Can anyone say tribal mentality? Yes, it is alive and well in the US.

Fort Defiance, Ariz. - In a grassy clearing amid the dusty hills here, Donovan Nez bends over a bubbling spring. Mr. Nez, 26, is a Navajo Indian and a former marine. Though he wears his dark hair cropped in a military cut, he looks very much the civilian on this Sunday afternoon. He balances on a fallen log, turning every so often to flash a boyish smile at his younger cousins who cluster behind him on the bank.

"When you drink this water," says Nez, "it seeps into every crevice of your body. It rejuvenates you."

Nez turns back to the water at the site known as Swiffle Spring, located on the Navajo Indian reservation just below the Chuksa mountains here, and bows his head. He whispers a prayer in Navajo, then English.

"Mother Earth, ease our physical and mental burdens. Thank you for all you have given us. For safety and strength. For this sacred water." He places his hands in the spring.


STORY

Navajo reservation, which sprawls across 27,000 square miles of northern Arizona and extends into Utah and New Mexico. Some 43 percent of the reservation's 180,000 residents live below the poverty line. Unemployment stands at 42 percent. Nearly 32 percent of homes lack full plumbing.

Wow. It's hard to believe any part of society who are ignored like these people would give a crap about a government that treated them like that, or would have any sense of service to them.

Different things could explain it. Sense of duty to tribe not country or it could be the moinbey because things are horrendous on the Rez or coulod be their ticket out, oeriod.