Sacred land, bitter battle

Navajo-Hopi dispute built on differences in religion, culture, evolving economy

Jerry Kammer The Arizona Republic Jan. 30, 2000

BIG MOUNTAIN - In the end, there is only the land.

The earth. The rocky soil beneath the feet of Katherine Smith, 80, as she treads the vast landscape of northeastern Arizona.

It is an immense, wild place, racing across high-desert ranges, climbing onto plateaus of pinon and juniper forest, rearing up into towering mesas, then plunging suddenly into multicolored canyons.

"Our songs and our prayers are tied to this place," Smith says in the clipped tones of the English she learned in her two years of formal schooling in the 1920s.

But that bond is about to be severed forever.

As of Tuesday, dozens of Navajos such as Smith will, by federal law, become trespassers on the lands of their birth.

Twenty-five years ago, in December 1974, President Ford interrupted a Colorado skiing vacation to sign a law forcing thousands of Navajos to move.

The law has turned the land over to the nearby Hopis, for whom it is also hallowed ground.

Traditional Navajos call this the world of the Hero Twins - Child Born of Water and Monster Slayer - who received powers from their father the sun to slay bloody monsters.

They made this remote, rocky place safe for the Dine, "The People," as the Navajos call themselves.

It is safe no longer.

The Hopis won a long, bitter battle in Congress, arguing that the larger Navajo Tribe had gradually taken over much of their land. The Hopis insisted that their survival and simple justice required that the Navajos be moved back.

But this forced relocation of thousands of Navajos is more than the latest episode in an intertribal feud. It's also the last, haunting echo of America's controversial policy of Indian removal. Critics say it is tainted with racism; they argue that if the settlers on Hopi land were non-Indian, they would never be evicted.

And it has targeted some of the last traditional Indians living in the continental United States. They dwell far from mainstream America, over axle-bending dirt roads that turn to mud after the driving summer storms Navajos call "male rain."

They have little understanding of the English language or White people's laws. They believe the land is alive with sacred power, that gods - Diyiin Dine, the Holy People - live in the springs, the rain, the wind.

About 13,900 Navajos have bowed to the Bilagaana Bi Behaasani, the "White Man's Law," as the relocation act is often called. It has cleared out entire communities with the relentlessness of a glacier.

Congress in 1974 thought it could get the job done in a few years at a cost of about $40 million. Twenty-five years later, relocation goes on, and the cost to taxpayers is approaching a half-billion dollars.

About 200 Navajos remain, anchored by the sturdy women of Big Mountain and a few other places. Some, including Katherine Smith's daughter, have accepted the 1996 "accommodation agreement" that allows signers to stay for 75 years under Hopi jurisdiction.

Yet some Navajos, known as "resisters," cannot bring themselves to acknowledge either Hopi ownership or the Feb. 1 deadline.

Federal officials in Phoenix promise there will be no marshals on the disputed lands this week. Not yet. But after eviction proceedings make their way through federal court, the marshals are likely to move in unless the Navajos give in.

"We have no choice," Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Lodge said, "but to enforce the law." Pauline Whitesinger, Katherine Smith's half sister, reacts to the news with bewilderment and defiance.

"Sometimes, I wonder what exactly caused it," she said. "Is it because we didn't offer enough prayers and corn pollen to the Holy People? Are we being punished because we are joining other religions, like the Christians and the Native American Church?"

Other times, her temper flares.

"Let them bring out the policemen and the guns and the tanks," she said. "We'll see who's standing at the end. Let's get this over with."

It is almost over, even though critics such as anthropologist David Aberle have for years urged Congress to reject relocation. Aberle and others cite a long-standing federal policy of resolving Indian land claims without dislodging settlers.

Richard Schifter, an attorney for the Navajos, told Congress that relocation embodies a racist double standard and a deviation from past federal policy in Indian land disputes. "Could it be, may I ask, that where the settlers are White, we pay off the original owners in cash; but where the settlers are Indian, we find expulsion and removal an acceptable alternative?"

Forrest Gerard, a staffer on the Senate Interior committee that endorsed the 1974 bill, concedes Schifter's point.

"In all of the legislative land-claims settlements that I looked at or was involved in, we never once dislocated a non-Indian party," Gerard said in an interview.

In the end, Gerard said, many congressmen looked to Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater for guidance. Goldwater initially straddled the fence between the two tribes. But after a bitter political feud in the 1970s with then-Navajo Chairman Peter MacDonald, he came down strongly on the Hopi side, calling for the eviction of Navajos from 911,000 acres of high-desert rangeland.

Goldwater promised that relocation would be good for the Navajos. He said the new homes provided in the law made it "a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them to improve their lives." In some cases, he was right. Many young Navajos, educated and culturally mobile, have been happy to receive the new homes provided by the law.

Betty Pahi, a secretary in the office of the Maricopa County attorney, used the $79,000 check she received to make a hefty down payment on her Phoenix house.

Some Navajos who left moved onto the reservation. Others have moved to places like Flagstaff and Winslow and Phoenix, where some have thrived, using federal relocation benefits of up to $82,000 to get a head start on the American dream.

But many other relocatees have found only loneliness and misery in their new homes. There also is widespread agreement that the whole relocation effort has been hampered by federal bungling, political cronyism and drastic underestimates of the cost both in taxpayer dollars and human suffering.

"Forcibly relocating people with a strong tie to the land is about the worst thing you can do to them short of killing them," said Thayer Scudder, professor of anthropology at the California Institute of Technology.

Calling relocation "a cultural disaster" for the Navajos, Scudder said, "I'm increasingly seeing it as an American version of ethnic cleansing. You can't tell me we would have done that with Anglos or any other population in the United States.

"I see it as the most unjustified, unethical involuntary relocation in the United States since the relocation of Japanese-Americans in World War II." The home Pauline Whitesinger clings to is 12 miles from the nearest phone, about 25 miles from pavement. To outsiders, it is the forlorn middle of nowhere.

To her, it is the vibrant center of everything. A plain-spoken woman whose life is defined by the chores required by her sheep camp, cornfield and small stone house, she speaks in Navajo about her ties to this rolling land of dark-green pinon and sandy range.

"We are the children of the earth, of the bright-colored corn," she said, her face deeply creased by sun, work and worry.

Katherine Smith's most precious possession is a bag of dirt, a ceremonial bundle of buckskin containing soil from the Navajos' four sacred mountains.

So, Smith was not swayed by her visit to the so-called New Lands, the government-built community east of Holbrook that offers new homes and a chance to graze livestock.

Some of the tension is a result of the 1996 accommodation agreement, which allowed Navajos to remain on Hopi land if they signed a lease acknowledging Hopi jurisdiction and defining how they may use the land.

Although many Navajos have done so, the dozens of resisters insist they are bound to the land by their religion.

The accommodation agreement grew out of a Navajo lawsuit that made exactly that claim - charging that relocation violated the Navajos' constitutional right to practice their religion.

A federal Appeals Court asked U.S. Magistrate Judge Harry McCue of San Diego to step in to mediate.

"It was the most significant contact I have ever had with other human beings," said McCue, 72, adding that he came to respect both tribes' commitment to the land.

McCue said he began to understand the tenacity of elderly Navajos when he saw a woman living under a plastic sheet at the side of a sandstone plateau.

Rather than accept relocation benefits, the woman clung to the land. Barred by court order from replacing her house, she lived in a hole in the ground.

"I was really overwhelmed by the realization that here is a society that is truly attached to the land," McCue said, "not just physically, but spiritually and emotionally."