Strength, suffering, survival

May 21—FORT SUMNER — Aaron Roth remembers sitting at the front desk at the Bosque Redondo Memorial when a mother from the Navajo Nation walked in with her daughter.

"This mother was carrying a giant rock," Roth said. "She dropped it on the countertop and said 'I've got to tell you my story.'"

Roth, the Memorial's site manager since 2015, said the woman told him her great-great grandmother had been part of The Long Walk to Fort Sumner around 1864.

"Before any of the people were taken to this place," she told Roth, "the people were in their village. They had heard about things happening in neighboring villages and one day their scouts came back and said the military was coming. 'You need to leave now.'"

Many of the people in the village were elderly or children. They knew they could not make a fast getaway to avoid the soldiers. And so the great-great grandmother instructed her family and friends:

"I want you to go into your gardens and gather your seeds. Go into your homes and gather what is most important. Then take these things to the caves."

The woman told Roth the village in the Four Corners region around northwest New Mexico was surrounded by slot canyons — narrow gorges in soft rock — with caverns hidden inside. The people carried their prized possessions to these caverns, then covered them with large rocks — including the one placed on the countertop before Roth that day in 2017.

"If we survive Bosque Redondo," the great-great grandmother had said, "we will have something to plant and something we can rebuild with when we come back."

Roth said the rock today is at the Memorial's prayer shrine, established by Navajo medicine men in 1971. The shrine is a place for prayer and acknowledgment of Navajo (Diné) and Mescalero Apache (Ndé) ancestors who endured so much hardship in connection with The Long Walk and imprisonment at Bosque Redondo reservation in the mid-1860s.

About 1,500 people are expected to visit the Bosque Redondo Memorial south of Fort Sumner on Saturday when New Mexico Historic Sites presents the grand opening for a permanent exhibit called Bosque Redondo: A Place of Suffering ... A Place of Survival.

The site has a "mixed bag" of meaning, Roth said last week as he prepared for the event.

"I think the local communities see it as a place of remembrance, a place of potential healing and a place for honoring the strength of the people from the Navajo Nation and Mescalero Apache tribes.

"But when you talk to (Navajos and Mecaleros), their feelings vary from person to person. Some will say, 'We still don't want to talk about it.' Others see it as a point of history to take strength from: 'My people survived this; the reason I am here today, standing in this place, is because of what they went through.'

"Everyone feels a different way about this space."

'Great evil' seen as barricade to the west

As white settlers pressed west in the 1840s, they must have been awed on some level by the Navajo Nation in what's now known as New Mexico and Arizona.

American author and 19th-century explorer Josiah Gregg said the 10,000 native souls were "the most important ... of all the northern tribes of Mexico."

Gregg praised the Navajo serape, a blanket "highly prized for protection against the rains." He admired the people's wealth of quality horses, mules, cattle, sheep and goats and wrote appreciatively of their considerable skills at growing a wide variety of grains and vegetables.

But whatever respect frontiersmen may have initially felt for the natives, that emotion was soon overwhelmed by fear, followed by a determination to destroy the "savages" many Americans felt stood in the way of their manifest destiny — God's will to expand the country, spreading democracy, Christianity and capitalism.

Gregg wrote that his concerns were the Navajos' "present predatory and somewhat unsettled habits."

U.S. Army Gen. James Carleton in the 1860s would come to describe Navajo raiders as a "great evil," and declared they "must be whipped and fear us."

Indeed, the natives were known to kill white settlers, steal livestock and kidnap white children to raise as their own in the process.

In "Diné: A History of the Navajos," Author Peter Iverson reports the Navajo learned the war tactics from Mexicans and Spaniards before them, dating back to the 1600s, as a parade of invaders tried to take and tame the land inside the region's four mountains the Navajo believed to be sacred and intended for them.

By the early 1860s, attempts at peace between the natives and the invaders had all been abandoned. Famed scout and Indian fighter Kit Carson, a lieutenant colonel in the First New Mexico Volunteer Infantry, would employ a "scorched earth" attack aimed at eliminating or "civilizing" the Navajo.

Carson was successful. About 10,000 Navajo and 500 Mescalero Apache, starving after soldiers destroyed their crops and water sources and slaughtered their livestock, surrendered and were marched up to 400 miles to the reservation called the Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner.

An estimated 2,000 natives died on The Long Walk or in captivity at the place the Navajo came to call Hweeldi — a place of suffering.

Cultural clashes result in The Long Walk

The Bosque Redondo Memorial was initially established as the Fort Sumner State Monument in 1970, its focus on the U.S. Army stationed at Fort Sumner whose mission was to neutralize the Navajo and Mescalero Apache Indians who were terrorizing settlers headed west.

The military's stated intentions were to help the natives adapt to new lives as residents of the United States, which had won the territory after war with Mexico. Records show the Army attempted to convey to the tribes that the U.S. wanted to be friends, not enemies.

Treaties were negotiated and signed, but terms were often ignored within days.

Cultural and language differences were no doubt factors in the decades-long attempts to find peace.

— The tribes had no real concept of land ownership, the Army failed to understand that treaties negotiated with one band of Navajo were not recognized by other bands. Author Hampton Sides, in his book "Blood and Thunder" wrote that many of the Navajo had never seen paper or pen before and had no understanding of how the mark they were asked to make related to any kind of agreement.

— The Army negotiated only with native men, but the Navajo were a matriarchal society.

— While many of the natives had been converted to Catholicism under Mexican rule, they also found ways to incorporate their own faith, which included belief in a spirit world that interacted with the living. The natives largely rejected the Christianity brought by the U.S., especially when attempts were made to introduce the new religion to their children.

Records show the reservation was supposed to be a place where the natives could be independent, learn to farm and become productive citizens of their new country. The Army's plan was to feed and house those on the reservations until they could learn to assimilate into their new environment.

But for all the stated good intentions, most of the plans never came to fruition.

Floods and bug infestations ruined the crops. The water from the nearby Pecos River was alkaline and those who drank it anyway were often made sick. Cottonwood trees that gave the region its name — Bosque Redondo is Spanish for round forest — were gone almost before the first Indians arrived on the reservation, used up to build fort structures and housing for the soldiers.

"Navajo and Apache had to walk up to 20 miles a day to find mesquite for firewood," Roth said.

The plan to build adobe-style houses for the residents of the reservation was never going to work. Kit Carson, who oversaw life at Bosque Redondo for a time, tried to tell military leaders that the Navajo would not live in a home if someone died there, which was inevitable. "He said he could not relieve the people of their superstitions," Roth said.

So a lot of the natives dug ditches, where they slept under blankets at night, Roth said.

And while the Army tried to ship supplies to the fort, those plans often failed as well. The United States may have designated 40 square miles surrounding the fort as land belonging to the Navajo and Apache, but the Comanche Indians of the Plains considered that area to be their homeland. The Comanche often intercepted the supplies headed for Fort Sumner and sometimes raided the area around the fort itself, killing Navajos and Apaches and kidnapping their children.

By 1868, the U.S. government realized its plan at Fort Sumner had been a colossal failure. The Apaches had already left the reservation by then, with little effort from soldiers to stop them. The Navajo continued to press for a return to their land, as they had since their capture and forced migration.

On June 1 of that year, government officials and more than three dozen Navajo men approved a treaty declaring: "From this day forward all war between the parties to this agreement shall forever cease.

"The Government of the United States desires peace, and its honor is hereby pledged to keep it. The Indians desire peace, and they now pledge their honor to keep it."

The agreement provided about 5,200 square miles of land for the Navajo in their original homeland. The natives also received an allotment of seeds, cattle, tools and other materials to help them rebuild what Carson's army had destroyed. The tribe agreed to not harm those passing through their new reservation. Their reverse migration home began later in June of 1868.

Following a series of legislative debates and land purchases, the Navajo Nation today has expanded to just over 27,000 square miles.

On the 150-year anniversary of the treaty in 2018, Smithsonian Magazine reported:

"The Navajo Nation is the largest, acreage-wise, and most numerous (about 350,000 people today), of the 500 or so Indian tribes that once roamed the land now known as the United States. That is not by accident. The Navajo people have their ancestors to thank for having stood up to the federal government 150 years ago to demand that they be returned to their homeland."

Students: 'Where is our history?'

When a group of Navajo students happened upon the Bosque Redondo Memorial in 1990 — they were returning from a Native youth conference in Oklahoma and decided to stop — they found the story of The Long Walk shockingly incomplete.

One exhibit, Roth said, referred to the Navajo as a "plague."

"That's what these kids saw when they visited," Roth said. "There was a lot of information about fort life, what the soldiers endured, but it did not come across very well that this was a place where people suffered and died."

And so the students wrote a letter, which they left at the prayer shrine. It said they found the place discriminating and offensive. "Where is our history?" they wanted to know.

Coming Wednesday: Navajo students inspire stories from the Native perspective.

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