Hunt, a high school junior and a resident of the Navajo Nation, was on a short training run for the national cross-country championships being held Saturday in San Diego. Her team, Wings of America, has risen to prominence with an unlikely collection of athletes. It is a group of American Indians from reservations around the country, and a Wings team has won a boys or a girls national title 20 times since first attending a championship meet in 1988.%26#8220;You say Wings of America to anyone in the running community %26#151; it%26#8217;s synonymous with the best Native American runners,%26#8221; said Eric Heins, the cross-country and distance coach at Northern Arizona University, a program that has benefited from having Wings runners in recent years.American Indians have especially high rates of youth suicide, Type 2 diabetes and deaths attributed to alcoholism, and extreme poverty is pervasive on many reservations. Wings of America, a 20-year-old nonprofit organization based here, has embraced the challenge.%26#8220;The hardest part is getting people to understand, to make the case how important it is,%26#8221; said Anne Wheelock Gonzales, the organization%26#8217;s former executive director who now serves as a consultant. %26#8220;One time someone said, %26#8216;Well, it%26#8217;s not like you%26#8217;re saving lives.%26#8217; And I said: %26#8216;Excuse me, we are saving lives. That%26#8217;s exactly what this does.%26#8217; %26#8221;Dillon Shije, another member of the Wings team who will be competing Saturday, runs 60 to 70 miles a week around Zia Pueblo, near Albuquerque. He zigzags between junipers and cactuses on trails, and he sometimes runs five miles up an arroyo. %26#8220;Those are typical running trails all over the reservations,%26#8221; said Alvina Begay, 27, a former Wings runner who will compete in the United States women%26#8217;s Olympic marathon trials in April.Shije, a 16-year-old high school junior, commutes an hour each way to attend Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque. In the winter, when the light is short and his training regimen requires running before dawn and after dusk, Shije will run while his mother drives behind him on dirt roads with the headlights on.%26#8220;Sometimes I need the extra push from the car,%26#8221; he said. %26#8220;The honk.%26#8221; In the Navajo Nation, where Hunt lives, many of the statistics concerning health problems are even higher than for the overall numbers for American Indians. A study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that nearly 15 percent of youths in the Navajo Nation in grades 6-12 had attempted suicide. A study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 40 percent of adults ages 45 and older had Type 2 diabetes, and that the rates were increasing among children. %26#8220;There%26#8217;s this element of historical post-traumatic stress that%26#8217;s occurred in Indian communities,%26#8221; said Dr. Chuck North, the chief medical officer for Indian Health Services. %26#8220;The history of Native Americans in the United States is one of loss: losing land, losing language, losing culture and losing family members.%26#8221;More than 180,000 people live on the Navajo Nation, which spreads over 27,000 square miles in Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. Unemployment hovers at about 40 percent. More than three-quarters of the 6,184 miles of roads are not paved. Roughly half the homes lack plumbing. Hunt lives on reservation land about 15 miles from Navajo, N.M., in a small two-bedroom house at an elevation of about 8,000 feet. Navajo has about 2,100 residents, and 64 percent of the families are below the poverty level. Her family drives into a town called Crystal each week to fill a 1,000-gallon cistern with water. They chop and haul wood in the winter to heat their home. %26#8220;We camp year-round,%26#8221; said Delores Hunt, Chantel%26#8217;s mother. The Navajo culture centers on strong women. The Navajo believe that Father Sky and Mother Earth gave birth to Changing Woman, a deity who has the power to change her age with the seasons by walking to the horizon. When a Navajo girl comes of age and has her first period, the community celebrates with a rite of passage called the Kinaalda. For four days, the girl re-enacts the role of Changing Woman, waking up before dawn and running east, toward the sunrise. The longer a girl runs, the longer she will live. 1 2 Next Page %26#x00bb;
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