Bitter Water: Diné Oral Histories of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute

Foreword

Foreword Jennifer nez Denetdale We Diné point to a place in present-day northeastern new Mexico as the site of the emergence of our forebears from the lower worlds to this world, the Glittering World. Beings, including those who became the Diné, journeyed through a series of worlds to emerge in the present one. Upon their entrance, first Man, one of the travelers, took the soil he had gathered from the Third World and formed the four sacred mountains, which demarcated the boundaries of Diné Bikéyah, the navajo homeland. each of the mountains was fastened to the earth with elements. To the east, sisnaajiní (Black Belted Mountain) was fastened with a bolt of white lightning. To the south, Tsoodził (Mount Taylor) was fastened with a stone knife. To the west, Dook’o’oosłííd (san francisco Peaks) was fastened with a sunbeam. And in the north, Dibé nitsaa (La Plata Mountains) was fastened with a rainbow. Two other sacred mountains were also formed: Dził ná’oodiłii (Center, huerfano Mountain) and Ch’óol’í ˛’í ˛ (east of Center, Gobernardor Knob). With the parameters of Diné Bikéyah set, the holy People set about establishing the foundation for Diné life. sa ˛’a ˛hnaagháí bik’eh hózhó ˛ (The Path to Beauty and old Age), the navajo philosophy of life, is informed by the events and happenings that occurred during the course of the journey through the layers of the lower worlds and on the earth’s surface. in the Glittering World, the holy People provided the Diné with gifts of livestock —sheep, goats, and horses, among other valuables. Wrapped in songs and prayers, these gifts led to vast cultural, economic, and political transformations for the Diné. it was at this time that the Diné became a pastoral people who required grazing lands, which led to expansion throughout the lands between the four sacred mountains. With horses, the Diné also became skilled warriors who defended their lands against incursions by colonial settlers for several hundred years. Diné origins and creation narratives tell one kind of history while narratives about the Diné from non-indian sources tell another, which often contradicts navajo stories. More so than with any other indigenous peoples, Diné perspectives of themselves and their relationship to the land contrast dramatically with white American notions. The American accounts, based on sparse spanish and even fewer Mexican sources, have firmly entrenched the earth surface People—another name that the Diné call themselves—as blank slates who arrived in the southwest just in time to greet the spaniards and who then proceeded to acquire, adapt, and accommodate the material culture and knowledge of surrounding cultures, tribal and foreigners alike, into their cultural repertoire. This narrative of the Diné as late arrivals and cultural borrowers has been so powerful in the American and tribal imaginaries that it has been reified in federal indian policies. As a result of these narratives of the Diné, between twelve thousand and fourteen thousand traditional Diné were violently uprooted from their homes in northern Arizona when, in 1974, Congress passed the navajo-hopi Land settlement Act, which divided the 1882 reservation between the two tribes. This act reflects but one strand of historic relationships between the Diné and their neighbors, the hopis. for at least three centuries, the Diné had remained beyond the reaches of spanish and Mexican colonization. By the time the Americans arrived to claim the southwest in 1848, the Diné were known as a formidable power and blamed for much of the cycles of violence that characterized the southwest from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. in the mid-nineteenth century, the Diné came under American rule when they were literally starved into submission by Kit Carson’s brutal scorch-and-burn policy. over ten thousand Diné were forcibly marched to the Bosque redondo reservation in northwestern new Mexico, where they were to be inculcated with American beliefs and values.The forced removal was extremely traumatic and still lives in the collective navajo memory. in 1868, Diné leaders signed a treaty, the last they would sign with the American government. Although the treaty provisions were mostly favorable to the Americans, the Diné were simply joyous that they were to return to their traditional homeland. The Diné returned to former residences, including those that lay outside the reservation boundaries. The survivors rejoined family and kin who had hidden in the remote regions, beyond the hopi mesas to the Grand Canyon and north into southern Utah. it is not...