The season finale of Morgan Spurlock's "30 Days" - a show in which its host and creator experiences 30 days living in someone else's shoes - took viewers to a world many in the United States have never been, a Navajo reservation. Spurlock lived in a hogan on a ranch in Tohatchi and spent his days with the Dennison Family so he could understand their life.

 

Upon attempting to obtain a job, he found that there are very few on the reservation as unemployment is over 50 percent. He managed to find work at a tire shop where the owner explained to him that the complexity of starting a business on the reservation was the reason many gave up and left to find work in other parts of the United States. This was also the reason the Dennison's son, Kyle, was under pressure to continue winning rodeos in order to keep from having to leave the reservation to find employement. He finally applied for a job in Tucson, Arizona, saying, "I think it's time for me to get on the road." Spurlock wondered whether more jobs and better opportunities on the reservation would improve the lives of families who lived there.

 

He took away one tradition from his experience on the reservation, that of racing the rising sun. "I don't beat the sun, but I'm pretty close," Spurlock said. Welling up with emotion upon parting, he said, "I didn't think I'd be this sad to be leaving, but this place and these people just really affected me...This whole idea of kind of cordoning them off and forgetting about them is just not something we can do...They are a part of our culture as Americans and they're a part of our heritage...we can't write them off as just not being important and just think that casinos are going to fix everything."

 

View Clip from "30 Days" on a Navajo Reservation

 

Navajo hogan and sheep pen .

 

 

Navajo Nation Fair and Rodeo.