HOPI RESERVATION, Ariz. — A rifle hangs under Pauline Whitesinger's mud-packed timber ceiling. It's placed within easy reach so she can scare off the coyotes that threaten her sheep. But there have been times when she's imagined other uses.
"Maybe we should have set up firearms at our doorways so we could defend our homes," she said in her native Navajo language, as translated by her nephew Danny Blackgoat.
Whitesinger lives like her ancestors did, in an eight-sided juniper hogan in the reaches of Big Mountain, Ariz. Miles from the nearest paved road, she is without electricity or running water. She sleeps on a cot over a dirt floor next to a wood fire built within an overturned, sawed-off barrel. She wakes each morning before dawn, and her first action is to make a small white-corn pollen offering and to pray in the direction of the rising sun.
Whitesinger is one of the last Navajos remaining on this land after the largest forced migration in the U.S. since the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In 1974, Congress drew a boundary through what had been a 1.8-million-acre joint-use area between the Navajo and Hopi tribes. While an estimated 100 Hopis were told to move from what had become the Navajo side of the boundary, about 12,000 Navajos were ordered off the Hopi side.
Sponsors of the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act said its purpose was to return to the Hopi Tribe ancestral land that had been occupied by the Navajos for more than a century. Critics said it was no coincidence that beneath the land lay some of the largest untouched coal deposits in North America, and that the Navajos needed to be moved to allow the mining.
Either way, Whitesinger said, "it was like a big wind that flew into our vicinity and said, 'This is it; you have to abide by what had passed in Congress. You are going to have to relocate.' "
In traditional Navajo belief, land cannot belong to a person. Instead, a person belongs to the land on which they were born. If Navajos stray too far from that land, they lose themselves and their sense of purpose and direction.
So when a representative from the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation "came to ask me to sign up for the relocation benefits and move," Whitesinger recalled, "I didn't bother with that person at all. But all of a sudden, it was like a sieve. Where we were a thousand points of light within this area, there are only a few of us now -- a few flickers of light."
