The Navajos, or Dine (the People), as they call themselves in their own language, are the most populous Indian community in the United States. A majority of the community's more than 225,000 members reside within the boundaries of the Navajo Nation, a sprawling enclave of 25,000 square miles, approximately the size of West Virginia, that is situated in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah.
Until the late twentieth century most archaeologists thought that the Navajos, and their linguistic relatives the Apaches, had arrived perhaps two centuries before the Spanish incursion in the region in the sixteenth century. They generally portrayed the Dine as dependent upon the Puebloan peoples for survival in a harsh, new land. Further research, however suggests that the Navajos came to the Southwest a century or two earlier than had been assumed. It also suggests that the Navajos absorbed other peoples, including some of the Anasazi, forming a dynamic, expansionist culture that by the time of Coronado had become a significant force in New Mexico. The Navajo clan system reflects the incorporation not only of Puebloan peoples but also of Utes, Apaches, Paiutes, and Spanish or Mexican individuals and groups.
The Spanish presence created many difficulties for the Navajos, including the evolution of a vast slave trade that forced many Dine women and children into involuntary servitude. However, the Spaniards also brought livestock, the addition of which transformed the Navajo world. It would be hard for later observers to imagine the Dine without sheep, horses, goats, and cattle. Livestock, especially sheep, quickly became central to the workings of Navajo society. The Navajos became extraordinary weavers. Sheep also fed people and helped pay for ceremonial services. To be sure, the Dine gave no credit to Spain for introducing these animals. Rather, the elders told the children that the Holy People had brought these wonderful beings to the Navajos, charging the Dine with the responsibility of caring for them properly.
The Navajos often raided Spanish communities in order to obtain additional livestock and to seek revenge for their relatives who had been incarcerated. From their administrative headquarters in the northern Rio Grande valley, the Spanish dispatched punitive expeditions against the Dine. But the Navajos remained elusive; any treaty or agreement signed with one group of the Dine was not considered binding on another group some distance away. After gaining independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexicans experienced comparable problems. When the United States claimed the region during and following the war with Mexico in the late 1840s, it was determined to assert its authority over these uncooperative residents.
American aggression brought about what the Navajos would call "the fearing time." Within a generation, most of the Dine had been forced to surrender and, in the early to mid-1860s, departed on forced marches into captivity hundreds of miles from their home country. "The Long Walk," as it became known, took them to Fort Sumner, a newly constructed post in east-central New Mexico. There the head military officer for New Mexico Territory, James Carleton, expressed the hope that away from "the haunts and hills and hiding places" of their own country, the Navajos would become a contented and peaceful people.
Fort Sumner, or Hweeldi, as the Navajo termed it, never came close to fulfilling Carleton's dreams. Instead, it brought enormous hardship and anguish to the captive Dine. Disease and despair swept through the people, who desperately wanted to return to their homeland. In 1868 two members of the U.S. Peace Commission, William Tecumseh Sherman and Lewis Tappan, arrived at Fort Sumner to negotiate what turned out to be one of the final treaties signed by the United States with an American Indian nation. Sherman had suggested the possibility of the Navajos moving to Indian Territory, but this notion was immediately protested by Barboncito, the head Dine spokesperson, who argued that the Holy People had intended that the Navajos should live only within the boundaries of the four sacred mountains of their home country.
The Treaty of 1868 represented in many ways a triumph for the Navajos. Not only did they return to a portion of their homeland, but they succeeded in adding substantial amounts of acreage through a series of executive orders. Land became more difficult to obtain after New Mexico and Arizona became states in 1912, but by that time the essential Navajo land base had been established. In the early 1900s the photographer Edward Curtis used a group of Navajos on horseback to exemplify the notion of Indians as a vanishing race, but the twentieth century would prove him to be incorrect.
In the 1930s Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier imposed a drastic program of livestock reduction upon the Navajos. Although launched in the name of soil conservation and the well-being of the Dine, the program brought trauma and enormous suffering to thousands of Navajos. It also began to prompt a movement by many of the Dine into the wage economy, a movement that accelerated with the Navajo participation in World War II. Finally, the program initiated the transformation of the Navajo Tribal Council from an entity initially imposed upon the Navajos in the 1920s as a means to approve oil leases to a unit that represented the people.
The Navajo Code Talkers—a special unit in the U.S. Marines that employed the Navajo language as the basis for an effective code—played a vital role in the Pacific Campaign during World War II. Several hundred Dine became Code Talkers, and thousands worked in warrelated industries. After the war the Dine leadership launched a program of sweeping modernization, including a new emphasis on formal education, industrialization, and road construction. Aided by funds from the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Act of the 1950s, the Navajo tribal government began a nationalistic movement to gain greater control over Dine lives and lands.
The last decades of the twentieth century brought sweeping, and at times overwhelming, social and cultural change to Dine Bikeyah (the Navajo country). Only a minority of the people, most of them elderly, herded sheep, and most Navajo children grew up speaking English as a first language. Yet many of the traditional values within Navajo society are still observed and honored. The Dine bring new elements into their culture and, over time, make them Navajo. Members of the Navajo Nation struggled to control their own educational systems, to develop their economies in an appropriate way, and to live within the sacred mountains. Their very presence, the continuation of their language and their arts, and their successful incorporation of old and new means of competing and achieving (ranging from chess, basketball, and rodeos to tourism, education, and the arts) deny the old image of the vanishing Indian. As the twenty-first century began, the Navajos were clearly here to stay.
Bibliography
Iverson, Peter. Dine: A History of the Navajos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Photographs by Monty Roessel (Navajo).
Iverson, Peter, ed. "For Our Navajo People": Navajo Letters, Speeches, and Petitions, 1900–1960. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Photographs by Monty Roessel (Navajo).
