{"id":561263,"date":"2018-04-15T00:01:01","date_gmt":"2018-04-15T06:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/?p=561263"},"modified":"2018-04-19T20:44:36","modified_gmt":"2018-04-20T02:44:36","slug":"basic-needs-are-in-short-supply-on-the-navajo-nation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/04\/basic-needs-are-in-short-supply-on-the-navajo-nation\/","title":{"rendered":"Basic needs are in short supply on the Navajo Nation"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_561283\"  class=\"wp-caption module image alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 771px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-large wp-image-561283\" src=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/01_SIDEBAR_This-is-home-771x514.jpg\" alt=\"Navajo Nation\" width=\"771\" height=\"514\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/01_SIDEBAR_This-is-home-771x514.jpg 771w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/01_SIDEBAR_This-is-home-336x224.jpg 336w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/01_SIDEBAR_This-is-home-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/01_SIDEBAR_This-is-home-1170x780.jpg 1170w, https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/04\/01_SIDEBAR_This-is-home.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Don Usner \/ Searchlight New Mexico<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of the few well-paved roads on the Navajo Nation.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>A few years ago, something rare showed up at the Teec Nos Pos Trading Post on the Navajo Nation: a big assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables.<\/p>\n<p>Eighty miles south, spinach smoothies muscled their way into the Totsoh Trading Post, formerly ruled by foods like Cheetos and Twinkies.<\/p>\n<p>The changeover was thanks to teamwork between store owners, Navajo health providers and the Gallup-based Community Outreach and Patient Empowerment (COPE), a nonprofit that supports health and wellness efforts across the Navajo Nation. The ongoing COPE \u201cfruit and vegetable Rx\u201d program helps remote stores bring in fresh produce, provides vouchers so families can afford it, and helps kids learn what nutritious food tastes like.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"module align-left half type-aside\">\n<h3>About this article<\/h3>\n<p>This article is part of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/searchlightnm.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Searchlight New Mexico\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0year-long journalistic investigation into child well-being in New Mexico. Read the series, Raising New Mexico,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/series\/raising-new-mexico\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h3>Related<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2018\/04\/unique-program-helps-navajo-students-pass-ged-test\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Unique program helps Navajo students pass GED test<\/a><\/p>\n<\/aside>\n<p>\u201cThere\u2019s so much strength and inter-generational strength here,\u201d says Sonya Shin, a medical doctor and COPE\u2019s executive director. The needs are urgent: one in four adults has diabetes, she says. \u201cBut the solutions already lie within the community.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Just six months of healthy eating can establish a health habit in young children.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cKids are drivers of change,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>But kids can\u2019t drive change if their parents can\u2019t drive the local roads to make it to the doctor or a food store &#8212; or if homes don\u2019t have electricity. The Navajo Nation lacks more basic needs than almost any region in the country.<\/p>\n<p>Among the problems:<\/p>\n<h3>Food<\/h3>\n<p>There are only about 10 full-service grocery stores on the entire reservation, <a href=\"https:\/\/create.piktochart.com\/output\/1940797-final\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">according to the Din\u00e9 Policy Institute<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>For roughly 70 percent of communities &#8212; scattered across a region the size of West Virginia \u2013 there\u2019s nothing nearby except a convenience store or trading post. Very few have affordable fresh produce.<\/p>\n<p>Owing to severe poverty, the reservation has some of the country\u2019s highest rates of food insecurity, the Urban Institute reports. Children go hungry and don\u2019t know where the next meal is coming from.<\/p>\n<h3>Housing<\/h3>\n<p>More than a third of households across Indian Country are severely overcrowded or lack safe drinking water, an indoor toilet, electricity, heat, refrigerator, or other necessities for sanitation and health, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).<\/p>\n<p>Housing conditions on the Navajo Nation are nearly the worst, outranked only by Alaska tribal housing, HUD concludes.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Rates of homelessness would be devastating if it weren\u2019t for families opening up their homes to people with nowhere else to go, a generosity seen across Indian Country, HUD says. Nearly 100 percent of respondents in one HUD survey said a friend or extended family member lived in their household.<\/p>\n<p>People who don\u2019t double up sometimes end up sleeping in fields and ditches.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s where I slept last night,\u201d said a Navajo woman named Marilyn one February morning, pointing to a culvert near a Marriott hotel in Gallup. \u201cI\u2019m like a stray dog. I hope sometimes I won\u2019t wake up.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Each winter in Gallup, more than a dozen homeless people freeze to death in open fields. In 2014, three men were found dead of hypothermia in a single day.<\/p>\n<h3>Uranium<\/h3>\n<p>The Navajo Nation is home to 521 abandoned uranium mines, four abandoned mills and more than 1,100 uranium waste sites, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.epa.gov\/navajo-nation-uranium-cleanup\/cleaning-abandoned-uranium-mines\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the Environmental Protection Agency says<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The contamination is the legacy of corporations that from 1944 to 1986 mined nearly 30 million tons of uranium ore for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. The cleanup is decades and billions of dollars away from completion.<\/p>\n<p>Uranium exposure is linked to high rates of cancer, kidney damage and diabetes. Uranium-contaminated water in unregulated wells is blamed for increased rates of birth defects, miscarriages and developmental delays.<\/p>\n<h3>Phones<\/h3>\n<p>In 2000, about 37 percent of households had landlines. The rest of the country had that level of phone service in 1920 &#8212; 80 years earlier, Federal Communications Commission legal filings show.<\/p>\n<p>Today, about 75 percent of people have phone service, according to U.S. Census data; other estimates put the percentage lower. But there is no debate about the major problems with cell phone reception.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/navajotimes.com\/news\/2013\/0413\/040413dig.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Navajo Times reported<\/a> that one Navajo term for cell phone is &#8220;hooghan bik bil dahjilwo&#8221; &#8212; or \u201ca thing you use while running uphill,\u201d describing someone in desperate search of a signal.<\/p>\n<p><i>Searchlight New Mexico is a nonprofit nonpartisan organization dedicated to investigative journalism. Read more of our stories on Raising New Mexico at <a href=\"http:\/\/projects.searchlightnm.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">projects.searchlightnm.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Navajo Nation lacks more basic needs than almost any region in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":561283,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[234,709,3586,146],"class_list":["post-561263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-analysis","tag-children","tag-native-americans","tag-navajo-nation","tag-poverty","series-raising-new-mexico"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=561263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/561263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/561283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=561263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=561263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=561263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}