Word: kee
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...nameless horrffr swept over me as I read of the inhumane treatment of Kee Chee [whose sick baby died in a bus - TIME, Nov. 26] and his family. Though these people are illiterate and can do only menial tasks, the breath of life and of free peoples is within them, and they should be treated as such...
...Navajo beet worker, Kee Chee, did not do as he was told . . . He was told both by myself, the superintendent of the hospital, and the representative of the Amalgamated Sugar Co. which employed him, to leave the infant in the hospital. Moreover, Amalgamated and Minidoka County were paying and were willing to go on paying the infant's medical expenses. Notwithstanding this, Kee Chee and his wife insisted on taking the baby out of the hospital, and on their own responsibility, left with it on the chartered bus for their home in New Mexico . . . The Chees' reason...
...workers in the sugar-beet fields of the West, for, unlike braceros (from Mexico), they are not protected by treaty regulations. Navajos are cheap; they keep their mouths shut and they do as they are told. When the season ended at Burley, Idaho, a Navajo beet picker named Kee Chee dumbly obeyed orders to get his family on a chartered bus for the long ride home to New Mexico-even though it meant taking his sick, seven-month-old daughter out of a hospital at nearby Bear River City, Utah...
...cold. Kee's pretty, 25-year-old wife, Mary, covered the baby with blankets. But before the bus reached Salt Lake City the child was dead. The Chees stared at the little corpse, not only with grief, but-like all the other passengers in the jolting vehicle-with terror. Navajos believe that a chindi, or evil spirit, inhabits the bodies of the dead; if the living stay near the dead the chindi may enter their bodies...
...over again in my heart and in my head. But what can I do? I am a Navajo." The busload of Indians followed the police and the doctor who had performed the inquest out into the street when they left. But finally they got back into the bus. Kee Chee sat stiffly with the baby on the seat beside...