American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Forced relocation has become an affliction. The Navajo-Hopi land dispute has led to the relocation of 2,940 households, more than 10,000 Navajo people, with another 440 households certified but not yet relocated. This is the largest forced relocation of American citizens in the United States since the World War II-period internment of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry-most of whom were American citizens. This paper describes the post-relocation experience of Navajo relocatees in Pinon, Arizona, a Navajo reservation community. For centuries, Navajo and Hopi peoples lived side by side in the Black Mesa region of northern Arizona. After Spanish arrival to the Southwest in the sixteenth century, white settlers, the slave trade, and the Navajo pastoral lifestyle compelled scores of Navajo to move closer to Hopi villages. Altercations between the two peoples over land increased in frequency after the 1882 formation of the Executive Order Area (EOA) for the “Hopi and such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle there-on,” as well as with the expansions of the Navajo Reservation. Navajos living on the EOA gradually outnumbered the Hopi, a factor that widened the scope of the initial land disputes. In 1962, a US. District Court in Prescott, Arizona ruled in Healing v. Jones that the Navajo and Hopi tribes have undivided equal rights to the surface and subsurface of the EOA with the exception of Grazing District Number Six (located in the heart of the EOA). This region (fig. 1 ) became known as the Joint Use Area (JUA).Following the court decision, the Hopi tribal council sought to protect the JUA’s grazing resources from further Navajo encroachment. The Hopi initiatives resulted in a series of federal actions having serious repercussions for the social and economic fabric of Navajos living in the JUA. On July 1, 1966, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) froze all residential, commercial, and infrastructural developments in the JUA unless the Hopi tribe approved them.