the Indian Health Service said they saw no new cases for almost a month.
But, in a message that would prove to be a foretelling of what would go on some 30 years later with the hantavirus scare on the reservation, the Times, in several articles, would warn tribal members to be afraid of rodents, which carried the fleas that caused humans to get the plague.
“We are not making this statement to scare anyone,” the paper said in one editorial but basically that is what they were trying to do because tribal members were becoming very complacent about the whole problem and were forgetting the scare it caused throughout the reservation just two months before.
And the villain in all of this was the family’s pet dog.
In one issue of the paper, the Times had a drawing of a dog and underneath it had this caption:
“I have sick fleas. I used to be called ‘George’. I used to be a pet but now I am very dangerous because I am covered with sick fleas. Do not let your children get near me.”
The dog problem then — like now — was that the reservation was overrun with dogs. Some of whom were pets but a lot were roaming wild through the streets of the communities and in the hinterlands. People were going around catching dogs so they could be killed, some on the spot. And for awhile no dog, even those who were tied up next to the family’s home, were safe.
“DO NOT,” stated the Times in big letters, “LET YOUR CHILDREN PLAY WITH DOGS OR CATS.”
Cats were equally as bad as dogs in harboring those nasty bubonic plague fleas but as the Times pointed out, not many families had cats — in fact, the Times argued that most of the cats on the reservation belong to non-native residents.
Navajos had dogs because they could be used in helping herd sheep and goats. Cats really had no useful purpose except to create more cats.
“Keep your dogs and cats out of the house and away from the house,” the Times warned in its message to reservation residents. “If you have an extra dog or two, get rid of them and only keep the dog or dogs you need to help herd your livestock.”
“It is better to lose a dog or cat than it is to take a chance of losing a child because he caught the plague,” the paper stated.
In an effort to keep the reservation safe from the plague and possibly provide an opportunity for children to one day play with dogs and cats again, the Indian Health Service this month announced plans to go to every home on the reservation in areas where someone contracted the plague and dust the homes with a five percent dilution of a powder called “Malathion.”
The notice from the IHS tried to appease Navajos who worried about the effect of the powder on children or their livestock and IHS officials put out releases, posters, and even messages in Navajo on the radio stations to tell people that it will only kill plague germs and not the livestock or the rabbits or even prairie dogs.
IHS officials didn’t mention how it affected dogs and cats but no one seemed to care about their future on the reservation at this point.
The Times apologizes.
At one point, the Navajo Times even apologized to the Navajo people for having to give them this warning.
“We’re sorry that it is necessary to issue this warning about the plague,” the Times’ managing editor, Leslie Goodluck said in one editorial. “We are sorry that the prairie dogs, rabbits and other small animals are sick with the plague but we are even more sorry for ourselves because we sure like roasted prairie dogs.”
Notice that the Times doesn’t mention at all about being sorry for the rap the reservation dogs and cats are taking.
And finally, a film crew was on the reservation in late August and early September filming a movie that hopefully would improve the image of law enforcement officers.
The movie, which has a working title “I like the police” – that definitely was going to change — was part of a series of films that were filming in areas throughout the United States.
Featured in the film for the reservation part was the tribe’s police chief, Lafie Bennett, and officers Raymond Tso, John Brady, Frank Adakai and Robert McCabe.
Filming was done in the sand areas near Nazlini.
The plot of the movie, said the Navajo Times, centers around a tourist family whose car is hopelessly stuck in the sand, far away from a main thoroughfare. Because they are unfamiliar with the vast reservation, the tourists’ troubles increase when the head of the family becomes lost when searching for help.
“The arrival of the Navajo police officers with their equipment spells a happy ending for the tourists,” the Times stated.
Yes, it would probably have been a lot better if Chevy Chase played the helpless father but evidently, the producers were striving for realism and not comedy. Instead, the producers chose Mr. and Mrs. Stan Bartos and their daughter, Sally, and Ricky Bywater to play the parts of the tourists.
The film would have its world debut on October 4 at the International Association of Chiefs’ annual banquet in Miami Beach and in December, it will be shown throughout the country.
The episode on the Navajo Reservation is scheduled to be 28 minutes long but an eight-minute abridged version will be playing as a short film at some 8,000 movie theaters across the country.