Historian

Holdouts Resist Forced Location of Navajos
By Sean Reily
Los Angeles Times - 9 February 2006

HOPI RESERVATION, Ariz. -- A rifle hangs under Pauline Whitesinger's mud-packed timber ceiling. It's placed within easy reach so she can scare off the coyotes that threaten her sheep. But there have been times when she's imagined other uses.

"Maybe we should have set up firearms at our doorways so we could defend our homes," she said in her native Navajo language, as translated by her nephew Danny Blackgoat.

Whitesinger lives like her ancestors did, in an eight-sided, juniper hogan in the reaches of Big Mountain, Ariz. Miles from the nearest paved road, she is without electricity or running water. She sleeps on a cot over a dirt floor next to a wood fire built within an overturned, sawed-off barrel. She wakes each morning before dawn and her first action is to make a small white-corn pollen offering and to pray in the direction of the rising sun.

Whitesinger is also one of the last Navajo remaining on this land after the largest forced migration in the U.S. since the Japanese-American internment during World War II. In 1974, Congress drew a boundary through what had been a 1.8-million-acre joint-use area between the Navajo and Hopi tribes. While an estimated 100 Hopi were told to move from what had become the Navajo side of the boundary, more than 12,000 Navajo were ordered off the Hopi side.

Sponsors of the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974 stated its purpose at the time as a return to the Hopi Tribe of ancestral land that was occupied by the Navajo more than a century before. Critics said it was no coincidence that beneath the land lay some of the largest untouched coal deposits in North America, and that the Navajo needed to be moved to allow the mining.

Either way, "it was like a big wind that flew into our vicinity and said, this is it, you have to abide by what had passed in Congress," Whitesinger said. "You are going to have to relocate."

In traditional Navajo belief, land cannot belong to a person. Instead, a person belongs to the land on which they were born. If Navajo stray too far from that land, they lose themselves and their sense of purpose and direction.

So when a representative from the then-created Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation "came to ask me to sign up for the relocation benefits and move," recalled Whitesinger, "I didn't bother with that person at all. But all of a sudden it was like a sieve. Where we were a thousand points of light within this area, there are only a few of us now, a few flickers of light."

Many Navajo called the relocation the "Second Long Walk," comparing it to the infamous Long Walk in 1864, when the U.S government rounded up the tribe and marched them to Fort Sumner in New Mexico, a trail on which many died. In this new transplantation, the Navajo were given promises of the "New Lands," mostly government-built housing on the reservation's border towns.

A rural people who earned their living off the land, they were undereducated and ill-equipped to compete for the few jobs on a reservation where unemployment hovers near 50 percent. Most of the elders and many of the adults didn't speak English. Many of the stories that followed were of tragedy, grief and depression. Of the first groups who relocated, 25 percent were dead within four years.

"I had a lot of my relatives relocate to the New Lands," Whitesinger said. "If they had sheep, it was three sheep in a corral the size of my hogan. They might have nice homes, but that isn't the way I was brought up. That is why I stayed."

Whitesinger and the other Navajo who refused to move became known as "resistors." And the federal government and Hopi tribe set out to make life difficult for them.

All construction, including repairs to existing structures, was forbidden. Reductions were placed on livestock, often limiting their numbers to fewer than it would take to support a family. Grazing permits were canceled. Free-roaming livestock that crossed newly created boundary lines were impounded. Regulations limited the collection of firewood. Water wells were capped and blades were removed from the windmills that pumped the water. Even the prairie dogs that the poorer Navajo ate were poisoned in a pest-eradication program.

As Whitesinger watched one "resistor" family after another wear down and succumb to the relocation, she saw "the Hopi come with their bulldozers and level their home sites leaving no trace of their lives there," she said.

When a work crew arrived in the late 1970s to place a fence across the grazing land for her sheep in the relocation's first move against her, Whitesinger borrowed her son's truck and drove close to the crew in an attempt to scare them off.

Each time that fencing crew returned, they would find their previous day's work dismantled and discarded. Eventually they gave up.

Whitesinger said it was a Hopi ranger who came next. The ranger read the mandate for her to leave in English -- with her daughter translating -- while Whitesinger whittled the end of a long stick. When the Ranger demanded Whitesinger's acceptance and answer, her daughter said to him that he could see her answer.

"She is making a stick right now. A fire poker. To poke you with," Whitesinger said, recalling her daughter's words. "She told him if he stayed around I might even fix a blade to the end of the stick."

For three decades, Whitesinger has kept powerful forces at bay.

"I don't know how old I am," she said. "It is like floating down a river. Each year passes by, and it's just another season of winter, and time goes on.

But, she added in her native Navajo, "I know where I belong. I know if I relocate I will die of loneliness."

Before the settlement act was approved, the Navajo and Hopi governments signed a pact to share equally in all royalties from minerals mined from beneath the joint use land, regardless of who controlled its surface.

Whitesinger believes that's why "through this all, any kind of needs that we had, any kind of requests that we made to Window Rock (the seat of the Navajo government), they say we can't do it because this is all under Hopi jurisdiction."

Short-lived standoff

In the mid-1980s, representatives from the Navajo government called upon her and her sister Roberta Blackgoat.

"There was about seven or eight that came out here to meet us, including the Navajo tribal chairman," said Whitesinger. "My sister had come to my house to wait for them with me. When they came, they threatened us with armed confrontation. They told us that the U.S. Army was coming to forcefully relocate us. They related that unless we left, they were going to witness us being drug out of this house."

Long past being intimidated, "I said, `Where is the army?' " Whitesinger recalled. "They told us they were right over the hill. So I said, `OK, let's get it over with. Which one of you tribal officials are going to be the one that's going to grab me, and which is it of you that are going to observe?' "

According to Whitesinger, none of the Navajo officials answered.

The standoff didn't last long. There was no Army unit. No one dragged anyone out. And if they had, the officials knew they likely would have had a media event on their hands. By then, the "resistors" had learned how to get out their message. Sympathizers and volunteers from outside had arrived to offer their help and numbers.

Growing publicity eventually caused a re-evaluation in Washington, and in 1996, Congress passed the second Hopi-Navajo settlement act, also called the Accommodation Agreement. Sponsored by Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, it permitted those few Navajo who had stayed to live out their lives on the land if they signed leases with the Hopi government giving up all property rights and stating that the land could not be passed to their heirs.

A new forcible eviction date was set for late 2000.

"A lot of elders were pressured to sign the Accommodation Agreement and a lot moved," Whitesinger said. But she and her sister still did not sign. To them, land could not be ceded away.

Today, where there once had been more than 12,000 Navajo, only eight "resistor" families remain, with 22 adults.

War of attrition

The affected lands are now a vast, quiet and empty desert. In winter, snow dusts the juniper trees and sage. In summer, the heat can reach triple digits by early morning. Water is always the most precious commodity.

No coal has been mined here, as coal transportation costs, due to the remoteness of the area, have proven prohibitive. No more than a handful of Hopi have tried moving here despite their government's claim that this was a return of their homeland. And the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation is planning to close down sometime in the next couple of years.

For Pauline Whitesinger and the U.S. and Hopi governments, it's a war of attrition now.

Whitesinger points to a post within her hogan.

"It needs to be repaired," she said. "But the Hopis won't allow me to cut the wood to get a new post. Whatever way they can to break our spirit, they have done that. We still experience a lot of hardship. And now it seems like we're forgotten." In July of 2003, Roberta Blackgoat died.

Every evening, Pauline Whitesinger finishes the prayer that she starts that morning.

"I make an offering with the yellow corn meal to the yellow folding of the evening," said Whitesinger. "I pray to anything and everything that is holy around here. I pray for harmony and peace and that there be compassion and understanding by any and all about our situation here. I pray for an end to the disharmony that is caused by man."

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"Be good, be kind, help each other. Respect the ground, respect the drum, respect each other."
--Abe Conklin, Ponca/Osage (1926-1995)

**jdazmum**

I can understand how that feels, I remember when I was a kid, the Hopi Rangers came and loaded up about 40 horses, 50 sheep and about 30 head of cattle and drove away. Makes me sad to hear this story, sometimes I wish we held out too, but my mom couldn't handle all of us so we had to move. I don't know why we couldn't share the land with the Hopis. We could all live in peace, but it's disheartening to know our own people didn't fight hard enough for us. If only we weren't wooed by them bilaganaas so much and listen to their false advertisements.

The Office of Navajo and Hopi Relocation will be closing in 2008. So anyone who needs old records better get copies now, because once it closes, it will be sent to an archive in California.

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Your integrity is your destiny… it is the light that guides your way.”
-Heraclitus, Greek poet and philosopher