This paper presents the history of the Diné (Navajo) system of kinship and clanship as a response to environmental and political instability. We describe the Diné traditional system of k'éí, kinship and clanship, held together by k'é, the ethic of universal relatedness, and how, after 1930, the system has fared under conquest, settler colonialism, climate change, and replacement with a government-administered grazing-permit system. As long recognized, through the k'é principle, the clan system distributed people on the land flexibly in response to unstable conditions for farming and stock raising. Less understood is that, through kéí—the mutual rights and responsibilities of clan relatives—the system also limited that flexibility to make the distribution more orderly.

Between 1863 and 1868, the US Army waged a war on the Navajo people that ended in the Army holding perhaps half of all Navajos at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The Navajo homelands before this time extended from southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado across northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. Fort Sumner was hundreds of miles to the east. In 1868, a dozen Navajo headmen inscribed their Xes on a treaty with the US Army, which set aside a reservation in the middle of their much larger traditional homeland. Released from captivity, the Navajos gravitated to their former homes, including those off‘ the reservation. Other tribal members who escaped the Fort Sumner entrapment also resettled in their homeland. But things were different than they were before the forced march. The Navajos were to be governed from Fort Defiance, located near the new reservation’s southern boundary, by military authorities temporarily and by civilian authorities ultimately. The Navajos were to receive rations at Fort Defiance, so many settled nearby, at least until they could restore their sheep herds. In 1866 Congress set aside a swath of land south of the treaty reservation for a transcontinental railroad that would travel through the middle of the Navajos’ traditional homeland. The grant, alternate square-mile sections in a corridor soon expanded to 100 miles wide, was supposed to generate funds to finance railroad construction.“

This article seeks to deepen our understanding of an all-too-recurrent process: Washington, D.C.’s eviction of Indians from lands that the American government itself had previously “secured” for them. The intricacies of this process appear in a little-known story that precedes the Navajo-Hopi land dispute. It is the story of how Navajo families lost lands, which we call the Chambers Checkerboard (see fig. l), along the railroad in Arizona during the 1930s through the process of allotment. This story is told through alternating chronicle and hindsight, through statements of both Navajos and non-Indians, thereby acknowledging the patchy underpinnings of any reconstruction of this history. We hope to elucidate how people experienced, analyzed, and tried to cope with or influence the events that ensued. Similar events unfolded across the state line in New Mexico, where allotted areas stretched north and east to Chaco Canyon and beyond. Because the Chambers Checkerboard is more compact and more accessible to the railroad than most of the New Mexico allotted areas, however, land-grabbing was more intense and the processes underlying allotment gain and loss more starkly apparent. The documents for the Chambers Checkerboard also give heretofore unpublished details on the logistics of sending non-Indian, nonlocal-government land surveyors among widely dispersed, unschooled, non-English-speaking Navajos to take their written applications for specific half-mile-square parcels of land and mark each square on the ground. The documents further tell how the Navajo families, most of which traded wool, livestock, and weaving at local trading posts for store credit, were induced to pay with hard currency for the surveys and leases on surrounding unallotted railroad lands.

All theories of the “peopling” of the Western Hemisphere acknowledge the abundant evidence, from remotest pre-Columbian times to the present, that American Indians have traveled long distances for direct subsistence, trade, and other purposes. Yet most Indian societies have not produced “maps” in the familiar sense of “a representation, usually on a plane surface, of a region of the earth or heavens.” Outside the influence of European colonizers, and with the pre-Columbian exception of urbanized Mesoamerican groups, these groups have relied mainly on speech and memory to transmit and store important information, including knowledge about the earth’s surface and wayfinding on it. Scholars working within Eurocentric traditions of keeping written records have documented some of these spoken and memorized portrayals of the earth’s surface. Today scholars, especially geographers, recognize a variety of ways that human societies represent the earth and heavens, as the following definitions of “map” attest: According to J. B. Harley, “Maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.” More than mere “representations,” states Denis Wood, maps are social constructions that “make present—they re-present—the accumulated thought and labor of the past . . . about the milieu we simultaneously live in and collaborate on bringing [into] being. . . . they enable the past to become part of our living. . . . (This is how maps facilitate the reproduction of the culture that brings them into being).” These constructions have many forms, both tangible (visual, “artifactual”) and intangible (verbal, “mental,” performed). Intangible maps include the cognitive maps that each person constructs mentally from direct experience and other sources (often traditional). They also include verbal maps, that is, constructions of the earth’s surface in spoken forms, such as descriptions or narratives. Much of the literature on verbal maps, at least those of American Indians, concerns place-names and how they organize information associated with the places, including memorized strings of placenames used to mark travel corridors.