Hundreds Must Leave Hopi Lands : Moving Means Trail of Tears for Navajo

The old Navajo woman placed a goatskin on the dirt floor of her hogan and talked of her sacred tie to the earth on which she sat, the place where she has lived a life of 63 years, raising sheep and goats and children and their children. She talked of the ways in which her very being is dependent on the rocks and trees--the “pure places,” where she goes to seek strength from the Great Spirit.

“I bore my first child here,” Ruth Benally said, touching the ground beside her. “I’ve been here as long as memory can serve me. There are pure trees here with the blessing of the Great Spirit. We pray to our Maker through those trees. The same is true with the hills, when we give sacred stones and talk to the Maker. There are so many pure places to go to for strength and to talk to the Great Spirit. If we were put elsewhere, we will not know those pure places.

“How could we talk to the Great Spirit?”

But the United States government is going to force Ruth Benally to move. She is one of hundreds of traditionalist Navajos caught up in the nation’s largest forced relocation of people since Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.

Benally may be living on the land of her Navajo ancestors, but by the decree of courts and Congress, it now belongs to the neighboring Hopi tribe. By July 6, the Navajos must all be gone, victims of an acknowledged human tragedy that pits the tribal needs of the Hopi--whose lands have inexorably been taken over by Navajos--against the present-day individual Navajos, whose ancestors did the taking.

“Relocation . . . is not simply a matter of changing residence,” the surveys and investigations staff reported to the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations last year. “To the traditional Navajo family, it is the end of a way of life. . . . Relocation is complicated and can be tragic.”

‘A Sense of Failure’

“Removal from family lands to strange lands, even though to other Navajo reservation lands, creates a sense of failure accompanied by severe emotional trauma and withdrawal,” the Interior Department’s Richard C. Morris wrote in October for William P. Clark, the former secretary of the Interior and national security adviser whom President Reagan asked to determine whether a negotiated settlement between the Navajo and Hopi tribes could be reached.

“Some who are threatened by relocation conclude that, because their lives would serve no further purpose in a strange environment, they would prefer to sacrifice their wasted lives by resisting relocation.”

For their part, the Hopi are acting upon imperatives no less absolute.

Hopi ‘Fight for Survival’

“Our resistance is not mainly on restoring Hopi lands, but a fight for our survival, that we are not wiped off this land,” says Hopi tribal chairman Ivan Sydney. “The Hopi are the victims. If we do not speak up, the Hopi will be the victims. We have won every (court) case. The Supreme Court has stood by the decision.

“Something is wrong, that we are still not using the land. We have been victims of broken promises.”

Long before there were promises, there were Hopi here. Their village of Old Oraibi is the oldest continuously inhabited site in North America, dating back about 1,200 years. The Navajo came much later, to what is now the Four Corners region, between 1500 and 1700.

The Hopi were village dwellers; the Navajo were nomads. Conflicts were inevitable. Navajos periodically raided the Hopi villages. In 1863, Army troops led by Kit Carson forced about 2,400 Navajos to relocate to Ft. Sumner, N.M. They were eventually joined by 6,100 others in a painful pilgrimage now remembered as The Long Walk.

Navajos’ Migration

The attempt to convert the Navajo to farming at Ft. Sumner failed miserably, and in 1868, a treaty set aside a 3.5 million-acre reservation for the Navajo in northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. Some traditionally Navajo lands remained outside the boundary, however, and population growth and an ill-defined reservation boundary all contributed to the Navajos’ eventual migration west--to traditionally Hopi lands.

In the years that followed, federal Indian agents warned of the Navajo encroachment on Hopi lands and water sources, but their cries went unheeded in Washington. It was not until 1892 that a 2.5 million-acre Hopi reservation was set aside by executive order of President Chester Alan Arthur.

It was not an airtight securing of land for the Hopis by any means. For one thing, the order allowed the secretary of the Interior to provide for other Indians to live there “as (he) may see fit to settle thereon.” Even at the time the order was signed, 300 Navajos were living within the clearly defined boundaries of the new Hopi area.

As the Navajo migrated from their own reservation and as their numbers grew, the Navajo reservation was expanded to an area the size of West Virginia that encircled the Hopi tribe’s government-assigned lands. The Navajo, however, continued to settle on their neighbors’ reservation. The Hopi were harassed and their produce and horses stolen. Once again, pleas to Washington went unanswered.

Squatters Entrenched

During the 1900s, the Navajo squatters became more entrenched and the Hopi more demanding that their land be preserved for them. In 1936, the federal government responded by carving an exclusively Hopi area--640,000 acres--out of the 2.5 million-acre Hopi reservation.

Still the conflict simmered, and in 1958, Congress authorized the tribes to take their dispute before a special three-judge federal court. Critics say that the dispute was sharpened by the Hopi counsel, John Boyden, a Salt Lake City attorney who reportedly received $1 million for representing the tribe before Congress and the court. According to the critics, Boyden, since deceased, had close ties with oil and uranium interests and pushed for a settlement that would produce clear, undisputed titles to the land, thereby opening it to mineral lease sales.

Interpretation of Order

In 1962, the court held that President Arthur’s executive order had provided for “the use and occupancy of the (Hopi).” But it also found that the government’s failure to remove the encroaching Navajo decades before had, in effect, settled the Navajos there in accordance with the proviso in Arthur’s 1892 order that other Indians might live on the reservation.

The result: 1.8 million acres outside the exclusive Hopi district were declared a joint-use area for both tribes. Eventually, a federal court divided the joint-use area in half.

With the drawing of a line on the map, the Hopi, in effect, lost 900,000 acres to the Navajo. About 100 Hopis found themselves living on Navajo land, and some 12,000 Navajos were on tracts assigned to the Hopi.

In 1974, Congress provided for the relocation of those to be moved and allocated the Navajo tribe 250,000 acres of federal land to accommodate those pushed from their homes. The tribe also was permitted to buy another 150,000 acres for inclusion in its reservation.

Valuable Coal Deposits

Thus, the Navajo gained 1.3 million acres, and underlying 35,000 acres of this new reservation land are valuable deposits of coal. According to the surveys and investigations staff of the House Appropriations Committee, “The Navajo do not view the (coal lands) as a relocation site, but rather a future source of revenue.”

There is coal on Hopi land, too, though tribal chairman Sydney says that his people have placed a “moratorium on mineral development of our lands.” This includes, he says, coal resources leased to the Peabody Coal Co. in 1966 on former joint-use land adjoining Peabody’s Black Mesa Mine, which supplies coal to a power plant near Kingman, Ariz. The 1974 law that led to a partitioning of the jointly used area, however, stated that all coal, oil, gas and other minerals on the land “shall be managed jointly by the two tribes” and the proceeds shared equally.

Thus, neither tribe can exploit the reserves without the agreement of the other.

Homesteading may be a preferable use, Hopi chairman Sydney says, and scores of Hopis have sought to settle on the land to be vacated by Navajos.

Navajo Land Overcrowded

Meanwhile, relocation of 12,000 or so Navajos has proceeded, starting with volunteers in 1977. All 100 or so Hopi families who lived on land given to the Navajo have been relocated to the Hopi reservation. But the Navajo reservation--expansive as it may seem--is overcrowded and overgrazed, conditions that prohibit relocation to existing tribal lands.

Today, eligible Navajo families may receive more than $60,000 in government aid to purchase new homes off the reservation, as well as other payments.

“Individual Navajo families have, from the beginning, flocked to the (government’s) door to apply for relocation benefits,” the House Appropriations Committee surveys and investigations staff found. “In fact, in the first year of relocation, the response to the program was so overwhelming the (government) had to immediately increase its staff just to handle the paper work.

“There has never been a shortage of families ready, willing, able and anxious to be relocated.”

Eight Years of Delay

In fact, the staff found that the Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation Commission, the Flagstaff-based agency charged with overseeing relocation, had some applications for relocation benefits still not acted upon after eight years of delay.

Many of those who were moved in the early days of relocation have fallen on hard times. One study by the relocation commission found, in fact, that of about 100 families relocated to off-reservation homes, a fourth of them had “serious, significant difficulties, including 14 who lost their homes owing to financial problems.” Others suffered “depression, suicidal tendencies (and) marked, extended family conflict.”

The relocation commission estimates that 400 Navajo families remain on land belonging to the Hopi tribe. David Shaw-Serdar, research officer with the commission, says that 325 families have applied for relocation benefits and have been certified as eligible. The other 75 families are called The Resisters.

“A minimum, at least,” Lee Brooke Phillips says of the government numbers. Phillips is an attorney with the Big Mountain (Joint Use Area) Legal Defense/Offense Committee, which is waging a legal and public-relations war to stop relocation. “I can tell you: Those people are not going to go. There’s nothing good going to come to them.”

Relocation Pressures

Phillips says that the relocation commission has never accommodated more than 200 families in one year, and it now must move 400 in five months if it is to meet the July 6 deadline. The commission itself once estimated that relocation would take until 1993.

Given such pressures, Congress recently acted to allow Navajos to remain on Hopi land until new houses are available for them. At the same time, it flatly rejected a one-year extension of the relocation deadline, perhaps setting the stage for violence in July.

Phillips fears that the bare requirement that new housing be available will only lead to more suffering, as federal officials rush to provide that housing without regard to the availability of medical care, schools, job opportunities and other necessities.

“It may be a recognition,” he says, “that they’re not going to continue to try to provide health services, that the only thing they are going to provide is a house, a la Hardrock.”

Hardrock is a community built by the commission for relocated Navajo. The houses have no power or water, and some residents have built hogans in the yards to live in. There are no jobs and there is no land for livestock.

‘A Disaster Out There’

“It’s the worst thing you can do to people today,” says Percy Deal, the Hardrock chapter president and representative to the Navajo council. “It’s a disaster out there. “True, they got houses, but they’re all dry and cold. There’s no water, there’s no sewer, no decent road. It’s a disaster out there. There has yet to be a perfect relocation.

“I have yet to have one person come up and say to me, ‘Hey, I’m better off.’ ”

On Feb. 8, 1985, President Reagan asked former Cabinet member and Administration adviser Clark to explore the possibility of a negotiated settlement between the two tribes. Clark and aide Morris later reported: “The case for the Navajo is not one for the Navajo as a nation, but rather for those individual Navajos subject to relocation which may be life-threatening, emotionally and physically.

“Whatever the conduct of Navajo a century ago, the Navajo now subject to relocation are not yet guilty of wrongdoing. If the Hopi were victims of federal inaction during the last century, surely today’s traditionalist Navajo are victims of the relocation process as fashioned by the Congress.”

‘Substantial Justice’

Of the Hopi, they said: “It must be understood that we believe the Hopi have concluded in good faith that it is not in their best interest to negotiate; that implementation of the current law better serves their interests and accomplishes what they deem to be substantial justice.”

So the tribes could not agree on land exchanges or purchases or lifetime residences for people like Ruth Benally to live out their years on Hopi land. So the pain of relocation continues for many, while others resist.

“No, I won’t move,” Ruth Benally says. She raises sheep and goats as her ancestors did, and she speaks through a translator. She is one of the victims of whom Clark and Morris spoke. For such a traditional Navajo, life and the land are inseparable. “I live here. This is home.”