Despite Deadly Forced Marches, Navajo Identity Grew Stronger

The Navajos seek new harmony from infamous and deadly 1864 forced marches LONG WALK LONG RECOVERY

We drive on water, on a sheet of milkchocolate spring runoff that ripples through Canyon del Muerto from one wall to the other. It's a river 3 inches deep and a hundred feet wide, mined with quicksand ambushes, which, fortunately, Teddy Draper Sr. has memorized and can navigate a safe route around. He was born in this canyon 81 years ago and knows it intimately.

Draper guides us to Tsélaa', “Navajo fortress rock,” where he will relate one of the canyon's stories handed down from his great-great-great-grandmother -the tale of how a few people outwitted a siege by Col. Kit Carson's Army in 1864 and dodged the holocaust that engulfed the Navajo Indians for the next four years. He jokes affably as we splatter along. “The Navajo people hid easily in this canyon,” he says. “Our skin is the same color as the rock.”

I laugh. So does he. It will be days before I understand that his “joke” is as profound as the red canyon's many centuries of history.

The Navajos first settled in the basins and canyons west of Arizona's Chuska Mountains in the mid-18th century, claiming an obdurate but lovely land that had been vacant since drought and environmental exhaustion dispersed the Pueblo culture 500 years earlier. Trouble, however, came with the territory. Navajos and Utes skirmished and raided each other for livestock and slaves. In 1805 the Spaniards massacred 115 Navajos huddled in a cave with a ricocheting rain of thousands of bullets.

But not until Gen. James Henry Carleton of the U.S. Army assumed command of the New Mexico Territory in 1862 was the entire Navajo culture threatened with annihilation.

Carleton was a professional soldier who also saw himself as a devout Christian and humanitarian. Like most white Westerners of the time, he viewed Apaches and Navajos as impediments to progress who had to be contained and controlled. He suspected, as many did, that the Navajo homeland held mineral wealth, and because its primitive occupants had no idea how to harvest it, white America owned a divine mandate to manage it.

In 1863 Carleton hatched a “humane” plan to move the Navajo people en masse to a reservation on eastern New Mexico's high plains, where they could learn white men's ways and, he believed, be much the better for it. Those who refused to go “would be considered hostile and would be proceeded against accordingly.” Carleton saw no contradiction between his Christian righteousness and these Draconian orders; he was a child of Manifest Destiny-God's plan for American democracy to flood the continent.

Carleton handed the job of breaking the Navajo resistance to Kit Carson, by then 54 years old and tired of fighting. Carson had far more understanding and sympathy for Indian ways than most soldiers-he had twice married Indians and adopted Indian orphans-but whatever his private misgivings, he swallowed them and followed orders with the ruthlessness that was expected of him.

Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto served as the Navajos' defensive stronghold, and their broad floors provided beautiful orchards and pasturelands. (One Army officer grudgingly admired their efforts, reporting that “... the Corn Fields of the Savages are laid out with farmer-like taste...“) In January 1864, Carson launched a two-pronged assault on the inhabitants of the two canyons, burning orchards and hogans, taking prisoners when possible and shooting those who refused to surrender ("Killed two (2) Buck Indians and one Squaw who obstinately persisted in hurling rocks and pieces of wood at the soldiers," reported Capt. Albert Pfeiffer). The raids crushed Navajo morale and raised the specter of a winter of starvation, and over the next several months thousands of destitute Navajos trudged to Fort Canby (now Fort Defiance), 35 miles southeast of

Canyon de Chelly, to surrender. In numerous large groups, they were herded 300 to 500 miles (the routes varied) to Fort Sumner, at what New Mexicans melodiously called the Bosque Redondo, "round forest." By the best estimate now possible, 1,500 to 3,000 people-up to a fifth of the Navajo population at the time - died either en route or in the camp. It became known as the Long Walk-the Southwestern counterpart to the Cherokees' Trail of Tears.

At this point, the story rightly becomes Navajo property. For more than 100 years, their version was ignored, partly because there was no written Navajo language in the 19th century to record it, but mostly because to white ears, the oral histories passed down through generations of Navajo grandmothers seem laced with contradictions, a swirling farrago of fact, myth and mysticism. But the Navajos interpret their history in different dimensions of reality, some of which lie outside others' comprehension.

I go to Dinétah, the Navajo homeland, to retrace the Long Walk and try to understand it on the Navajo level. Problems arise. Some Navajos don't like my plan to actually walk parts of the route, even though my collaborator, photographer Monty Roessel, is Navajo. They feel it would trivialize the tragedy: "It wasn't a hike," says one. So I drive the approximate route from Canyon de Chelly to Bosque Redondo, tracking forts and encampments cited in historical accounts. This dimension of the story has turned to dust. I locate the site of old Fort Wingate near San Rafael, New Mexico, now private property marked by a "No Dumping" sign and a scattering of discarded mattresses and fridges. Ten thousand Navajos once camped here, awaiting escort into exile. Nothing remains of Fort Sumner. In 1941 the capricious Pecos River changed course and dissolved the last of the Army post's adobe blocks. The soldiers and prisoners stripped the riparian bosque for firewood in the 1860s; today the surrounding landscape is a bleak, windswept prairie, the horizons broken only by the odd windmill or grazing cow. A small and lonely New Mexico state museum commemorates the site.

Museum manager Gregory Scott Smith says Congress has appropriated $2 million for a new museum, already designed by Navajo architect David Sloan. They're awaiting a $2 million match from the state. "We want to include much more of the Navajo point of view," Smith says. "We want a balanced story."

I am back at Tsélaa' with Teddy Draper, balancing the story. He narrates his family story with obvious pride: In the winter of 1863-64, word comes that the soldiers will arrive. For months the people have prepared, stashing dried food on the "fortress," a natural redoubt at the Y-intersection of canyons de Chelly and del Muerto. Its walls are 700 feet of vertical sandstone slab. But on the east side is a way up with handholds left over from the Puebloans. It is February, bitterly cold. The soldiers camp at the base of the rock. They fry bacon, thinking the aroma will rise and make the Diné crave to surrender. But the Indians have plenty of dried meat. The concern is water. So on a night when the full moon rises to the south of the fortress, the Navajos form a human chain down the north wall on yucca ropes. As the soldiers sleep, the Navajos scoop water from the creek and pass it up. Two or three weeks later, the soldiers themselves face starvation and quit the failed siege. "We call it 'mother rock' in Navajo," Draper says. "This was the rebirth of Navajo, right here."

But not for some time. It was a dismal winter-one Army account reported a foot of snow on the east canyon rim at the campaign's beginning. There would be no farming and sheepherding for those who eluded capture or surrender.

Navajo stories tell of people surviving by eating cactus and the heads and feet of discarded horse and sheep carcasses.

Ruth Roessel, a Navajo grandmother, Monty Roessel's mother and the woman who first gathered these stories on tape for a groundbreaking 1973 book, escorts me as far as Fort Defiance in her vehicle. We stop at a lookout over Spider Rock, an 800foot sandstone needle that erupts from the floor of Canyon de Chelly and figures prominently in Navajo legend. She brings children here to tell them about the Long Walk. She seats them on a log, relates the stories, and lectures, "You've got to mind because you don't want to make another mistake like a long time ago."

Mistake? My interpretation of her warning seems obvious: They shouldn't have surrendered.

But the Navajo story operates on a different level. I read the stories that Ruth Roessel collected and discover a thread of fatalism. It began because of the behavior of a few Diné... a handful, here and there, killed white people.

The idea that the Navajos invited this tragedy is rooted in the concept of hozho, or "harmony with all things"-nature, neighbors, tradition. When there is disharmony, terrible things happen.

Johnson Dennison, a medicine man who works for the hospital at Chinle, near Canyon de Chelly, tells me that until the Long Walk, the Diné were out of harmony. "There was no order. People were doing whatever they wanted, raiding, making war, killing each other."

But Dennison, an intelligent man whose eyes seem constantly to test and probe his listeners, rejects the mantle of blame. "We Navajos who have an educationa white man's educationhave a different perspective. If you really study history, it was not the Navajos who started it. The Euroas slaves. Because we have learned the truth, we feel bitter."

I edge toward understanding. Bitterness and acceptance, suffering and enlightenment, myth and reality all coexist in the Navajo world. Each pair forms the two sides of a coin.

Families still pass on horrifying stories from the Long Walk. Howard W. Gorman, a longtime tribal councilman, told Ruth Roessel how his ancestors had a pregnant daughter who had managed to walk almost as far as the Rio Grande but could no longer keep up. The soldiers ordered her family to leave her behind-and a few moments later, they shot her. At Bosque Redondo, Gorman related, the rations were so meager that small boys would poke around in horse manure to find undigested corn kernels, which they would roast in hot ashes.

Official stories from Fort Sumner are confirm the hardship and deprivation. Even as the Long Walk began, Carlton warned the commanding officer at Fort Sumner, "It will require the greatest effort and most careful husbandry to keep the Indian alive... every Indian-man, woman or child-able to dig up the ground for planting, should be kept at work every moment of the day preparing a patch, however small... Indians must live on the smallest possible quantity of food."

Eventually more than 8,000 Navajos resettled onto a windswept 40-by-40-mile camp. Contemporary photos show clumps of lopsided stick-and-canvas shacks, a stark contrast to the neatly aligned and landscaped barracks of Fort Sumner.

The Army tried constructing adobe huts for the Navajos, but their numbers soon overwhelmed the buildings, and whenever someone died inside, no others would ever enter again-among the many facts of Navajo culture of which Carleton was ignorant. Navajo anthropologist Harry Walters tells me that some prisoners built traditional hogans, but eventually had to destroy them for firewood. After that, they huddled in dugouts.

Herrero, a Navajo headman, provided government investigators with a picture of life at Bosque Redondo that-contradictions and all-portrays a brutalized and abjectly demoralized people. "Some of the soldiers do not treat us well," he said in testimony recorded in an 1867 U.S. Senate report titled "Condition of the Indian Tribes." "When at work, if we stop a little they kick us or do something else, but generally they treat us well. We do not mind if an officer punishes us, but do not like to be treated badly by the soldiers....

"Our women sometimes come to the tents outside the fort and make contracts with the soldiers to stay with them for a night, and [they] give [the women] five dollars or something else. But in the morning they take away what they gave them and kick them off. This happens most every day... the women are not forced, but consent willingly."

Stories of courage also came out of Bosque Redondo. Ruth Roessel's greatgrandmother, then about 15 years old, told one of them about how she escaped.

On the night of her flight, she said she spoke to the Army's guard dogs using their sacred names so they wouldn't bark and betray her. Walking alone and only at night to avoid capture, she first followed an owl's hooting. Another night a bear guided her through a forest, her hand on its rump.

Finally, threatened by a pack of hungry wolves, the desperate fugitive spoke to them, too, in their language. "Look at me," she cried. "I am nothing but bones. Go find a fat deer, I just want to go home."

And after many such nights, she indeed found her way home. Ruth Roessel points to a low, angular purple mesa visible on the horizon from the south rim of Canyon de Chelly. "Waterless Mountain," she says reverently. "That was her home."

I understand the story in terms of re-establishing hozho, harmony with the natural world and with home. Harmony would never have settled into Bosque Redondo even if the Army had provided adequate food, shelter and firewood. Carleton never understood the Navajo concept of home, where every mountain, plant and sunset is sacred.

The chapter of the Long Walk seemed to close with treaty talks at Fort Sumner in 1868 between eight Navajo chiefs and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman offered a proposal to give the Navajos a new reservation in Oklahoma, stocked with cattle, corn and schools, but Navajo chief Barboncito pleaded against it. "I hope to God you will not ask me to go to any other country except my own." Sherman relented, not so much out of compassion as from government weariness with the problems of feeding and controlling 8,000 miserable prisoners of war.

The irony-perhaps the lesson-of the Long Walk is that it preserved Navajo identity instead of destroying it. The Navajos returned to their land with a new and deeper bond to it, and the stories tightened the fiber that held the culture together.

"The appreciation of the land, the language, the culture, the ceremonies-we almost lost this," says Harry Walters. "I don't want to say it was good that the Long Walk happened-it's like hitting yourself over the head with a hammer; it feels so good when you stop. But it's what made us strong."

Johnson Dennison wonders. He surveys the modern troubles of the Diné and sees disharmony-things falling apart, the center failing to hold. "It's been 132 years, and people are acting like they didn't learn anything. Every day someone dies because of alcohol. There are all kinds of social problems. We are not teaching the old ways. We are not practicing the right way of living.

"But the weapon we need to overcome all these problems, we already have it. All we need is to rediscover who we are."