Getting Out of Greasewood

Lower Greasewood lies on the high steppe at the base of Toyei Mesa, 23 miles southwest of Ganado, Arizona. In 1972, the paved road ended at the Greasewood Chapter House and Trading Post, beyond which were the trailer-like clinic, the boarding school, and a 3-block arc of government houses where the school staff and teachers lived. Near the arroyo on the other side of the clinic were an old stand of cottonwood and a dirt road that continued west to Bita Hochee, where you could rejoin the pavement that ran south to Interstate 40. The Navajo called this place d'wooshi bitwa, which means something like “water that flows from the rock.” But there wasn't any flowing water, except sometimes in late spring when runoff from snow in the Chuska Mountains flooded the arroyo and much of the land around it.

During the Vietnam War the Indian Health Service (IHS) was able to staff such remote clinics with doctors, generally newly trained and out to save the world. The IHS clinic at Greasewood served about 600 elementary schoolchildren, plus a community of 4000 or 5000 Navajo people scattered over hundreds of square miles in this south-central part of the Navajo Nation. To the newcomer the landscape looked barren and vacant—endless pale-yellow and brown scrub that merged with a rainless sky. Once your eyes got accustomed to it, though, you could see scattered camps on the open range up and down the arroyo, often tucked in tiny valleys with their sheep corrals backing against the mesa wall. In each camp lived an extended matrilineal family, including grandparents, married daughters, and their husbands and children. There were maybe 20 to 30 people per camp, plus pickups and horses. The community centered around the clinic and trading post, or at least it seemed …