Indians living in danger
By Judy Nichols
The Arizona Republic
Oct. 13, 2002
For most Americans the leading cause of death is heart disease, then cancer.
For Navajos, it's accidents.
The unintentional injury, or accidental, death rate for Navajos is 138.5 per 100,000 compared with 30.1 for all races.
It's the highest of all Indians.
Chuck Thomas remembers being 8, standing on the side of the road near Gallup, N.M., watching his grandmother walk across.
He saw the drunken driver who hit her. And he was with her at the hospital when she died two hours later.
They had been driving from their home on the Navajo Reservation to celebrate the Fourth of July in Gallup, but hit a cow that had strayed onto the road. Thomas' grandmother was going for help.
"It changed my whole childhood," said Thomas, 29, who earlier this year attended an alcohol treatment program in Gallup. "Every year around July 3rd I visualize the whole thing, every moment of it."
Motor vehicle accidents kill the most. The death rate: 87.2 per 100,000 in the Navajo area compared with 15.9 for all Americans. Almost a third of the Navajo accidents involve pedestrians.
"It impacts greatly on our community," said Nancy Bill, Navajo-area injury prevention specialist for the Indian Health Service. "The deaths are mostly young Navajo males, so it leaves families without a means of income. And most of them could be prevented."
But Native Americans also die in falls: from mesas in northern Arizona, from ice floes in Alaska, from poorly built stairs, from rodeo horses, and even from trips to outhouses at night.
They die of exposure.
And drowning.
And burns, because wood is used to heat homes and for cooking.
"Living a native lifestyle is a high-injury, hazardous situation," said Paul Sherry, chief executive of the Alaska Native Medical Center. "In our area, people travel by snow machines, in boats, in four-wheelers, by small, charter aircraft. All of these have inherently higher rates of injury and death."
"The 'Golden Hour'?" Bill asked, referring to the optimum time to receive needed medical attention. "It doesn't exist. I know people who have waited many hours. Even cellphones don't work in lots of places."
One factor in the carnage is poverty, said Alan Dellapenna, deputy director of the Indian Health Service Office of Environmental Health and Engineering and an expert on accidental deaths.
That means poorly built housing and older, poorly maintained vehicles, or no cars at all, which means people walk along the roads, Dellapenna said. And there are long miles of poorly built, poorly lit, sometimes-unstriped roads.
"You have an odd mix: The tribal roads are less developed, and they convey a high-risk population with low socioeconomic and alcohol problems," Dellapenna said.
Heartbreaking knock
For Robertson Preston of Bylas, on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, the knock on the door came one June evening just as he was about to go to bed.
"I had one boot off," Preston said. The police said they needed him, something about someone with his last name.
He and his wife, Veronica, drove about six miles to where the police cars were stopped.
Officers asked if he knew someone named Henson Preston.
"I said, 'Yes, that's my boy,' " Preston said, patting his chest over his heart. "They said, 'There's a body over there. Can you see if you can identify it?'
"They pulled back the sheet, and there he was."
Preston, who was recovering from heart surgery, collapsed on the side of the road. His wife crumbled, too.
Henson, 23, had been coming back from Phoenix, about 120 miles, from the hospital where he had been holding vigil for a sick baby in the family. Witnesses said Henson's white pickup truck ran off the road and flipped. Maybe he fell asleep. No one knows.
Now, twice a year, on Memorial Day and on Henson's birthday, the family tends the small white cross draped with blue flowers and crepe paper on the side of the road where he died.
The death robbed Robertson Preston, a medicine man, of a son and of one of his Crown Dancers, who perform in the most sacred Apache ceremonies.
In April, Preston performed the Sunrise Dance for his granddaughter, a dance for a girl coming into womanhood, a dance Henson had been urging his father to do soon.
"About halfway, I almost ran out of voice," Preston said. "That's when Henson would keep me going."
Dangerous roads
Federal money for improvements usually is targeted for the most dangerous roads, Dellapenna said. But tribes, which are sovereign and have their own police forces, often don't report fatalities to the state, so the roads don't get on the priority list. And Native Americans rarely are represented on regional and state transportation boards that decide where to spend money.
Dellapenna points to Arizona 86, which crosses the Tohono O'odham Reservation heading from Tucson to Sells.
"It's like driving back in time," Dellapenna said. "Before you get to the reservation, the road has wide lanes and a median. When you get onto the reservation, it's basically the paved old stagecoach line. It's never been upgraded from the '50s."
Nearly every mile, there's a white cross signifying a death, Dellapenna said.
The roads on the Navajo Reservation are no better.
"They're two-lane with narrow or no shoulders," Bill said. "It increases the number of head-on collisions. And there's no safe place to walk. A lot of the pedestrians killed are children."
Tribes are trying to stem the losses. They have put up fences to keep horses and cows off the road.
The Navajo Nation passed a seat belt law in 1988, even before Arizona did, and has instituted an internationally recognized program promoting child safety seats.
The death rates are half what they were 30 years ago. Still, the toll is high. Bill said one safety project focused on a four-mile stretch of U.S. 666, near Gallup. Some call it the Devil's Highway, in part because of the number and in part because of the death toll: eight people in one year.
In 1994, streetlights were installed, making it easier to see pedestrians. The death toll in following years: zero.
But it cost about $1 million a mile to install the lights, prohibitively expensive for the hundreds of miles of roads on the reservation.
Alcohol is another factor in the deaths, Bill said. Because liquor is not sold on the reservations, people walk or drive to border towns to drink, and some are killed returning home. Bootlegging also is a problem, she said.
And the situation is complicated by too few police to cover 25,000 square miles.
"There is a lax attitude about drinking and driving," Bill said. "I have seen people drinking and driving at all times of the day."
Hard lesson
Freddie Hale and his friends were partying hard on a Thursday night last April, driving a convertible down the back roads between Window Rock and Fort Defiance.
It was payday. They'd been drinking beer and a concoction of 7-Up, whiskey and peppermint schnapps they call Hop 'n' Schnapps.
"I was standing up in the back seat," Hale said. "I figure we were going about 100.
"The driver held his hands up and said, 'Watch me.' I think we gave him too much of that Hop 'n' Schnapps. We started sliding and the wheels caught. I remember flying through the air and hitting the ground hard."
Hale landed on his head. His brain started bleeding.
One of Hale's friends found his mother playing bingo at the tribal offices and told her about the accident.
"I ran out to the hospital," April Hale said. "It's right across from the hall. He was on a respirator and there was a big cut on his head. I thought we were going to lose him.
"I said, 'God, don't take my son yet,' and I held his hand."
Freddie Hale was flown to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. He was in a coma for more than a month. Then he began to come around.
Keeping faith
For weeks, Hale stayed at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, getting therapy, learning to walk again, brush his teeth, eat with a spoon.
Therapy included shooting hoops. Hale, who was on his high school's championship basketball team, can sink a lot.
But he spends most of his time in a wheelchair, and it's unlikely he'll regain enough balance to return to his job as a plasterer for La Plata Stucco, where he stood on scaffolding to stucco buildings.
Hale, his mother and teenage sister, live in a hogan with no electricity and no running water. They have three horses, 15 cows and 30 sheep. Hale was the only one with a job.
"We're behind on things, bills," April said. "It hurts the family. There's not enough to eat, (or to) buy supplies. We have car problems, and it takes a long time to buy parts, putting them on layaway."
The Hales can reel off a long list of friends and relatives who have been involved in car accidents: an aunt whose hip was broken when she was run off the road, a friend who can't walk after a head-on collision with a diesel truck.
Bill said disabilities, such as head injuries, are expensive for the tribe, and often force tribal members off the reservation to Phoenix for better services. Freddie hopes to return to school to learn about computers.
"I have faith in God," April said, relating a premonition her pastor had. "My pastor said he saw Freddie getting out of the wheelchair and coming to church."
Reach the reporter at judy.nichols@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8577.
No comments:
Post a Comment