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<http://www.freenewmexican.com/nationworld>Nation / World
A loss deeply felt

By PAULINE ARRILLAGA AND FELICIA FONSECA | Associated Press
September 12, 2007

A slaying involving two Navajo college students
strikes at the core of the Indian nation

WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. &#AD; That they had made it off
the reservation at all was no small feat in a
place where adversity runs as deep as tradition.
But they were success stories: Two Navajo girls
gone to the big-city university, planning to come home one day and give back.
Mia Henderson, the one they called ]Princess
Mia,^ captain of the softball team and a star
student who had a flair for science and yearned
to work in genetics or sports medicine.

Galareka Harrison, ]Reka^ to friends and family,
the track standout and rodeo girl who excelled in
roping and dreamed of becoming a pharmacist.

On this remote stretch of land where kids
sometimes have neither the means nor the desire
to reach for something more, Henderson and
Harrison stood out. They studied hard, played
sports and won scholarships &#AD; then set out to
make their mark at the University of Arizona in
Tucson, hundreds of miles and a world away from
the rolling hills and hogans of home.

They were just 18, the kind of young people
Navajo elders hope and pray will carry on for them.

Now one is dead. The other is charged with her
murder. And a community struggles to understand.

The loss is felt so deeply here because it goes
beyond one unfathomable act of violence. Among a
people who consider life sacred and their ritual
teachings the path to salvation, they wonder what
this tragedy says about the survival of a belief
system &#AD; and the next generation of Navajos.

Navajo hardships

]We pray for our young to get knowledge,^ says
medicine man Wilbur Begay. ]We pray for them so
they can help our Indian people. They are our future leaders.^
His face, etched with five decades of wisdom,
hints at the despair that has pervaded the Navajo
Nation since word spread of the Sept. 5 killing
and arrest. His words ring of doubt, the kind
that accompanies unanswered questions of why and how.

]Did we do something wrong?^ he asks. ]Didn\t we pray hard enough?^
Life for the young has never been easy on the
reservation that spans 27,000 square miles of
Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. Poverty levels,
dropout rates, teen pregnancies, suicides,
violent crimes &#AD; the many markers by which
non-Indians measure success or failure &#AD; have
long been higher here, along with substance abuse among both teens and adults.
In the face of these many challenges, Navajo
leaders have long grappled with how to keep their
heritage alive among future generations. They
fight to instill the traditional principle of k\e
&#AD; respect for yourself and others &#AD; as well as kinship, balance and harmony.
]We\re all family,^ says Navajo President Joe
Shirley Jr. ]We\re supposed to be getting along.
We\re supposed to be looking out for each other.
That\s supposed to be the philosophy, the belief, the way.

]In spite of us wanting to save the ways,^ he adds, ]we\re losing a lot of it.^
Education is meant to be part of the answer. Only
about 18 percent of the adult population on the
reservation has earned a four-year degree, below
the national average of 24 percent. So the tribe
has worked to provide scholarships and other
assistance to those wanting to pursue a college
degree. Some schools even go so far as to develop
promotional DVDs of their top students.

Mighty Mia

Henderson, in fact, won a prestigious Chief
Manuelito Scholarship, a $7,000-a-year, four-year
award for college-bound Navajos named for a
legendary chief who was dedicated to providing
quality education for his people.

Henderson grew up in Tuba City on the western
edge of the reservation, 85 miles north of
Flagstaff, Ariz., and east of the Grand Canyon.
Her father once worked as a principal and
administrator for the Tuba school district, while
her mother taught middle school.

Friends liked to call her ]Princess,^ though she
used ]Mighty Mia^ for her e-mail address and
MySpace page. At Tuba City High School, she
excelled as both an athlete and an academic, a
National Honor Society member who graduated in
May as one of the top 10 students in a class of 184.

Softball coach Flora Sombrero remembers her third
baseman and team captain as sweet and humble,
nurturing and analytical. Once, during a
difficult at-bat, Sombrero called time out and
instructed Henderson to step into the ball. The
girl returned to the plate and swung.

It was her first grand slam.

]She ran around the bases with this big ol\ grin
on her face,^ Sombrero says. ]She would listen
and take things to heart. She got it.^

The summer before her senior year, Henderson was
one of 25 Arizona students picked to spend seven
weeks working on biomedical research projects at
the University of Arizona. She worked eight hours
a day, five days a week in a lab studying albinism in American Indians.
At the end of the program, when each student
stood before an audience of professors and
researchers to show a slide presentation of their
work, Henderson spoke quietly but confidently for
12 minutes. She then thanked her parents,
]because they pushed me during school.^

Henderson was ]this incredible comet coming
across the sky,^ says program director Marlys Witte.

]There\s nothing she couldn\t have done,^ Witte
says. ]She loved the reservation. She loved her
culture. She loved her family. She loved her
grandmother. But she saw something outside the
reservation, as well, that she wanted to be a part of.

]Full of possibilities &#AD; wonderful possibilities
&#AD; that\s how I see her,^ Witte says.

Rodeo hand

Harrison, meanwhile, grew up 100 miles east of
Tuba in the reservation village of Chinle, a
wind-swept slice of land where cows and horses graze along the highway.
One of seven children, she, too, was an
accomplished athlete, a member of the track and
field team at Many Farms High School. But the
rodeo was her love, and she was especially good
at breakaway roping, where a contestant on
horseback attempts to rope a calf around the
neck. Two years ago, the All Indian Rodeo Cowboys
Association named her rookie of the year in the event.

Friends and relatives describe a good girl &#AD;
]cool,^ says 16-year-old Lavonne Yazzie, who
competed against Harrison in rodeo events. ]We
both just like to laugh. We just go out there and give it everything we got.^
Her mother, Janice, says Galareka was a good
student who won a full-ride to the Tucson
university. ]The way I taught my kids, that\s the
only way &#AD; to go to school,^ she says.

Things go wrong

The two girls &#AD; strangers until only a few weeks
ago &#AD; were brought together under the University
of Arizona\s First-Year Scholars Program,
intended to help American Indians make the
transition from home to campus, where just 812 of
nearly 37,000 students were Indian in the 2006-2007 school year.

Fifty native students, most of them Navajo, were
selected for this year\s program, which requires
participants to live together in a wing of
Graham-Greenlee dormitory called O\odham Ki &#AD; or The People\s House.
When school began Aug. 20, Harrison and Henderson were matched as roommates.
Clearly, things went very wrong, very quickly.
But the bare-bones police blotter account raises
more questions than it answers.

On Aug. 28, Henderson filed a police report
accusing Harrison of theft and forgery after she
saw her Social Security card and a campus debit
card sticking out of Harrison\s wallet, according to a court affidavit.
On Aug. 29, Harrison admitted in a police
interview that she had stolen the cards and
fraudulently bought a sweat shirt. She also
admitted stealing Henderson\s checkbook and
cashing a $500 check, and using another stolen
identification as her own, according to the
affidavit. University police declined to explain
why Harrison wasn\t immediately arrested, citing an ongoing investigation.
Harrison then went home for a Labor Day weekend
visit with family, returning to school Sept. 4.

At 5:45 a.m. the next morning, students called
university police to report hearing screams in
Graham-Greenlee hall. Police say Harrison bought
a knife on her return to campus, then wrote a
note pretending to be Henderson. She had falsely
accused her roommate, the note said, and she
mentioned ending her own life. Then, police say,
Harrison stabbed Henderson numerous times as she slept.

University police Sgt. Eugene Mejia says Harrison
had been accused by a second student of theft,
but there was no indication she presented a
physical threat to any of her classmates.
Harrison\s mother maintains her daughter had no
history of violence, and those who remember her
from high school were stunned by her arrest.

]Our whole staff was just numb when we heard the
news,^ says Dave Lepkojus, an assistant principal at Many Farms High.
]Those who did know her just couldn\t imagine
that she would be involved in anything like this.
She was a good student, an honor student, was
accepted to the university. She was just a really good kid.^

[Hard to accept\

A Navajo medicine man whose son is a freshman at
the University of Arizona has since performed a
cleansing ceremony inside Graham-Greenlee hall.
The university wanted to do something to help
their students start anew, says Kendal Washington
White, the school\s director of multicultural affairs.

At least one student in the Indian scholars
program has already withdrawn from the
university. Still, says White, ]it was important
to bring in the medicine man to provide a sense of spiritual relief.^
But healing may be a long ways off for many on the reservation.

A few days after Henderson\s death, Navajos
gathered in Window Rock for the 61st annual
Navajo Nation Fair. It is the tribe\s biggest
event of the year, but pride and exultation were
infused with concern as Navajos tried to make sense of what had happened.
]I think that people will start to wonder about
Navajo Nation people: Are we teaching our kids
the values of our elders?^ says Yvonne
Kee-Billison, a program supervisor for the Navajo
Office of Youth Development. ]It just saddens
everyone, that two of our young children are involved in something like this.^
]If there\s any lesson to be learned it would be:
How do we nurture and how do we support our
kinship among our children?^ says Tanya Gorman
Keith, a vice president at Din&#E9; College, the
first college established by Indians for Indians.
]They are of the same family and of the same
people U they have to care for each other.

]The question now is really &#AD; moms, dads,
grandparents, educators: How do you make sure this happens?^

Harrison was to have competed in the rodeo at the
fair along with her sister, Garveda. The family
instead watched only one of the girls perform,
sitting somberly in the grandstand. Harrison
remains jailed on a first-degree murder charge as
her family tries to raise the money for her $50,000 bond.

Henderson was laid to rest Monday. Navajo
tradition calls for four days of mourning, after
which those left behind must find a way to go on.
For Henderson\s loved ones, that time has come &#AD;
if they can somehow find a way to begin.

]In Navajo culture, we cherish life to the
fullest. To lose someone like this, this
tragically, it\s very hard to accept,^ says
Sombrero, the girl\s coach and friend. ]Look at
all the potential she had, what she could have
brought back to her people, what she would have
taught them, what she could have contributed. That\s all gone.
]A lot of people are saying: [Why?\ ^ she says. ]Why?^
AP National Writer Pauline Arrillaga reported
from Phoenix. Albuquerque-based reporter Felicia
Fonseca reported from the Navajo reservation.
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