Navajo Life as a child,

   There are memories of our lives we would like to forget and there are those we loves to remember and share with others. If you were born Navajo and grew up between the 1930 and 1970 you will remember these time fondly.
   First, we survived being born to mothers who herd sheep in the cold, carried buckets of water, chopped wood, and worked the cornfields in the heat while they carried us. They ate mutton stew and blue corn mush, fried bread, drink black coffee, and didn't get tested for diabetes. Our baby cribs were flat cradle boards, with sacred stories and songs.
    We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets as we lived in Hogans and brush shade houses and when we rode our horses, we had no helmets, but we did have clan relatives who recognized us from a distant and picked us up while hitchhiking. As children riding in the back of a horse drawn wagon, absorbing all of nature on a warm day was always a special treat.  No such thing as seat belts.
    We drank water from the natural spring where the livestock drank and NOT from a bottle and no one actually died from it. We shared one soft drink with our brothers or sisters, from one bottle at least four times a year and get one piece of hard candy that we also shared with each other. We drank from muddy ponds and puddles with bugs and worms and made mud houses made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
     We had fried potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner and at times roasted mutton, liver covered with fat placed between tortilla and tea with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight,  because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!  We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the sun was just above the rim of the west horizon. No one worried about us or thought about where we were all day. And we were O.K.
    We would spend hours building our Hogan out of damp sand, used rocks  for horses and trucks, sounds of shifting gears were heard as our imagination ran wild and built dirt roads with our hands, even before Wal Mart invented floor rugs with imprints of roads and communities. We rode on old rusty car hood tied to the saddle behind the horse 
and laughed with mud flying in our faces. After that we learned to solve the problem and made improvements. We did not have Play Stations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at  all, no 500 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround  sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet  chat rooms.......... WE HAD WORK TO DO and we were always outside in all kinds of  weather conditions and respected nature! We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and bad scraps, and never told our parents, if you did you were told “dih giis'(stupid)” from these accidents.
    We did not have birthday parties or given birthday presents, we made our own toys and guns out of sticks and we play shopping by building trading posts using empty cans and bottles, using what ever paper we could find to use as paper money.
    We rode horses, donkeys, or walked to a relative's house and knocked on the door and knew how to greet and shook hands with everyone, down to the babies! The idea of a parent bailing us out for one lost sheep from one hundred or more heads of sheep was unheard of, you were sent out to find it.
    This generation has produced Navajos with their language and culture intact! We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
If you can remember this times YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS! You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the government regulated our lives for our own good. While you are at it, share this with your children so they will know how brave their parents were.Like they are going to believe us!