For Navajos, Desert 'Tea' Fosters Kinship With Heritage And Nature
Some Navajo are trying to bring back their traditional food culture, including drinking Navajo "tea." It's brewed with a plant called greenthread that thrives in the mid-summer heat of the Southwest.
In the dusty red earth of eastern Arizona's portion of the Navajo Nation, the main road stretches out beneath the massive white-cloud sky and rubs against barren, chalky mesas; sometimes it skirts the deep, dry crack of a canyon stubbled with sagebrush. Small fields of corn occasionally sprout up beside the road, the short stalks still far from ripe.
But away from the road, tucked beside lakebeds or the foot of a hillside,a mid-summer visitor will find bright yellow flowers beginning to open. They are the crowning blooms of a thin plant), it is used to make Navajo "tea."
