The Navajo came into possession of their land haphazardly. The U.S. government had taken ownership of much of the American Southwest after winning the Mexican American War in 1848, christening it the New Mexico Territory. A big chunk of it was deeded to the Navajo. When Arizona and New Mexico became states in 1912, the Navajo Reservation was expanded within the borders of that former territory.
The folks back in Washington thought the territory a godforsaken desert where no person in their right mind would want to live. So creating a huge Indian reservation in such a place was like giving away a stretch of remote ocean. What the hell could you do with it?
They had no idea the tribes in the territory were divided by culture. The fact that the Hopi had been living for well over a thousand years in the same area just granted to the Navajo, recent interlopers, was irrelevant.
The U.S. government signed their breakable treaties with the Navajo because they seemed to be the biggest tribe around. They had also proven a formidable enemy and were rewarded during the subsequent peace process with the largest reservation in America.
The Hopi, on the other hand, had hidden atop their mesas and avoided being drawn into the fight. They were secretive and asked nothing other than to be left alone. This unwillingness to engage the new owners of America worked against them because when it came time to carve up the pie of their original land, they were pretty much left out.
As the first people to occupy the region, the Hopis’ tribal boundaries spread from Bill Williams Mountain in the west to the Grand Canyon in the North to central New Mexico in the east and to the Mogollon Rim in the South—an area almost the size of Oklahoma.
After the white man divided up the territory, the Hopi were left with only their three narrow mesas, surrounded like islands in a sky of Navajo land. While the Hopi got 70 miles of worthless rock and not much else, the Navajo got most of the vast coal reserves at Black Mesa.
The Hopi continued to live in peace as they engaged a battery of Washington law firms to argue the unfairness of their plight through the federal courts. They won a few cases and lost a few while the lawyers got rich and the Hopi remained poor.
The Navajo Nation stretches from northeastern Arizona to northwestern New Mexico and southeastern Utah. Covering almost 18 million acres, it is bigger than ten states. The land is desolate and rocky, but it is also rich in coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. The tribe’s annual GDP is almost $13 billion. Its population is about 350,000 members, half of whom live off-reservation.
Yet the rich Navajo land was poor in practice. The resources were finite. The long-term contracts the tribes signed with the mining and drilling giants greatly favored the multinationals. Most of the jobs extracting precious natural resources went to outsiders.
Health was in the same bad shape as the economy. The tribe battled rampant diabetes, drug addiction, liver and heart disease, and severe combined immunodeficiency. Nor were the new Navajos eating healthily. The natural, organic food they used to consume had been replaced by a corn syrup diet, which led back to the tribe’s poor health.
On top of all that was the relentless drought gripping the Rez. The winter snows were but a memory, and the summer monsoons were over in an instant. Add to the vanishing water act the alarming fact that at least twenty percent of the people living on Navajo were without running water, indoor plumbing, or electricity, and it was no wonder there was an ever-accelerating exodus from Navajo land.
Fewer people meant fewer taxes. After several years of ever-decreasing revenues, the Navajo Tribal Council had been forced to make deep budget cuts to all departments, including Law Enforcement.
As a result, single officers like Dalton Singer and Harry Bigman, the ones who didn’t have families, became floaters, meaning they could be assigned all over the Rez at the drop of a hat. One week they might be working out of the Chinle Substation, and the next they might be in Kayenta. Working by assignment meant they answered the captain in charge of their temporary substation. They bounced from commanders who were decent, to those who made life miserable for their subordinates. It was hard to feel connected to where they worked when they might be somewhere else the next day.
On top of all that was the constant tug of war between the Navajo and the federal government.
Navajo was like a big rundown building with many unlocked doors. The feds strolled in and out as they pleased, sometimes bearing gifts like a school lunch program, and other times yanking the funding for necessities like roads or housing. It was totally unpredictable. Nor had the Navajo any way to restrict access to the federal sugar daddies who controlled the purse strings through a myriad of different agencies, often with conflicting agendas and regulations: HUD, the DEA, the Department of Education, the Department of Interior, the Department of Agriculture, the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the FBI. The Diné never ever got to call the shots.