Kids Hold the Keys

During my past travels to foreign countries I discovered a community’s secrets are often best revealed by their children. They project naïveté, offer brutal honesty and are a wealth of information. Blissfully unaware of their actions, they return our inquiries with thoughtful questions about our personal reasoning forcing us to reevaluate our culture while concurrently discovering their own.


Bordering the Navajo Indian Reservation, Page, AZ has a population of close to 2000 people. You can drive a loop around the town in five minutes and children of all ages often walk the streets alone, apparently without fear of being taken like kids in a larger city. Their main industry pertains to the energy and water distribution from the Glen Canyon Dam and tourism at Lake Powell. Other than that there was not much going on here. I heard whispers from locals about how hard it was to find jobs in the area. The town supports a Walmart and several fast-food restaurants which employ locals, and the Navajo are given preferential treatment for available jobs at the coal power plant built on their reservation land. But, it still seemed too small to support the number of individuals looking for work.

I sensed an interesting dynamic between the Navajo and the White folks living among them. This was clearly the Navajo’s land and had been for hundreds of years since the US government awarded them their ancestral homelands as their reservation (though they share small pockets of it with other tribes). There was an obvious cultural separation between the Whites and the Navajo, yet they appeared to co-exist respectfully.

While golfing one day I met a couple of ninth grade boys. They were practicing for their school’s golf team and took the time to give me a few pointers on my swing. Something led me to believe that they were not Native Americans. As we chatted I learned more about the Navajos. I asked the boys about the roaming dog populations that I consistently noticed on each reservation. First, according to them, I needed to understand that the Navajo believe that the strength of the dog’s fight reflects upon the family who owns it. In other words, the meaner the dog is, the stronger the family. Of course, I do not know if this interpretation is accurate, but if it is true, then the information connected another piece of the puzzle for me. It explained why, while shopping with Sequoia one day at Walmart, a young boy around the age of four had asked me whether Sequoia was mean. He also questioned whether I just tell him to bite people when I want him to bite. I thought this was a strange view on dogs and felt very sad for this child who obviously had a bad experience with them. It was possible that in his mind a fighting dog was not a negative thing but a reflection of a family’s power and pride. This perspective was definitely opposite from my perception of my fluffy, cuddly, black mop, licker of a dog who could be considered only vicious to a lollypop.

There was no animosity in the boys’ voices, and no racism or degradation expressed, yet they conveyed an outsider’s view of the Navajo culture keeping them worlds apart from one another. Kids are still kids, and if there were tensions between the communities and if their parents held contempt for the Navajo, then I would have heard it in the way they spoke about them. It is reassuring to see that the inhabitants of this small town can each keep their strong cultural ties and cohabitate among one another peacefully. This experience simply reminded me that children are the keys to unlock the untold secrets of a culture.