A monument for our times
For nearly 60 years the Confederate Troops Memorial absorbed and withstood the Arizona sun on the grounds of the state Capitol. Then in the dark hours of early Thursday another kind of heat, the burning resentment of those who know history, finally pushed it from its place of honor on Wesley Bolin Plaza.
History has caught up with Confederate memorials as the descendants of people once enslaved will no longer tolerate the enduring insult. Growing numbers of Americans of all races now believe the Southern army that defended slavery in the mid-19th century is more worthy of contempt than recognition.
The Confederacy represents evil, part of the 5,000-year continuum in which men have enchained men. Slavery continues in surprisingly large numbers today in far-flung parts of the world, but in our part it had long ago become barbaric.
So goodbye to all that.
But it is worth pausing and considering another memorial for Wesley Bolin Plaza. Not a replacement for that Confederate bauble, but the memorial that should have been built in its place in 1961 when the United Daughters of the Confederacy gifted their monument to Arizona.
In those same early years of the 1960s, the nation was beginning to recognize the enormous achievements of an Arizonan whose life’s work probably saved thousands, if not tens of thousands, of lives. She is virtually unknown in this state today and yet she is one of the greatest people in Arizona and American history.
Only two years after the Confederate memorial appeared on the Arizona Capitol mall, President Lyndon Johnson conferred on her our nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
That year, she took her place among giants — other recipients of the 1963 medal — including playwright Thornton Wilder, author E.B. White, painter Andrew Wyeth, singer Marian Anderson, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, President John F. Kennedy (posthumously), Pope John XXIII and biomedical scientist John F. Enders, “The Father of Modern Vaccines.”
You’ve probably never heard her name. But the president of the United States read it out to the nation:
Annie Dodge Wauneka.
She was a Navajo woman we all should know today because she embodies qualities desperately needed in a country and state that have grown more diverse and more polarized by the year.
She was “a boundary person, a bridge person,” Phoenix psychiatrist Dr. Carl Hammerschlag told then-Republic reporter Jerry Kammer in 1997. That was the year she died at age 87 and Hammerschlag recalled, “(She was) one of those rare individuals who can stand between different cultures and help them bridge their differences.”
How we need her story today. In our divided hour, she was person any of us could admire. For the conservative, she revered tradition and put it to enormous good use. For the liberal, she was ferociously progressive, breaking the barrier of ancient mythology and bringing modern medicine to the Navajo people, her people.
Thanks to Kammer’s lush biographical sketch, we have the story of a woman both highly creative and politically shrewd.
She was born in a traditional Navajo hogan in Arizona on land that straddled the New Mexico border. As a child she learned to sheer sheep and would come of age in a time much like our own, in the throes of a pandemic, the 1918 Spanish flu. That pathogen killed many of the Navajo and infected the young Wauneka, but her mild case fortified her with antibodies that allowed her to feed and care for other sick people, according to her biography at the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
He father was Chee Dodge, first chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council. She would follow him as he traversed the reservation and witnessed for herself how sickness and disease had become the scourge of her people. She would study public health and then work from inside the nation to solve its serious health problems.
In 1951, she would run and win a seat on the Tribal Council and serve there for 27 years. Dignified and conspicuous by her height, she stood nearly six-feet tall. Her great contribution was refusing to accept the spiraling death tolls of Navajo people and children because of disease and contaminated water.
Navajo infants were dying from gastrointestinal disease and diarrhea picked up from bad water, wrote Kammer. “(Their) parents were reluctant to turn to hospitals, which were stigmatized as places people went to die.” And they didn’t trust doctors.
Wauneka knew she needed to calm their fears and her solution was ingenious. She created a baby contest in the community and invited medical doctors to judge it.
That interaction of parents with physicians created the comfort that persuaded Navajo parents to trust these professional men and women with the lives of their children.
She used the ancient stories of the Navajo people to persuade them that they were being invaded by an enemy they could not perceive – the tuberculosis germ. In fact it was killing the Navajo at a rate eight times the national average.
Wauneka took off across the Navajo Nation in her four-wheel drive pickup to remote sheep camps. She brought a message about the “bugs you cannot see,” and eventually convinced her people that hospitals would save their lives, not steal them.
She was also working the politicians in Washington, recalled Ron Wood, a Navajo executive in the Indian Health Service at the time of her death. This woman from the remote desert of Arizona earned the respect of the top leaders in our nation, Wood told Kammer. “Most of us, when we went to Washington, we’d have to meet with legislative aides. But when Annie Wauneka came to town, senators would cancel appointments to meet with her personally.”
“I think she was the smartest politician I’ve ever known,” Robert Bergman, a former Indian Health Service physician told Kammer.
To prove it, he recounted a story from the 1970s when he had to deliver the bad news that the federal government would not be building the medical school she had sought for the Navajo Nation. The logistics were impossible.
“Of course I know that,” she told him. “But think what they’ll have to give me to make me feel better about not getting it.’”
Nearly 60 years ago, Arizona erected the wrong monument in a place of honor on its Capitol grounds. We need to rectify that mistake.
We need to make our fellow Arizonan Annie Dodge Wauneka a household name and an historic model for bridging the differences between us.