Indian Giving: Allotments on the Arizona Navajo Railroad Frontier, 1904–1937

Abstract

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 The documents for the Chambers Checkerboard also give heretofore unpublished details on the logistics of sending non-Indian, nonlocal-governinent land surveyors among widely dispersed, unschooled, non-English-speaking Navajos to take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

Infrastructures as colonial beachheads: The Central Arizona Project and the taking of Navajo resources

“…Both material and legal infrastructures work as forms of colonial encroachments. Rail created checkerboard land statuses for western Indigenous nations and was the bases for forced removal and diminished territories (Chang, 2011;Kelley and Francis, 2001). The land statuses that rail fashioned survive today and affect tribal sovereignty in matters such as environmental regulation over uranium mining.…”

“…After four years in a makeshift concentration camp in eastern New Mexico (1864-1868), Din e people signed a treaty with the United States that allowed the people to return to traditional homesites (Bailey, 1998). But many of these lands were already awarded to rail companies by Congress during the internment (Kelley and Francis, 2001). The Navajo reservation was reduced to a remote section of Arizona and New Mexico and was intentionally placed north of the Santa Fe rail's eventual route from Chicago to Los Angeles (Denetdale, 2007;Montoya, 2019).…”

“…For Arizona, statehood required population expansion and the control of all land and water resources. With the construction of the railway in the 1880s, the cattle industry rampaged the grasslands of northern Arizona (Kelley and Francis, 2001). Overgrazing of livestock led to desertification that was later blamed on Din e sheepherding practices.…”