Few Wrinkles Remain as Navajos, Hopis Try to End Land Dispute

BIG MOUNTAIN, Ariz. —  Pauline Whitesinger grabs a fistful of copper-colored dirt in her wrinkled hand and releases it to the wind, speaking defiantly in Navajo.

She points in every direction to explain why she never will leave this land and never will sign a document acknowledging that it belongs to the Hopi Tribe.

She gestures toward the graves of her ancestors. She explains that Big Mountain--a wide, pine-dotted ridgeline behind her--is sacred. She describes how she knows which herbs to chew when she is ill and which prayers to sing to give thanks here.

“They [Hopi officials] told us, ‘If you don’t sign, we’re going to handcuff you and take you away.’ I told them, ‘If you come to my home, I have a gun and I’ll shoot you,’ ” Whitesinger says with supporter Cordell Tulley translating. “You’re going to have to shoot me to get me out of here.”

Defiant as she is, Whitesinger is one of an aging and dwindling number of Navajos still fighting the Hopi Tribe and the federal government over remote areas of high desert that both tribes claim as their own.

Most of the Navajo families living in this area have agreed to end their decades-long battle and sign 75-year leases with the Hopi Tribe allowing them to stay under Hopi jurisdiction.

But Whitesinger and residents of 13 other Navajo home sites have refused. The Hopi Tribe has given them three years to either sign leases or leave.

But even for the families who have signed the leases, the decades of distrust are difficult to overcome.

“You grew up to not like the Hopis because of the things that went on,” says Betty Tso, a Navajo who grew up near Big Mountain and heads the group of families who have signed leases. “But since we’ve been working with the Hopi Tribe, we have a better dialogue between us. We are beginning to understand each other.”

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Clayton Honyumptewa’s office is filled with maps. Maps showing how the Navajo reservation grew and the Hopi reservation shrank after both were created in the late 1800s. Maps showing some of the 3-acre home sites leased to Navajo families.

“We want to have control over all of our reservation, and we don’t have that right now,” says Honyumptewa, head of the Hopi land management office. “I don’t think there’s any other Indian tribe in the United States that doesn’t have control over all of their reservation.”

The Navajo and Hopi have lived side-by-side in what is now northeastern Arizona for centuries, although they have vastly different languages, cultures and religions. The Hopis--whose name means “peaceful”--never fought the U.S. government, but the Navajos did.

After being rounded up by the Army and forced to a concentration camp in New Mexico, the Navajos signed a treaty in 1868 that gave them a reservation east of Hopi territory. In 1882, President Chester Arthur granted the Hopis a 2.5-million-acre reservation encompassing the three mesas where most Hopi lived.

The Navajo population exploded over the next decades, however, and Congress responded by expanding the Navajo reservation until it completely surrounded the Hopi reservation in 1934.

By the 1960s, the Hopi Tribe had exclusive control of only 651,000 acres of their reservation. The other 1.8 million acres was designated as a “Joint Use Area” to be shared by the two tribes.

Neither side was satisfied by the compromise, so in 1974 Congress passed a law to equally divide the “joint use” land between the two tribes--stranding hundreds of Navajos and Hopis on land awarded to the opposite tribe.

The law offered money and land to relocate Hopis and Navajos who found themselves on the wrong side of the partition, and the relatively small number of Hopis on the Navajo side have moved. So have hundreds of Navajos, but hundreds more refused to leave.

Representatives of the Navajo families and the Hopi Tribe began meeting with federal mediators in 1991 to hammer out a solution. Their agreement allows the Navajo families to lease 3-acre home sites and 10-acre farm sites from the Hopi Tribe.

Just what will happen at the end of the 75-year leases is still unclear. Honyumptewa said the Hopi Tribe probably would be willing to renew the leases, but said he doubted that many Navajos would want to remain by then.

“There aren’t too many young people out there. There’s nothing to do out there,” Honyumptewa says.

Tso said the next generations will decide whether to stay or to leave.

“It’s up to them to renew the leases. We’re not locking them into one type of lifestyle,” Tso said.

The Navajo families had until March 31 to sign the leases or be declared trespassers. But the Hopi Tribe decided to wait until 2000 to begin forcibly evicting the resisters, Honyumptewa says.

“They have three years. If they don’t like it, they can always move,” Honyumptewa says. “The Hopi tribal members, a lot of them opposed it. They say, ‘Why do we want Navajos still on our land?’

“We say to the Navajos, ‘We’ve really bent over backward for you guys. This is the best we can do. This is our final offer. Take it or leave it.”

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For Betty Tso, the main reason she eventually decided to sign was one of the biggest sticking points of the dispute: religion.

“We had to stay on the land to practice our religion,” Tso said. “If we decided to go, who would look after the sacred sites?”

Whitesinger has similar reasons for not signing a lease--to stay on the land where her ancestors are buried. Many Navajos who have been relocated have become alcoholics, and others have tried to return, Whitesinger says.

“Is that the reason the government wants me to move, to make me an alcoholic?” Whitesinger asks.

The Hopis also have religious reasons to oppose the settlement, for the land includes shrines and areas where eagles are captured for use in religious ceremonies.

“The agreement hasn’t been completely accepted [by the Hopis]. The prophecies say the Navajo will take themselves out of there eventually,” Honyumptewa says.

The accommodation agreement also has widened rifts among the Navajos on Hopi land, splitting the families between signers and resisters.

“When we [signers and resisters] meet, we hug, we shake hands, but we don’t talk about the land dispute,” Tso says. “If we talk, we talk about our sheep and goats and our children. There’s that underlying uncomfortable feeling--people trying to not say anything to hurt the feelings of the other.”

But despite the problems, both Hopi tribal officials and Navajo signers say they’re committed to making the solution work.

“We’ve finally reached a point where this is a resolution. This is the best that we have,” Honyumptewa says. “We don’t know if this will resolve the issue. But we’re here to implement the law.”