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Show HAPPY TRASH cans! Happy July 4t h! And why not? This spring our Navajo workers have painted t he Mission brand on oil drums, made them red, white and blue and put them where the people here could use them. What a difference it has made in our looks. Each Friday our truck empties them out and takes the trash to the town dump. We are really trying to put God's creation to more beauty and use in t his part of His land. Our pictures of families and faces here at St . Christopher's Mission show us in summertime. Here are children out of school joining the Mission's recreation program-people at home- Confirmation Day with Bishop Watson-Bluff Indian Day CelebrationSt. Christ opher's Shop booth with dart games and balloons- the old altar and statue now a garden of t rees and grass-work groups coming from Milwaukee, Colorado and California-many guests and visitors. How are we gettin g along? Only through your generosity and kindness! On September 30, 1966, the auditor showed us owing a debt of $60,000. Now it is $40,000 and when you consider that we must pay our bills before the new church can be completed, you can know that every amount helps. Pray for us and help us dedicate the new church on our 25th Anniversary, July 25, 1968. Here's a special Independence Day thought from us all in Navajoland to you: Have you ever thought much about what makes the United States so distinctly di ffere nt from any other country on earth? It's because of the Indians. This is why America is not a carbon copy of the European count ries where most of our people originally came from. Nearly everything t hat is distinctively different about this count ry is Indian from A to Z. Cigarettes, chewing gum, rubber balls, popcorn, corn flakes, flapjacks, maple syrup-American disrespect for the eternal authority of parents, presidents and would-be dictators. And the lack of peasants on American soil was all inherited from our Indian predecessors. Scholars are just beginning to learn that the effect of Indian culture on white customs far overshadows the effect that white methods have had on India n practices. For instance, four-sevenths of our national farm produce today is made up of plants which were tamed by t he Indians long before Columbus ever thought of sailing the ocean blue in 1492. Take away corn, t obacco, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, tomatoes, pumpkins, chocolate, cotton and ru bber , and we're practically out of business. That's over half of our national farm income, and we got them all from the Indians. And if anyone should ask you about Irish potatoes, Turkish tobacco, India Rubber and Egyptian cotton, you can tell him they're nothing but respectable old world names for American Indian products. It seems that in the old days things American were not looked upon with a great deal of fa vor by t he self-styled superior Europeans, so they gave the new world products some old world names. And if it had not been for the rich Indian democratic tradit ions, it's hard to tell what kind of government we migh t have today. Voting for women, the idea of several states within a state (Federalism) , the belief that Chiefs are servants of the people rather than their masters, and t he insistence that the community must recognize t he difference between men and t heir dreams and respect it, all were in practice here before Columbus landed. The Indians knew about hybrid corn, and when we finally woke up to it, it increased the yield forty per cent. Take the field of medicine Where did we get quinine, cocaine, cascara, ipecac (IP-A-KAK), witch hazel, oil of wintergreen, petroleum jelly and arnica? All from t he Indians! For 400 years physicians and botanists have been examining and analyzing the flora of America and they've yet to discover a single medicinal herb that was not known and used by the Indians. Our love of the outdoors . . . the sun, water , tanned complexion, bodily beauty, athletic prowess and |