American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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 The documents for the Chambers Checkerboard also give heretofore unpublished details on the logistics of sending non-Indian, nonlocal-government land surveyors among widely dispersed, unschooled, non-English-speaking Navajos to take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.