The Long Walk revisited

Will the route Navajos took for the Long Walk become a National Historic Trail?

Should the trail be commemorated given it is such a painful piece of the Navajo past?

Those will be some of the issues discussed when the National Park Service hosts a series of open houses on the reservation in the coming weeks.

The proposal to name the route, or routes, being that there were a number of different trails and roads the Navajos traveled to get to Bosque Redondo, as a historic trail has been in the works since 2000. But it is only recently that the Park Service, working with the Navajo Nation's Historic Preservation Office, is making the move to finalize the proposal.

In 2002 Congress passed legislation to request the National Park Service to do a feasibility study of the Long Walk routes.

According to the National Park Service Web site, to be considered a National Historic Trail, the Long Walk must be of "exceptional value" in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States. In 2006, The National Park System Advisory Board agreed that it did.

To become official Congress must confirm the feasibility study. But before it does the National Park Service will take public comments on the draft plan at open houses in communities along the proposed routes.

There will be four open houses held on the Navajo Reservation and three others along the proposed route.

On June 15 there will be an open house at the Crownpoint Chapter House from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.; June 16 in Window Rock at the Navajo Nation Museum from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.; June 17 at the Chinle Chapter House from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.; and June 18 at the Tuba City Chapter House from 2:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

An emotional subject

Judy Martin, a cultural specialist with Navajo Historic Preservation, assisted as an interpreter at the scoping meetings and heard a wide variety of comments, many emotional, on the subject.

"The old people were saying that we're not supposed to talk about these things," said Martin. "Hwéeldi was a place of death and burial.

"But the young people said they wanted to know about our history," she added. "There were all these pros and cons and different reactions."

At one meeting Martin recalled that she "bawled" her eyes out and "by the end our eyes were all red and puffy."

That type of reaction indicates the Long Walk still is an event that can produce heart-felt anguish in elderly Navajos who remember stories about it from their parents and grandparents. For these people it is not merely an historical event contained in the past.

But for some, like Antoinette Curley-Begay, an ethnographer for the Navajo Nation's Archeology Department, it is important that it be talked about.

"Our younger generation, we're saying if we don't talk about it how will we know?" said Curley-Begay.

Curley-Begay works at Diné College in Shiprock, where the Archeology Department keeps an office and trains students to be archeologists.

"Some of these students are not taught these things at home," Curley-Begay said. "There's no one to talk to them about these issues, the importance of knowing this, and how our grandmothers and grandfathers went through all this so we could be here."

The "all this" Curley-Begay is refers to is the forced removal and later imprisonment of thousands of Navajos at Bosque Redondo, N.M., by the U.S. Army from 1864-68.

More than 1 route

There was more than just one Long Walk route, said Robert Begay, director of the Navajo Archeology Department, who helped draft the feasibility study and whose staff provided one-on-one interviews with elderly Navajos.

In the beginning the Park Service had only one map with one trail, Begay said.

"That was incorrect," said Begay. "It wasn't just one expedition, there were over 50 long walks. It depended on what region you're in, we identified three main groups."

Some people did not go on the Long Walk, but instead hid and escaped detection from the army.

Some people from the Navajo Mountain area did not go on the Long Walk, said Begay.

There are also stories of harsh winters and people dying along the way to Bosque Redondo or being killed by soldiers because they couldn't keep up.

Begay said there were also stories of people who missed their relatives and voluntarily joined them in Bosque Redondo.

"There were 50 different campaigns, and a lot of different perspectives, that's why you have so many different versions of it," he said. "It all varies depending on who you talk to."

The missing 2,500

According to Harry Myers, a retired National Park Service project leader who worked on the feasibility study, military records say about 11,000 Navajos were taken from their homeland and there were a total of about 8,500 in captivity at Bosque Redondo.

What happened to the missing 2,500? They were killed or died in some way, said Myers.

"But many were unaccounted for," Myers said. "They probably died, were killed, or expired one way or another. I suspect probably more Navajo people died in addition to (the 2,500 number).

"The army maintained that they kept good records, but there's no way they could do that," he added. "There's no way to prove that but that sure is the feeling I get from reading even the military accounts."

If the Long Walk is designated as a National Historic Trail, awareness will be raised and more people would know about it, but it would look nothing like a hiking trail, said Sharon Brown, chief of trail operations for the National Park Service's Intermountain Region.

"It's not a trail that starts at point A and goes to point B - it's not like the Appalachian Trail," said Brown. "It is a trail that people can follow and visit historic sites and museums and visitor centers that tell stories of long walk events."

Typical practice for such a trail is to put markers on roads that have been laid over the historic trail, said Brown.

"For the Long Walk when Navajo people were taken to Bosque Redondo, they were following established roads of the time in the 1860s," she said. "A lot of those roads have modern roads built on top of them."

The draft feasibility study can be found on the Web at http://parkplanning.nps.gov/ntsi.

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