The Diné, Navajo Nation

The Diné, the people outsiders call Navajo, call themselves the People of the Four Sacred Mountains. Those mountains are real and named. Blanca Peak in Colorado to the east. Mount Taylor in New Mexico to the south. San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff to the west. Hesperus Peak in Colorado to the north. Within those four points is a territory the Diné have inhabited for centuries, a landscape their entire cosmology maps onto the land itself.

Today the Navajo Nation is the largest Native American reservation in the United States, covering more than seventeen million acres across northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and northwestern New Mexico. Its population is roughly three hundred seventy thousand enrolled members. It has its own government, its own supreme court, its own capital at Window Rock.

But that sovereignty was bought at enormous cost. In eighteen sixty-three, as the Civil War consumed the East, the U.S. Army dispatched Colonel Kit Carson into the Navajo homeland with orders to starve and subdue. Carson's forces destroyed crops, orchards, and livestock. Thousands of Diné were rounded up and forced on the Long Walk, a three-hundred-mile march to a barren internment camp at Bosque Redondo, in eastern New Mexico. Between eight thousand and ten thousand people made that walk. Hundreds died on the road; more died of disease and starvation at the camp.

In eighteen sixty-eight, Navajo leaders signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo with the United States. They were allowed to return home. Barboncito, a Navajo headman and ceremonial leader, spoke at the signing. In words later recorded by treaty interpreters, he said, quote, I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own, end quote.

The Diné went home. Their nation endures.