Hopi Tribe Plans Appeal of Court Ruling on Lands

The chairman of the Hopi tribe said Saturday that a federal judge’s decision to give nearly 61,000 acres of disputed land to the tribe is inadequate and he vowed to appeal the ruling.

Vernon Masayesva said in a press release that District Judge Earl Carroll’s decision Friday is “yet another example of Navajo aggression at the expense of legitimate Hopi land claims.”

Attempts to reach Navajo Nation President Peterson Zah or other Navajo officials were unsuccessful.

Carroll gave the Hopi tribe exclusive rights to 60,518 acres of disputed land. He also wiped out an order that had barred most Hopi and Navajo construction there for more than 25 years.

The land represents a small fraction of the 3 million acres of land the Hopis hoped to recover when the tribe filed a lawsuit in 1974. The tribe has said the land is part of 7.5 million acres that the Hopis felt the Navajos had taken over illegally with federal government help over several decades.

Masayesva said the court’s decision “unfairly penalizes Hopis for our traditional lifeways while rewarding Navajos for theirs.”

He said the tribe would appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to “fight again for Hopi rights.”

The tribe said the disputed territory was the aboriginal Hopi homeland before the 7.5 million acres in question had been added to the Navajo reservation “and such other Indians as may already be located thereon” by an act of Congress in 1934.

Carroll said the acreage he awarded to the Hopis included 22,675 acres that the Hopis were using exclusively in 1934, plus 25% of joint-use acreage.

The judge’s decision does not require the relocation of Navajo or Hopi families, as did congressional partitioning of 1.8 million jointly used acres in the early 1970s.

The tribe, in its statement, said Carroll’s decision in effect dismisses the Hopis’ claim. He said the land was used by the Hopis for centuries for pilgrimages, eagle gathering and farming, among other things.

The nomadic Navajos moved onto the land despite it being designated by the U.S. government as part of the Hopi reservation in 1882, the Hopi statement said.

The lands turned over to the Hopis were in and around the Navajo town of Tuba City and the adjacent Hopi village of Moenkopi, near U.S. Highway 160 to the north and along Arizona Highway 264 to the east, where it links up with the Hopi reservation.