By Jim Kristofic
This year marks the 95th anniversary of Sage Memorial Hospital operating in Ganado, Arizona. The staff of the Navajo Health Foundation – the non-profit that operates Sage Memorial Hospital – is celebrating with an event to honor and explore the history of the institution that began as a four-room adobe mud building and has now grown to a 177 million-dollar, 140,200 square-foot facility with 25 hospital beds that serves more than 11,000 people. People will gather at the hospital campus from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. to attend a local job fair, listen to a live podcast of community stories, participate in youth wellness activities, a fun run and walk, and shop a farmer’s market. A complimentary lunch will be provided for people as a gesture of gratitude and appreciation of the community.
The hospital at Ganado began in the back room of the stone church at Ganado Mission in 1911, where an elderly doctor named James Kennedy used it as a place to dispense medicines to cure trachoma – a bacterial eye infection that caused blindness. Kennedy was known for walking for miles – sometimes as far as Chinle – to treat patients during the 1918 flu epidemic. Dr. Kennedy retired and was replaced by Drs. Alice and Gary Burke, who helped to build the adobe hospital at Ganado Mission. They logged more than 5,000 miles travelling to treat patients in their first year. During those travels, they treated a hataałii (medicine man), who took their medicine in front of twenty people and encouraged them to visit the doctors. From then on, people visited the adobe hospital every day. They trusted the doctors to perform surgeries on their relatives.
This trust remained when Dr. Clarence Salsbury, a surgeon with twenty years of experience, came to replace the Burkes in 1927. Despite his expertise, a young local girl died of an embolism during his first surgery attempt at the hospital. Her relatives decided they would run him out of Ganado or, perhaps, kill him. But a local hataałii named Hastiin Łichíí Deez’áhí (Red Point) intervened and asked the relatives to forgive Dr. Salsbury.
“Sometimes I have used all my skills as a medicine man, and yet the sick one dies,” he said. “But I keep on trying, because I want to save lives. So it is with the bilagáana medicine man.”
He asked the relatives to go home and forget their threats. People listened, but few returned to the hospital. Salsbury spoke with many local people and concluded they needed a new hospital.
By the winter of 1928, Salsbury had Navajo crews digging a foundation for the hospital before he had any funding for the actual building. This angered his bosses at the Presbyterian Church, yet inspired them to find the $50,000 needed to complete the hospital.
The plans were completed in the summer of 1929. By October, Navajo carpenters were setting the roof on rough-sawn posts and beams. By November, Navajo stonemasons were using sandstone, hauled by mules and wagons, to shape the walls of the hospital. Because the Russell Sage Foundation paid for much of the construction budget, Salsbury decided to name the building Sage Memorial Hospital.
On the morning of May 14, 1930, the hospital staff served lunch for visitors and speakers like Chee Dodge, the first tribal chairman, and John G. Hunter, the Superintendent of the Indian Service from Window Rock and initiator of the chapter house system. Over the next twenty years, the hospital hosted the School of Nursing – the nation’s first Native American nursing school.
Soon after the hospital was completed, Red Point led work crews to build a stone Nurses’ Home across from the hospital. That winter, Salsbury had already been drawing up plans and had found a benefactor in New Jersey to pay for the project.
In 1932, a work crew of local Navajo men quarried stone four miles from the Mission. Five teams of horses hauled the long chunks of dark sandstone on wagons for two days through snow that reached up to the horses’ knees and through mud that slid the wagons like they were rolling over ice.
The work crew started the foundation when the temperature was 18 degrees below zero. They burned fires all night to thaw the ground so the crew could dig during the day. Red Point was often there, pointing with his gish (cane) and giving advice to the younger masons and carpenters like Descheenie Nez Tracy and Karl Dalton.
The Mission staff dedicated the Nurses’ Home in thirteen weeks. Salsbury praised the “spacious new home” that would house twenty-two nurses. Salsbury would need it for the eight graduate nurses, fourteen nursing students, and their matron.
The first two graduates of the School of Nursing were local Navajo girls who were both closely related to hataałii. Red Point was there on the night of their graduation ceremony on November 29th, 1933. Salsbury and Arizona Governor B.B. Moeur presided over the ceremony, which Salsbury described as a “new trail” for Sage Memorial Hospital. Adele Slivers stood next to her fellow classmate, Ruth Henderson.
After Governor Moeur had given his address, Salsbury looked to Red Point. Among the Anglo men in suits, the hataałiwore green velvet trousers, a purple velvet shirt, yellow headband, deerskin moccasins, silver belt, beads, earrings, rings, and a bowguard.
Red Point stood and spoke in Navajo for several minutes while Governor Moeur listened as the nearby candlelight flickered in the room.
When the old hataałi had finished speaking, Howard Gorman, the local leader who would serve as council delegate from Ganado, stood and interpreted his words: “They say your George Washington led the people through the snow at Valley Forge in the middle of the winter – there were tracks of blood on the snow. He had something in his heart which he wanted to do for his Country – he wanted peace for the American people and he wanted liberty for this Nation. I put myself out on the coldest days in the month of January when no person would have come out to haul rocks so that the nurses might have a place in which to live. But I wanted to do this because my thoughts were to the future of these young ladies who are graduating this evening and all of the other student nurses. I know that some good will come from these two young ladies and from all those others who are now in this training school.”
The School of Nursing would operate for twenty years at Sage Memorial Hospital, until June of 1951. It graduated more than 130 nurses from more than 50 tribes. In 2008, the Department of the Interior recognized the school and Ganado Mission as a National Historic Site.
By 1959, Sage Memorial was still running sixty beds, twelve bassinets, and delivering 400 babies a year – almost ten times what they’d had twenty years before. Dr. Salsbury had retired from the hospital and was now working as the Commissioner of the Arizona state Department of Health. The new superintendent, Dr. Joseph Poncel, coordinated with the Board of Home Missions to start building a new hospital in the summer of 1961.
In 1962, they were finally able to get materials together so they could “go on full blast” with the new hospital building. The weather was unusually wet, with “practically daily showers,” and they wanted to get the building under a roof before serious cold weather so they could work inside during the winter.
The work moved along. That May, Paul Jones, the Tribal Council Chairman, allowed the Mission to quarry stone without paying a fee to the tribe.
Throughout the summer of 1963, the building grew from its stone foundation. Some of the men who’d worked on building the first Sage Memorial Hospital – who still remembered the sound of the hooves of the mules against the sand as the animals pulled the creaking wagons heavy with stone and iron tools – joked about how someone had forgot to bring hay to the construction site. How would they feed the animals? But they just laughed and continued the work with their new mechanical equipment that ran on diesel fuel.
The concrete, steel, and glass building rose in a wide and squat spread against a small hill in the middle of the old athletic field. The cost grew to $420,257.69, according to Glen Carson, architect and property director of the Board – a figure below the national average for a hospital.
The staff engineer, Eugene Haldeman, allowed the construction crews to use the local facilities to shave away unnecessary expenses. They used the machine and maintenance shops at Ganado Mission for the project. Cabinets were made on the job by local workers. Local men worked on the job site, saving on cost of room and board. This fit within the tradition of Ganado Mission. Of the 62 buildings on the Mission campus, only seven were built by outside contractors. Everything else was built by local work crews.
The new Sage Memorial Hospital was dedicated on October 21, 1963, at 1:30 p.m.
Rev. Dr. Kenneth Neigh, the General Secretary of the United Presbyterian Church U.S.A. gave the principal address. Raymond Nakai, the new Tribal Council Chairman, received a symbolic key to Sage Memorial to emphasize that the hospital would be open to all Navajos. Council delegates Annie Wauneka and Howard Gorman also attended. And so did the many young Diné people who still attended the boarding school at the Mission. At the time, the Mission had a 450-member church, with 145 students enrolled in the grade 4 through 12 school.
The new 45-bed hospital would be staffed by four doctors, sixteen RNs, a pharmacist, and two lab techs. All ward aides still spoke both English and Navajo, since 50 to 60 percent of patients couldn’t speak English.
After the opening of Sage Memorial Hospital, the land surrounding the hospital transformed dramatically. The Presbyterian Church gave up operating Ganado Mission and handed the hospital and its surrounding campus to the medical non-profit Project H.O.P.E. in 1969. After struggling to run the hospital for five years, Project H.O.P.E. left as soon as they legally could.
As they backed out, the community formed the Navajo Nation Health Foundation in 1974, a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) run by a CEO and a nine-member board of local community members, who would manage the Sage Memorial Hospital and the hospital campus.
Sage Memorial Hospital became the first privately-run American Indian hospital in the nation’s history.
The Foundation, renamed the Navajo Health Foundation in the late 1990s, moved through some times of prosperity and times of dire economic straits. Buildings fell apart. Some were rescued by renovations. But the all-Navajo board was able to navigate problems with staffing while drawing up plans for the new Sage Memorial Hospital organized around respect (iłiłį́), unity (beełáʼídlį́), beauty (hózhǫ́), and harmony in honor of K’é and the sacredness of life.
They are ideas that Red Point would approve of.
