“The Long Walk” is a Navajo experience of great devastation committed by the U.S. government, especially officials Kit Carson and General Carleton. This mural, “Return from the Long Walk,” by Navajo artist Richard Kee Yazzie, portrays the resilience and renewed shared values of the Navajo survivors of the Fort Sumner internment camp.
During the period of Western expansion by the U.S. government, increased tension among the indigenous people and the colonizers consistently resulted in American Indians’ loss of their land. For the Navajo/Diné people, this ultimately resulted in forced separation from their traditional homelands, bounded by the four sacred mountains (Blanca Peak, Mt. Taylor, the San Francisco Peaks, and Hesperus Peak) at the cardinal directions that lie in the states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona.
In 1864, Kit Carson led a scorched-earth campaign to force the Navajo to surrender, and after his troops killed and destroyed their crops and homes, they did. That spring, close to 9,000 Navajo walked about 350 miles eastward of their homeland to a place called Bosque Redondo. There, the U.S. government planned to establish a reservation that would inculcate the prisoners into Christianity, Western-style farming, and U.S. law. But Fort Sumner — with poor water supply and soil — was unable to sustain the population of people. Before 1868, 2,000 of the Navajo had died.
During their internment, the Navajo collectively strategized how to secure their freedom and regain their homelands. In the process, their group identity became ever stronger. Under Barboncito, the negotiator of the Treaty of Bosque Redondo of 1868, the Navajo were permitted to make the Long Walk home, and were restored 3.5 million acres of their homeland, which today has been increased to 16 million acres.
The mural shown here was commissioned in 2005 in the town of Gallup, and shows the Long Walk home of 1868. The four background colors are sacred to the Navajo, and the rainbow symbolizes protection, with the eagle as guardian. These symbols encapsulate much about the current Navajo nation.
Source(s): www.waymarking.com/way marks/WMP75N_Long_Walk_Home_Mural_Gallup_NM. _Navajo Times_, August 19, 2024, ‘My art has kept me going all these years’: Ceremonial poster artist Richard Kee Yazzie a model of strength, resiliency.” “Hwéeldi – The Long Walk” _Indian Country Grassroots Support_ citing dissertation by Raymond Darrell Austin, 2009 _Navajo Courts and Navajo Common Law, a Tradition of Tribal Self-Governance_ (Univ of Minnesota Press).
