PERSPECTIVE ON THE NAVAJO NATION : A Mystery Only to ‘White Skins’ : In the land that the people call Dinetah, rodents are carrying a message about the desecrated Earth.

There is a new killer loose in Dinetah, the Navajo term for their sprawling reservation in the American Southwest. Some doctors from the outside are calling the disease “Navajo flu”; Navajo Indian medicine people simply, and more accurately, are calling it ataha’dine, “an illness of the people.”

Some people who live on or visited the eastern edge of the Navajo reservation have been stricken by this illness, which can cause rapid respiratory failure. The authorities report that at least 26 people, mostly young Navajos, became seriously and inexplicably ill, and possibly 14 deaths can be linked to the ailment. Western medical doctors and scientists working on the diagnosis and treatment of the mystery illness--around 100 at last count--are now saying that the illness is viral, and is being spread in association with rodent urine or feces.

Predictably, the Navajo and Western medical communities have had different reactions to the illness and are at odds with one another. Some Navajo medicine people, the preferred medical authority for most residents of the reservation, have pointed out that this illness is but one of the many that claim their young people’s lives suddenly, unexpectedly. The new illness is unique and mysterious only in that some biligaana-- “white skins”--have died as well. And that fact, they believe, is the only reason this new disease is a mystery worth the attention of the national media.

To the Dine, as the Navajo prefer to be called, the new illness is but one in a series of mystery diseases they have suffered since the biligaana came into their lands. Dine medicine people are saying that the newest illness is the result of the young people forgetting the ancient Dine teachings. They say, too, that the Dine people have failed to protect the boundaries marked by the four sacred mountains that border and encircle Dinetah.

It snowed last Sunday on those mountains.

Dine medicine people have been holding cleansing ceremonies, a “wiping away” of this illness, and, again predictably, their efforts have brought them into conflict with Western medical knowledge and practice. Some biligaana doctors have told the medicine people that the dancing and singing of the medicine rites stir up too much dust and may cause the disease to spread.

Dine spiritual leaders have heard that before. They have been the targets of missionaries and government agents ever since the first historical contacts. In this century, the biligaana medical community has a history of dismissing the Dine medical practitioners as “witch doctors,” whose advice and teachings were utterly unworthy of consideration in the diagnosis and treatment of the Dine people.

In the 1918-19 influenza epidemic, an international affliction, Dine medicine people were rumored to have used witchcraft to cause and spread that “mystery disease.”

During the 1950s, the Dine medicine people were advised to stop using their sacred herbs and healing powders.

The white-jacketed biligaana doctors said that use of the sacred herbs was spreading the “mystery disease,” tuberculosis.

Now the biligaana doctors are running around Dinetah, chasing another “mystery disease.” The Dine healers see no mystery in one more illness caused by the imposition of biligaana ways. In this particular case, the Dine medicine people know that there was no illness like this when they lived in harmony with the Holy People, ancestors of all on Earth.

The Dine healers know that the Holy People gave instructions to the rodent population regarding its task, which was to taste and eat the things of the Earth and pass judgment on their suitability for human use. The Dine healers know that if the rats are dropping something that is poisonous, it is because they are eating the poisons that are dropping on Dinetah.

And that is the real source of this mysterious illness. The tragedy is that it took the death of some biligaana to wake up the Western world to one more illness it has given to the Dine.

The young people who died were probably smart enough not to handle rat droppings, and they certainly did not get the disease from stirring up the dust at a sing or ceremony, because many young people no longer attend these. No, this disease, some Dine believe, will ultimately be traced to the biligaanas’ insistence on using Dinetah as a dumping ground for their poisons.

If it was a virus from the droppings of rodents--and only six of the 26 or so cases have been so linked--the ultimate source of the illness is what the rodents have eaten. And rodents eat the same things their two-legged relatives--even the biligaana-- eat.