TUBA CITY, Ariz. — Etta Begay walks to the nearest store, a round trip of about eight miles, nearly every day to buy ice for the two plastic picnic coolers that serve as her family's refrigerator.
"If we don't have any money on a certain day, we don't have any ice," she said. "Then the food goes bad."
Like hundreds of other Navajo Indian families caught up in a land dispute between their tribe and the neighboring Hopis, the Begays live without electricity or telephone. They've been prevented by federal law for more than 25 years from repairing or improving their property without permission from both tribes.
The 110-year-old standoff has forced hundreds of Navajos and scores of Hopis from their traditional homes, while more than 600 Navajo holdouts defiantly continue to live on land Congress has awarded to the Hopis. Despite years of negotiations, legal battles in the federal courts and a series of congressional acts, the dispute seems no closer to resolution.
A court order that would have ended the enforced squalor surrounding the Begays and their neighbors is on hold pending appeal. And a mediated settlement that would have put millions of federal dollars and thousands of acres of public land into settling the overall dispute collapsed this summer, apparently sending the matter back to court.
The fight over a slice of northwestern Arizona high country has its roots in an 1882 order by President Chester A. Arthur that drew a 2.5-million-acre square on the map for the Hopi and "such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle thereon."
Navajos lay claim to part of the area, an island in their 14.8-million-acre reservation that spreads across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
Years of litigation between the tribes reduced the size of the Hopi reservation and created a "joint use area" of nearly 2 million acres, which Congress partitioned between the tribes in 1974.
Approximately 2,000 Navajo families--as many as 8,000 individuals--and about 160 Hopis found themselves on the wrong side of the new boundaries.
Relocation of the Hopis, traditionally village dwellers and farmers, was accomplished with relative ease. But for the Navajos, who made their meager living primarily by herding sheep and who lived in far-flung family "camps," the relocation would not be so easy.
Almost 20 years after the land was partitioned, hundreds of Navajo families still have not moved and many say they will never leave the land voluntarily.
