The Navajo Long Walk

The Dine people call it Hweeidi. The place of suffering. The United States government called it Bosque Redondo: a grove of cottonwoods on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico, four hundred miles from the Four Corners homeland where the Navajo had lived for centuries.

In eighteen sixty-three, United States Army General James Carleton ordered the forced removal of the Dine people. The official rationale was military necessity. The Navajo had been raiding settlements, and Anglo and Hispanic settlers had been raiding Navajo lands. Carleton's proposed solution was permanent. He did not intend to relocate the Navajo temporarily. He intended to break the culture.

The Army recruited Christopher Carson, the frontier scout known as Kit Carson, to carry out the campaign. Carson's forces did not primarily engage in direct combat. They destroyed crops, burned orchards and hogans, and killed livestock, including sheep that were the foundation of Navajo economic life. By eighteen sixty-four, starvation was doing much of the work.

Between eight thousand and ten thousand Dine people, including the elderly and children, were marched approximately three hundred to four hundred fifty miles to Bosque Redondo, depending on the route. Some groups walked in winter. Hundreds died on the march itself. More died in the internment that followed. The land at Bosque Redondo could not sustain the population it was assigned. The soil was poor. The wood supply depleted quickly. Disease followed.

The United States government's plan failed on its own terms. The Navajo did not abandon their language, their ceremonies, or their understanding of who they were.

In eighteen sixty-eight, Navajo leaders including Barboncito negotiated the Treaty of Bosque Redondo with the United States. The treaty allowed the Navajo to return to a portion of their homeland in the Four Corners region. On June first, eighteen sixty-eight, the treaty was signed. The return journey began shortly after. For the Navajo people who made it, the sight of the Chuska Mountains on the horizon was enough to make grown men and women weep.

The Navajo Nation today is the largest land-area tribal nation in the United States. The Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner is a New Mexico State Monument. The cottonwood grove is still there.