In Arizona: A New "Long Walk"?

By James Willwerth

On a high mesa framed by a fiery desert sky, the dancers appear: with eerie spectral masks, flesh painted in earthy clay and turquoise colors, and swathed in skins. The kachina priests whirl through the dusty streets of the village clacking tortoise rattles, chanting, waving yucca switches. Hopi legends say these "messengers of the Creator" have returned from the San Francisco mountains to begin anew the natural and spiritual cycle of planting and harvest. The desert will be blessed and purified and nourished by rain. An hour's drive north of the high mesa, on desolate scrubland wreathed by a dark cathedral sky, a 67-year-old silver-haired Navajo woman carves fresh mutton in her tidy one-room hogan. In golden lamplight, she rakes glowing coals from a wood stove onto the dirt floor to barbecue the evening meal. Ella Deal has borne children and, with her husband Leonard, has tended sheep here for nearly 40 years. She is a descendant of Navajos who returned from the terrible "Long Walk" of 1864, when the U.S. cavalry herded 8,000 tribesmen 400 miles, from northern Arizona to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. When snow piled up higher than the hogan roof a dozen years ago, she rode horseback through the blizzard eight days to watch over her sheep, losing half her hearing to frostbite. Ella Deal's life, too, moves to nature's seasonal and spiritual rhythms.

Today the seemingly peaceful worlds of the Navajo woman and the Hopi dancers are colliding, and bloodshed is possible. In the northeast corner of Arizona, a century-old conflict between the neighboring Hopi and Navajo nations over an area of mesa and desert land the size of the state of Rhode Island is finally approaching its sad conclusion.

More than 1,000 years ago, the Hopis (the word means "the peaceful ones") settled in the mesa-dotted desert farm land of northern Arizona. Passive and communal, they built stone and adobe houses on the tall mesas for protection against raiders, and farmed, hunted and gathered herbs on land that stretched away below them like a vast sea.

Navajos arrived from the north 500 years later. Proud and aggressive, they formed a fierce nomadic warrior culture, herding sheep and patrolling the desert on horses first introduced by Spanish explorers. Then, as now, the Navajos had little use for village life. Each family ranged over miles of grazing land, adding easily built mud and cedar-log hogans as new generations arrived, and moving the sheep when grazing areas played out. If they used the land differently from the Hopis, they attached equal mystical significance to it, dotting the hilltops with shrines attesting to its power to provide.

The resulting rivalry somewhat resembled the conflicts between wide-ranging cattlemen and fence-building farmers that grew up when white culture arrived. Almost from the beginning the Navajos clashed with those around them. The brutal 1864 forced march was punishment for their raids against neighboring Indians and white settlers. Soon afterward an attempt to introduce farming to the Navajos failed, and in 1868 the Government signed a treaty giving them 3.2 million acres straddling the Arizona-New Mexico border. Quite separately, Washington finally ratified some traditional Hopi claims. In 1882 President Chester A. Arthur signed an Executive order giving 2.4 million acres west of the Navajo grant to the Hopis and "such other Indians" as the Secretary of the Interior "may see fit to settle thereon." But the Hopi population (currently 8,000) stabilized, while the Navajos kept growing (there are now 150,000). Slowly the Navajos moved toward the Hopis until Navajo land filled Arizona territorial maps around the Hopi domain like water steadily rising around an island. By 1890 Navajos were grazing sheep within sight of the Hopi mesas and trading mutton for Hopi squash, beans, corn, cotton and pottery. But there were also raids and encroachments. When the Hopis complained, the Government tried a series of futile compromises. In 1943 it designated a fairly densely populated grazing district totaling about 640,000 acres as exclusively and forever Hopi. The Hopis protested angrily that this robbed them of 1.8 million acres from the 1882 grant. The Navajos argued that they should be considered the "other Indians" mentioned in President Arthur's Executive order. At one point, the courts designated the disputed land a "joint-use area." But because Hopis and Navajos could not agree on anything, wells dried up, roads disintegrated, even houses stopped in mid-construction while the tribes wrangled. Finally, in 1974, Congress authorized the federal district court in Tucson to partition the disputed land mainly according to population density.

Hopi Traditionalist David Monongye, who is blind and past 90, is convinced that the white culture's energy problems are secretly behind the dispute. The land has coal deposits, and Monongye believes that white-owned mining and drilling companies hope to profit from the confusion over its ownership. Today revenues from mineral leases to the white-owned Peabody Coal Co. provide one-third of the tribe's annual $2 million budget. At the same time, the 25% unemployment rate among young Hopis would easily double if federal employment programs evaporated. The future of the roving Navajos seems equally bleak.

Their land is overgrazed and their population grows. The coal, oil and uranium of the region, which have made them, collectively, America's richest native Americans, will not last forever.

"My grandmother made the 'Long Walk' to Fort Sumner," Ella Deal says quietly as she serves the mutton with fried bread. "As a child, I found it hard to learn about it. Do you know why? When the old people started telling you, they would start crying."

The partition plan now under consideration will reserve much less land for the Hopis than they now officially possess. But it will eventually force thousands of Navajos and some Hopis to leave where they live and take what some call "the second Long Walk." For many caught on the wrong side of the meandering new line, life is about to turn into a latter-day Palestinian partition story. Some traditionalists have refused to go, despite a substantial offer of resettlement money. "I live inside four mountains, and I pray to them," says Navajo Katherine Smith, 60, who spent a night in jail after firing over the heads of workers erecting a partition fence near her home at Big Mountain. "We're old folks. We live on our land. We don't know about white man's law." Nathan Begay, a Hopi working in the reservation's Bureau of Indian Affairs office, insists the U.S. Government started it all. "By doing nothing for so many years, the Government consented to the Navajos' living out there. They dug in." Most observers assume that only death or federal marshals will force the older Navajos to leave. "It is my land since I was set here on the earth," insists Katenay Benally, 72, standing forlornly beside a Navajo chapter house in the desolate community of Hardrock. "I lie awake, and smoke a cigarette, and think of my grandchildren. How will they live in the future?"

Percy Deal, 29, a strapping, strong-willed Navajo who studied civil engineering for two years at Eastern Arizona College and represents his nation at relocation hearings, understands the legal justice of the case. "I realize the Hopis want to make use of what is rightfully theirs," he says. "But there are human beings out there. The stress on them is tremendous." Percy knows well. He is one of Ella Deal's children, and was unable to return to the family land after his schooling because new grazing permits were unavailable and new housing was forbidden. "We've lost so much," Ella Deal says as her guests finish. "I want my children to come back and learn Indian ways. But the Government has separated us." She moves her hand solemnly around the dark hogan. "Now my children and grandchildren are frightened of the sheep," says Ella Deal. "They think this is a dirty place. "

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