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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." Klara Kelley is a self-employed anthropologist with more than twenty years' experience living and working in Navajoland.Harris Francis is a self-employed American Indian cultural rights consultant with a lifetime of experience as a Navajo. He is Tichii'nii clan born for Tibaahi clan. Kelley and Francis are coauthors of Nauujo Sucred I'laces and of' a sequel to this article, "Indian Giving: Allotments on the Arizona Navajo Railroad Frontier, 1904-1937," which appeared in the ArnmGmz Indian Culture and Kesearch Journul, volume 25, number 2.

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-governinent 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.Klara Kelley is a self-employed anthropologist with more than twenty years' experience living and working in Navajoland.Harris Francis is a self-employed American Indian cultural rights consultant with a lifetime of experience as a Navajo. He is TBchii'nii clan born for Tibaaha clan. Kelley and Francis are co-authors of Naval0 Sacred PlaceJ.