Navajo Nation confronts HIV and AIDS
Five years ago, the man Elsie Smith loved told her calmly from his hospital bed that it was time for him to go. He died with a hushed goodbye and a squeeze of her hand.
Smith herself had been feeling ill for a while. Her bones ached and she vomited often. She soon mourned him from her own hospital bed.
A doctor explained to the Navajo woman that her lover had died of AIDS. It was important that they check her blood, he said. She agreed.
Two days later, the doctor told her that she had HIV. Her tired mind became flustered with questions, but she asked only one.
“What is HIV?”
Smith learned of her diagnosis at the Indian Medical Center in Gallup, where Western medicine and traditional healing converge to treat members of the Navajo Nation and where a ceremonial hogan — or sacred structure — sits on hospital grounds.
It is where Jerry Archuleta and Emerson Scott, partners who are both HIV-positive, go for their monthly checkup and where Danny Morris nearly died from AIDS before receiving care from both doctors and medicine men.
The hospital has become a leading force in the effort to quell a rise of HIV transmission among Navajo, a troubling development at a time when HIV infections are holding steady or declining in other groups across the country.
Most of the infections are occurring in the Navajo Nation, a vast expanse in the Four Corners region where poverty, poor education, alcohol abuse and the hardships of reservation life cultivate an environment in which the virus can spread.
Like Smith, some Navajo learn of HIV and AIDS upon diagnosis. Others believe it’s a white man’s disease. Doctors, meanwhile, must explain the virus and disease in round-about ways because, in traditional Navajo culture, to speak of death is to bring it about.
Larry Foster, the Navajo Nation’s sexually transmitted disease coordinator, said health professionals had encountered resistance when giving presentations on the disease.
“They didn’t want to listen because they thought we were bringing a curse, bringing death into their communities,” Foster said. “Nobody cares until they have seen an AIDS death in their family.”