Word: navajos
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...federal action involves divvying up 1.8 million acres of disputed grazing and farm land in northeast Arizona. At the heart of the controversy is a Navajo settlement in what is supposed to be Hopi territory: Big Mountain, a juniper-dotted ridge about 50 miles east of Grand Canyon National Park. It is a place of endless sagebrush and soaring golden eagles, undergirded by rich seams of coal and uranium, where a band of perhaps 1,000 or so Navajo has vowed to resist relocation. "To move away is to disappear," says Pauline Whitesinger, an elderly resister with an easy smile...
...concept of land ownership is foreign to both the Hopi and Navajo traditions (despite the tribes' vigorous assertions of territorial rights), a point little appreciated by successive white administrators. Left alone, the stronger Navajo, who now number about 170,000, would have prevailed over the Hopi, who now number about 10,000. Instead, the U.S. Government has struggled to mediate the dispute for more than a century but so far has only prolonged...
After decades of Navajo encroachment into territory long claimed by the Hopi and successive efforts by the Federal Government to redraw the boundaries of their lands, a federal district court in Arizona in 1962 declared much of the disputed territory to be a "joint-use area." That effectively allowed the more numerous Navajo to dominate the land. But in 1974 Congress decided that it would be fairer to divide the joint lands equally, a solution that pleased neither tribe. Soon about 300 miles of barbed-wire fence bristled across the region, and the Government ordered 100 Hopi to one side...
...failure to prepare Indians for a bewildering new world of utility bills, car payments and real estate con men. "You can't take Indians off the land, drop them in the middle of a subdivision and expect them to survive," says Lee Brooke Phillips, a lawyer for the Navajo resisters. "People are losing their homes. Their families are being broken...
Despite their conflict over these homelands, many Hopi and Navajo have become friends through business dealings or school. Hopi Chairman Sidney and Navajo Chairman Peterson Zah were schoolmates, but as Sidney says, "When I was elected, the friendship took a vacation." Sidney threatens to break a sacred buckskin treaty wand if the Navajo do not evacuate Hopi land, which would signify the complete collapse of an ancient vow, and he refuses to entertain notions of a land swap or cash deal to settle matters. Each side is waging a sophisticated publicity campaign, assisted by experienced outside activists. Indeed...