For Navajo, Treaty is a testiment to leaders

By John Christian Hopkins
Dine Bureau

WINDOW ROCK — During the late 1860s, life for the Navajo on the sparse plains in Fort Sumner (Hwééldí), N.M., was miserable and tragic.

Seeing his once-strong Navajo people thin and weak, life there filled Navajo leader Chief Manuelito with shame and sorrow. Manuelito and the Navajo ancestors endured four years of imprisonment at Hwééldí beginning in 1863. On June 1, 1868, Manuelito and the other prominent Navajo leaders Barboncito, Armijo, Delgado and 25 more headsmen, signed the Treaty of 1868.

It is reported that more than 2,000 Navajo ancestors died at Hwééldí from starvation, disease and imprisonment. About 7,000 Navajos returned to Navajo Territory from Hwééldí during the summer of 1868.

The Fourth Annual Navajo Treaty Day Celebration at Mariano Lake Chapter is slated for June 14 to celebrate life and the strength of the Navajo ancestors, Planning Committee Chairman Eddie McCarthy said. The celebration begins at 7:30 a.m.

The event is for the Navajo people, sheep herders, family members and community members, and it is free to attend, McCarthy said.

The Opening Ceremony, at 7:30 a.m. is a Health Fun Walk, sponsored by the Department of Youth. Ernest Begay will be the Master of Ceremony.

McCarthy, who was born in nearby Smith Lake, will deliver the welcome address. Council delegate and Mariano Lake native Young Jeff Tom (Mariano Lake/Smith Lake) will introduce visiting dignitaries, including Navajo Nation Vice President Ben Shelly, who is scheduled to speak at 10:15 a.m., and Speaker Lawrence T. Morgan.

A special highlight of the celebration is the arrival of a Pony Express rider at 10 a.m. The Pony Express rider symbolizes the deliverance of the proclamation letter that is a re-enactment of the presentation of the Treaty of 1868 to the Navajo.

Morgan will read the proclamation letter in the Navajo language, and Grace E. Laurence will read it in English.

"This is very important because we remember how the Navajo ancestors suffered," Young Jeff Tom said. He added that Navajo living today owe a debt to the ancestors. "Today, we have life; we have our grazing and our livestock."

The treaty remains highly relevant today and is a testament to the foresight of the Navajo leaders who signed it, according to Navajo Nation Attorney General Louis Dennetsosie.

Speaking to about 150 lawyers at the Navajo Bar Association's annual conference in Albuquerque on June 1 Navajo Nation Memorial Day he said the Navajo leaders who put their mark to the treaty were farsighted strategic planners who looked to the future of their tribe.

"Our leaders wanted the people to continue, the tribe to continue," Dennetsosie said. "They wanted self-sufficiency. They wanted self-determination."

Beginning in 1863, some 8,000 Navajos were rounded up by U.S. soldiers and forced during "The Long Walk" to march 300-to-400 miles to Fort Sumner, the Bosque Redondo, where they were imprisoned until 1868.

Hundreds died or were killed by soldiers along the way; and, once there, many more died from starvation, disease, were subject to rape and many hardships just to survive. Firewood was scarce, food would not grow, the water was undrinkable and the people were subject to raids by other tribes in the area and were powerless to help themselves.

The Navajo Treaty of 1868 was the last treaty the Navajos signed with the U.S., and it not only freed Navajos from captivity but returned them to the homeland they were forced to leave.

In the Treaty of 1849, Navajos agreed to be peaceful people. But by 1852, the federal government was already planning to move the Navajos off their homeland anyway.

The reservation created by the Treaty of 1868 was about three million acres straddling what is now the Arizona-New Mexico border, reaching west to Canyon de Chelly. In the time since, until 1934, the Navajo Nation annexed the land east almost to Albuquerque, south to the San Francisco Peaks and Interstate 40, west to the Colorado River, and north into Utah.

The Navajos were so successful, that the State of Arizona passed a statute in 1918 to try to stop these land annexations, according to Dennetsosie.

"I would give them an A-plus for implementing the plan. They regained more of their aboriginal lands than any tribe in history," Dennetsosie said of the old Navajo leaders.

The federal government made treaties between roughly 1783 to 1880, though they were often changed without knowledge of the tribe or the tribal leaders were misinformed as to what they were signing.

Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph once explained how the white men made treaties: He likened the process to a man who comes to him and wants to buy his horses, but Joseph is happy with his herd and refuses to sell; so the man goes to his neighbor and pays him for the right to own Joseph's horses.

Chief Red Cloud, who led the Sioux in the only Indian War in which the U.S. officially surrendered, went to Washington later and when the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie was read to him, he insisted, "This is not the treaty I signed."

( John Christian Hopkins can be reached at hopkins1960@hotmail.com).