Active retirees like James Parrish, Jr., help keep small communities humming. Parrish, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, attends Kayenta Chapter meetings and is active in the farm board and veterans’ committee. When a relative was unhoused — living in a vehicle and legally blind — 82-year-old Parrish drove the man the 150-mile roundtrip to Tuba City, Arizona, to get the identification and paperwork he needed to establish housing. 

On Veteran’s Day, just a couple weeks after getting a pacemaker, Parrish spoke to high school students about his military service. Parrish — “J” to friends and family — served in the U.S. Army for three years, entering the Signal Corps following military education in microwave radio systems and previous schooling in industrial electronics.

Most of his working life was spent in Los Angeles and Phoenix, but when he had the opportunity to retire, he wanted to go home. “Home was always in my heart,” he said.

Parrish returned to his birthplace of Kayenta, population 5,189. “I knew the place,” he said. “I knew the community. I knew the history of the community.”

In Kayenta, Parrish sees the unique healthcare burdens placed on rural and Tribal residents. “If politicians just understood the living environment in these places,” he said. “Low economic conditions. A lot of houses don’t have water lines. They don’t have waste facilities. If you don’t go visit them, you don’t know.”

He also knows firsthand the challenges of getting specialized health care on the Navajo Nation. For knee replacements, Parrish traveled 300 miles roundtrip to Flagstaff.  An eye surgery meant a 600-mile roundtrip to Albuquerque.

Accessing healthcare requires a half or a full day of driving each way for patients and caregivers, often with the cost of an overnight stay. “Gas money is way up there, and overnight accommodations, they’re high, so you have some extra expenses,” Parrish said. “If you don’t have anything saved up, you’re kind of put on the spot.”

A new clinic opened in Kayenta in 2024 as a joint partnership of the Veteran’s Administration and Indian Health Services. In December, 2025, 12 positions were open at the Kayenta clinic, including jobs for physicians, nurses, X-ray technicians and pharmacy techs. Indian Health Services has long lacked the funding to attract and retain staff, with one of every four positions vacant nationwide.

With the resources that are available, Parrish received lifesaving care from a mobile V.A. clinic that identified a previously undetected heart condition. “They took a test, and they found out how severe and how dangerous it was to have the kind of condition my heart was in,” Parrish said. “They took me by ambulance to the nearest hospital.”

That vital testing ultimately led to the pacemaker that now keeps Parrish’s heart for service beating steadily. With full clearance from his doctor, he continues to advocate for better health care for his fellow Native veterans — and others threatened by insufficient funding for rural hospitals. “We’re always the last one to get any kind of funding anyway, and then the first to be cut,” he said. 

Parrish urges his neighbors to resist cuts to rural healthcare, get involved in their communities and, most importantly, vote. “That’s the only tool that we really have to change what we need,” he said.