Betty Reid: Accord brings new home to Navajo mom

Opinion
Betty Reid: Accord brings new home to Navajo mom
Monday, November 27, 2006

"My mother will get a water faucet.

Dorothy Reid has lived her 79 years on the Navajo Reservation in hogans, under arbors or in canvas tents without running water, bathrooms or electricity.

But that will change soon. After three years of petitioning tribal officials, next year, she will have a modern home: two bedrooms, 600 square feet.

I am as relieved as she is excited. I make the four-hour drive from Phoenix as often as I can, but, with her health declining in recent years, it was never enough.

I visited her this week in northeastern Arizona and found her loading empty 1-gallon milk containers onto a rusty, squeaky Radio Flyer wagon that she pulls to a nearby water spigot sticking out of the ground.

She and my 80-year-old aunt, Jeanette, live together in an isolated hogan warmed by a wood stove. A kerosene lamp lights the one-room home. The women walk 100 yards to an outhouse.

All that will change when her new home, about 100 feet away from the hogan, is finished."

Get the Story:
Betty Reid: New home to end wait for ailing Navajo mom (The Arizona Republic 11/25)

Relevant Documents:
Hopi-Navajo Intergovernmental Compact

Relevant Links:
Hopi Tribe - http://www.hopi.nsn.us
Navajo Nation - http://www.navajo.org
Black Mesa Indigenous Support, Navajo family support site - http://www.blackmesais.org