| NAVAJO LONGWALK | The Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo was the 1864 deportation and attempted ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the United States federal government. Navajos were forced to walk from their land in what is now Arizona to eastern New Mexico. Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. Some anthropologists claim that the “collective trauma of the Long Walk…is critical to contemporary Navajos’ sense of identity as a people. The traditional Navajo homeland spans from Arizona through western New Mexico, where the Navajo had houses, planted crops and raised livestock. There was a long historical pattern in the Southwest of groups or bands raiding and trading with each other, with treaties being made and broken. This included interactions between Navajo, Spanish, Mexican, Pueblos, Apache, Comanche, Ute, and later European Americans. Individual civilians and Native Americans could be victims of these conflicts and also instigate conflicts to serve their special interests |
