Two Nations, Indivisible: Unity, Discord, and the Cartoons of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute, 1973–1974

In the aftermath of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute of 1974, Diné activist Roberta Blackgoat said, "No compassion is left for the motherland. We've become her enemy. Money does this. This is what I say. Our prayers lose their meanings when the land becomes an industry."¹ The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute is a story about the power of extractive enterprise, about outsiders taking sacred lands, and about the horrors Diné and Hopi relocatees faced at the hands of the federal government. But it is also a history of art, activism, and survival. In this centuries-old conflict, art-as-activism succeeded in the face of seemingly insurmountable political opposition from the United States government. Powerfully drawn editorial cartoons presented a multidimensional world with an underlying message of intertribal solidarity and mobilized further resistance against United States government interference in the affairs of sovereign Indigenous nations.

During the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute, the Hopi and Diné engaged in many different forms of activism in an effort to protect their culture, traditions, and land from being arbitrarily divided by the United States government. Though the roots of this fight run deep, this article will focus on the story told by editorial images from 1973, the year both the Navajo Times and Qua'Toqti published political cartoons regarding the conflict, and 1974, the year that P.L. 95-531, the law that determined the partition of the Four Corners region, passed. During these most pivotal years of the conflict, 1973 and 1974, artists published scores of political cartoons in tribal newspapers the Navajo Times (Window Rock, Arizona) and Qua'Toqti (New Oraibi, Arizona).² The cartoonists who produced these images fought against the United States government's assault on sovereign space through satirical political interventions. Diné and Hopi editorial cartoons reveal that the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute, widely portrayed as an intertribal conflict, was in fact rooted in Indigenous resistance to the United States government's continued attempts to seize valuable natural resources located in the heart of Diné Bikéyah and Hopituskwa, the Navajo and Hopi homelands.³

To be clear, the Diné and the Hopi have not always operated in perfect sociopolitical symbiosis. Both groups had and continued to have disagreements over land use and land management, disagreements which were often highlighted in editorial cartoons printed in tribal newspapers, including the Navajo Times and Qua'Toqti. However, this particular dispute was not the result of intertribal animosity or ethnic differences. This article shows that it was instead the result of repeated non-Indigenous interventions into sovereign territory and continued attempts by United States officials to gain control of untapped natural resources across Diné Bikéyah and Hopituskwa.

This is the first historical exploration of the relationship between Hopi and Diné political cartoons, American Indian activism, land rights, resource extraction, and United States government interests in the late twentieth century. Specifically, this article examines how political cartoons printed in the Navajo Times and Qua'Toqti represented crucial manifestations of Indigenous activism throughout the contentious Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute. These cartoons remain important examples of anti-colonial discourse that preserved and protected Hopi and Diné voices, culture, and humor while challenging foreign incursions into sovereign American Indian nations.

This article considers Indigenous political cartoons as evidence of cultural agency deployed in the public sphere. As a heretofore unexamined cache of Indigenous voices, these Hopi and Diné political cartoons provide a new lens through which to view the dispute and reveal that the underlying cause of the conflict was the United States government's intent to extract value from the land. These cartoons speak to twentieth-century colonialism and provide important evidence in support of historian Glen Sean Coulthard's argument for Indigenous self-recognition and rejection of colonial policies.⁴ Furthermore, these editorial cartoons illustrate how cultural survival can exist within ongoing colonialism and how counter-public spheres can effectively communicate activist intentions, particularly when they refuse to rationalize colonial domination.⁵

One goal of this article is to contribute to scholarship moving "beyond red...