UNNATURAL CAUSES: Bad Sugar Copyright © California Newsreel 2008
www.unnaturalcauses.org
Page 4
likely as those in the highest to become diabetic. Dr. Warne might like to prescribe more affluence, but
instead he prescribes a change of diet, more exercise, and if this fails, medication and insulin injections.
TERROL DEW JOHNSON: That’s a picture of my sister. She has to take two shots of the syringes. She has to fill
them up to the max and she takes them on both sides of her belly. And her doctors said that her kidneys will go. But
she told me that, with this amount, ‘I’m alright for right now,’ she said. Which really bummed me out, I was sad.
I’m a diabetic, I found out in ‘96. And so they gave me some pills and boom. You know, I was stamped and
approved and put on that list of diabetics in the native community.
DVD Chapter 4: Stolen Water
NARRATOR: The genocide of Native American peoples may be a familiar story, but its unfolding varied
from tribe to tribe and place to place. To understand its continuing impact on the health of the Pima today,
we need not look far beyond one series of events.
ROD LEWIS (Former General Counsel, Gila River Indian Community): There is direct connection between the
diversion of water in the upper Gila River and the health status and economic status of the Pimas and Maricopas. In
the 1890s, water simply stopped coming down the Gila River.
NARRATOR: Upstream, water from the Gila was diverted by dams and water projects, giving the white
settlers, farmers, ranchers and mining interests the water they needed.
LEWIS: And we were depended on that water to grow crops, to provide for ourselves.
NARRATOR: Not even the 1908 Supreme Court decision upholding water rights for all Native Americans
could protect the Pima. The Coolidge Dam: in 1930, on of the largest in the world. Its promise: to provide
water for everyone, this time including the Pima.
Former President Calvin Coolidge celebrated its opening with politicians and businessmen. They dined on
china, crystal and linen. The Pima ate bag lunches on makeshift tables. Coolidge passed the peace pipe, but in
the end, the Pima got little of the water. Again.
LEWIS: We were practically without water for almost an entire century. We were among the poorest people in the
United States of America, as are Indians who live on other reservations and still are in that situation. Unable to grow
crops, unable to get out and work in the fields, unable to develop economically because of the lack of water for
almost a hundred years, it was just, it’s an absolute shame as far as this country is concerned, as far as the State of
Arizona is concerned.
WARNE: What is a metaphor for the rest of the country to try to think about in terms of damming the rivers? It
would be like saying to this entire country, okay, survive now without money. And how would you do that? How
would you change your entire economy, how would you change your entire culture? How would you change your
entire lifestyle? And would you be successful? Would people die?
NARRATOR: And the Pima did die. But they died from starvation, not from diabetes. A survey conducted in
1902 found only one case of diabetes among the Pima. But within 30 years of the building of the Coolidge
Dam, there were more than 500.
DVD Chapter 5: Diabetic’s Nightmare
WARNE: If we had not dammed the rivers back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, we wouldn’t be able to have this lifestyle
that we enjoy in Arizona with the swimming pools and golf courses and artificial lakes. And with this lifestyle we
are really living outside the laws of nature. And what people, I think, generally speaking don’t realize is that all of
the prosperity of Phoenix and the prosperity of this entire state was built on the backs of the health of the local
tribes.