Annie Dodge Wauneka
Annie Dodge Wauneka (1910-1997) was a Navajo Nation leader who won the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom for her efforts to improve health care among her people.
Annie Dodge Wauneka was born on April 10, 1910, in a Navajo hogan near Sawmill, Arizona. She was raised in a non-traditional Navajo setting. Her father, Henry Chee Dodge, was a Navajo rancher and politician. Her mother, K'eehabah, was one of Dodge's three wives. Navajo custom allowed polygamy, and a man's wives were usually related to one another. Navajo society is also matrilineal, so children born to wives who were related were considered full siblings. Wauneka lived with K'eehabah for only her first year. At that time, Dodge brought Wauneka to live with him, along with her half-siblings. Dodge spoke fluent English and had been an interpreter for the government. He was a tribal council head as well as the owner of a large ranch with all the modern conveniences. For these facts alone, Wauneka's childhood would have been highly unusual for a Navajo. Their home was more like a typical farm house than like the Navajo hogans. They even had servants. Dodge kept his children humble by making them do chores, like sheep herding, so they wouldn't feel superior to the tribe's other children.
Besmehn, Michelle. National Geographic Channel gets Some New Best Friends: Best Friends Animal Society. Web National Geographic, 13 Dec. 2007. Web. 14 Jan. 2011.
Best Friends and the Fredonia Humane Society have launched a three-year partnership that will provide free spay/neuter services to residents of The Gap, an impoverished area within the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona.
Roberts, David. Finding Everett Ruess. Web National Geographic, April/May 2009.
It was a warm day in May 2008. Daisy Johnson had come from her home in Farmington, New Mexico, to Shiprock to visit her younger brother, Denny Bellson. And to tell him a story he had never heard before—a story about their grandfather, Aneth Nez, that took place back in the 1930s.
Fifty-six years old last May, Johnson was a troubled woman. A year before, she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She underwent a round of chemotherapy that nauseated her and caused her hair to fall out, but the cancer had gone away. Now, just in the past few weeks, it had come back. This time Johnson, a traditional Navajo, went to a medicine man.
"He told me this all came about because of our grandpa," Johnson said to her brother. She knew in a heartbeat that the medicine man must be right. How else had he known about her grandfather?
Bellson lives on the Navajo Reservation, just off U.S. Highway 191, not far from where he and his sister had grown up, and where their grandfather, Aneth Nez, had lived. Last May he listened to his sister’s story in electrified silence.
"A long time ago," she said, "Grandpa was sitting up there on the rim of Comb Ridge [a sandstone uplift that crosses the Utah-Arizona border]. For several days he watched this guy—he was a real young Anglo dude—riding up and down the canyon below him. The guy had two mules, one that he rode and one that was packed with things dangling off the side. It was like he was looking for something."
One day, according to Johnson, Nez saw the young man down in the riverbed, only this time he was yelling and riding fast. Nez scanned the wash below and saw three Utes chasing the boy. "They caught up with him and hit him on the head and knocked him off his mule," she recounted. "They left him there and took off with the mules and whatever else the guy had."
As he watched the scene unfold, Nez stayed out of view. For centuries Utes living north of the San Juan River had been fierce enemies of the Navajo, whose homeland lay south of the river. As late as the 1930s, tensions between the groups occasionally broke out in violence. Nez’s perch was only a few miles from that ethnic frontier.
When the Utes had gone, Nez descended some 300 feet from Comb Ridge to the bed of Chinle Wash. The young man was dead by the time Nez got to him. Rather than looking for a burial site in the open wash, the Navajo hauled the body up to the rocky folds of the ridge, in all likelihood on the back of his horse. "Grandpa got a lot of blood on him," Johnson said. "That’s what made him get sick later. Then he buried the young guy up there on the rim."
For more than three decades, Aneth Nez had told no one about this dark episode in his past. Then, in 1971, at the age of 72, he also had fallen ill with cancer. Nez paid a medicine man to diagnose his trouble. "He said," Daisy Johnson recalled, "‘You had no business messing around with that body.’"
The medicine man told Nez that the only way he could cure his cancer would be to retrieve a lock of hair from the head of the young man he had buried decades earlier, then use it in a five-day curing ceremony. "I was 19," Johnson said. "I was home for the summer. That was the first time I ever heard anything about the young dude the Utes had killed down there in Chinle Wash."
Johnson drove Nez out toward the Comb in a pickup. She waited in the cab for two hours, guessing that her grandfather was reconnoitering the land or perhaps even praying to prepare himself. He returned to the pickup empty-handed.
Later, Nez traveled back to the Comb with a medicine man. This time he retrieved a lock of hair from the grave. In the curing ceremony, Johnson said, the medicine man dusted the hair with ashes—"so it will never bother the patient again." At the end of the five days, the medicine man shot the lock with a gun, to destroy it completely.
"And then Grandpa got better," Daisy Johnson said. "He lived another ten years."
For decades, scores of wanderers in the convoluted Southwest have disappeared, and their remains have seldom been found. The mystery posed by their vanishing usually lasts for a few weeks in the newspapers. But Ruess’s disappearance launched what can only be called a cult. In bars from California to Colorado, the mere mention of his story could be counted on to provoke a heated debate over the possible ways he met his fate.
In 1940 a small California press published On Desert Trails With Everett Ruess, a handsome collage of excerpts from the young man’s letters home, his poems and essays, and his watercolor paintings and woodblock engravings
In the dozens of letters he sent home, Ruess’s writing soars with rhapsodic, even grandiose, evocations of the wilderness: “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.” But his aesthetic flights are balanced by a sense of despair and often a premonition of impending doom. “I must pack my short life full of interesting events,” he wrote to his brother from an Arizona outpost at the age of only 17. “I shall go on some last wilderness trip, to a place I have known and loved. I shall not return.”
Before I could get to Utah, however, Bellson called the FBI in Monticello. If by some remote chance the grave was that of Everett Ruess—or of some other Anglo who had been killed by Utes—it was thus a crime scene. Fearful of sidestepping the law, Bellson felt it his duty to notify the authorities.
Bellson took one fork after another as the branching trails petered out in vestigial slickrock tracks. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I asked my dad, ‘Do people live out there?’” He pointed through the windshield at the stark plateau ahead of us. “Dad said, ‘Nope. You go out there and it just drops off into a big canyon.’ I thought it was like the end of the world.”
In a deadpan voice, Bellson described his outing a week before with the FBI. The team had consisted of Boisselle, two Navajo criminal investigators, and the San Juan county sheriff, who had invited his three teenage sons along. “One of the CIs tried to lift the skull,” Bellson recounted, “and it broke into pieces. The FBI lady decided right off that it was a Navajo burial. They acted like I was wasting their time.”
Before heading out to Utah, I had gotten in touch with Ron Maldonado, the supervisory archaeologist in the Cultural Resource Compliance Section of the Navajo Nation, based in Window Rock, Arizona. Maldonado was instantly intrigued—and instantly cautious. He agreed, however, to go out to the site with us and have a look around. Maldonado, I learned, was married to a Navajo, and he had vast experience with crevice burials on the reservation.
After a while, Maldonado commented, “It’s definitely a full-size skull. But it’s still growing. It looks like a guy in his 20s.” Many minutes later: “He’s not facing east. As far as I can tell, he’s facing to the southwest. If it was a Navajo burial, he’d be facing east.”
Later still: “It just doesn’t look like a Navajo burial. They would have put the saddle in the crevice with him.”
Bellson spoke up. “They would have killed the horse too. Hit it with an ax, and left the ax handle in the grave.
“Smell the bones?” Bellson asked.
Maldonado sat up, trowel in hand. “Yeah. You can smell them even when they’re a thousand years old. It gets into the dirt. It’s a smell I can never forget. This guy I used to work with calls it ‘people grease.’”
We took a break to sit in the shade and eat lunch. Maldonado mused: “Look at that crevice. It’s not a likely place to bury somebody. You could make a much better burial right over there, or there.” He pointed to a pair of ample slots in the rimrock cliff just behind us. “He may have been trying to hide the body in a hurry,” Maldonado went on. “Just stuff him in there, then maneuver him around. He had to get him in the ground before sunset.
“It all makes sense. The 1930s were a really volatile time on the reservation. The government had started wholesale livestock reduction, killing thousands of Navajo sheep and cattle. They were hauling the kids off to boarding schools. Here’s a Navajo guy who witnesses a murder. Your grandpa,” Maldonado nodded at Bellson, “doesn’t want the remains just lying out on the ground. In the ’30s, if a white guy gets killed on the rez, they call out the cavalry. Round up a bunch of Navajos, pick a suspect, and lock him in jail. I can see why your grandpa would have tried to hide the guy. And then I can see why he wouldn’t tell anybody about it for 37 years.”
After lunch, Maldonado went back to work. Finally, toward late afternoon, we sat in the shade again. The archaeologist lowered his head and wiped his brow as he pondered, silent for so long that he seemed to be meditating. Finally he spoke: “It just doesn’t look like a Navajo burial. Who else lives in this area?”
“Nobody,” said Bellson.
“Who else could be buried out here?”
Bellson shook his head. He had asked his neighbors. There were no stories of gravesites on this part of the Comb. “Mom and Dad,” Bellson added, “always told us to stay away from here. They never told us why.”
“According to Navajo Nation policy,” Maldonado said, “we’re supposed to protect graves, whether Native American or not. But we’re also supposed to try to find the lineal descendants if there’s an unidentified body.” He turned to me. “Who’s the relative you talked to?”
. “Out here,” he said, “Navajo oral tradition is pretty accurate. Based on that tradition, I think there’s a good chance this is Everett Ruess.”
Lying loose in a cranny in front of the crevice was a 1912 dime that had been converted into a button. The thing struck all three men as a very Navajo kind of relic (antique Navajo belts made of silver dollars fetch high prices). But we also knew that Ruess loved to wear Indian jewelry. In any event, the button gave us a terminus ad quem: the burial could not have taken place before 1912.
Blake, Kevin S. In Search of a Navajo Sacred Geography. Geograpical Review, Oct. 2001, Vol 91(4), p. 715-724. Identifier: ISSN: 00167428 ; DOI: 10.2307/3594728
Section: GEOGRAPHICAL FIELD NOTE
“One must know one's terrain.” This phrase, mumbled by George Garrad, the gin-soaked cartographer in the 1995 film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain, directed by Christopher Monger, voices a vehement rationale for understanding mountains through field exploration. Garrad and his assistant, Reginald Anson, have arrived in Wales to measure the heights of mountains. But Garrad's irksome personality and penchant for condescension inspire those around him to great lengths of avoidance, and his commitment to mapmaking falls lamentably short of his devotion to the bottle. Conversely, Anson's passion for fieldwork and fascination with what the local summit means to the Welsh enable the village to succeed in its efforts to raise the height of the “hill” so that it will appear as a mountain on government maps. While George Garrad accepts determination of an exact elevation as the utmost task, his young partner Anson and the Welsh can see beyond this quantification to the more powerful symbolic qualities of landscapes.
Half a world away, in the wild and tumbled mountains of eastern Arizona, the ethnographer Keith Basso discovers another kind of drinking: “As Apache men and women set about drinking from places—as they acquire knowledge of their natural surroundings, commit it to memory, and apply it to the workings of their minds—they show by their actions that their surroundings live in them” (1996,146). The rich place-names and tribal narratives of the sacred landscape of the Western Apache homeland recall its mythical importance and deeply influence the Apache sense of self and place.
The Englishman and Keith Basso also share an evocation of the importance of knowing where we are, especially in fieldwork. It is understood that this knowledge runs deeper than a single attribute (Fisher and Wood 1998). Technologies such as global positioning systems may help many people record their spatial coordinates, but the raw data fall well short of accounting for the cultural and symbolic qualities that are needed in the geographical sleuthing of the precise location of sacred mountains. To find the earthly manifestation of a mythical sacred mountain we must instead rely on qualitative assessments of landform shape, relative location, intervisibilities (line-of-sight views of one sacred mountain from another), folklore, place-names, ceremonial use, and previous explorations.
Gobernador Knob, one of the preeminent Navajo (or Diné) sacred mountains and a critical piece of the Navajo sacred geography, is often terra incognita in the literature and maps of Navajo lands. Unknown terrains hold great imaginative appeal for the likes of John K. Wright (1947), but geographical omissions or misplacements take on even more potent significance in pilgrimage and sacred-land studies.
NAVAJO SACRED GEOGRAPHY
There is consensus today about the precise location of five of six deeply symbolic Navajo sacred mountains. The Navajo world is bounded by four cardinal mountains: Blanca Peak, Colorado, in the east; Mount Taylor, New Mexico, in the south; San Francisco Peaks, Arizona, in the west; and Hesperus Mountain, Colorado, in the north (Wyman 1957). Within Dinétah, the original Navajo homeland, lie two sacred mountains: Huerfano Mountain and Gobernador Knob, both in northwestern New Mexico (Jett 2001) (Figure 1).
But the geography is not so simple, In an effort to complete fieldwork at each sacred summit, with the goal of comparing the actual land use of these mountains with their symbolic values (Blake 200l), I found a great deal of confusion, even among the Navajo, about the exact location of Gobernador Knob. With such misinformation, how can the Navajo connect with the spiritual power of the place, and how can culturally sensitive land management be ensured? For the Navajo, events need to be spatially anchored, or their significance is reduced and cannot be properly assessed (Basso 1996). It is widely accepted that Gobernador Knob is in the vicinity of Dinétah, which is located east of the main Navajo Reservation near “The Checkerboard,” an area of mixed private, state, federal, and Navajo lands. It can also be readily surmised, toponymically, that Gobernador Knob may be located near Gobernador Canyon east of Bloomfield, New Mexico. Approximate location, however, is of limited value when searching for a relatively small, indistinct knob set in a sea of similar mesa and butte landforms.
So, I set off in search of a Navajo sacred geography.[ 1] The task was complicated by the many scholars of Navajo land and culture who mistakenly identify, misplace, grossly generalize, or omit the location of Gobernador Knob on maps and in place descriptions, even when sacred mountains are an explicit focus of the work.[ 2] Confusion also exists among Navajo-authored works about their own sacred lands.[ 3] Although it is tempting to believe that these mistakes are instances of deliberate protection of American Indian religious beliefs from prying eyes (and some efforts along these lines are necessary), all of these errors are probably inadvertent. No effort is made or mandated to hide the location of major Navajo sacred landforms (Jett 1995). Furthermore, the knob is located beyond the reservation boundaries on land under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management; its location is a matter of public record.
The inference to be drawn from the rather copious literature is that the scholars and cartographers who misplace Gobernador Knob have not visited the place. Field exploration is typically beyond their central focus, but their work nevertheless confounds the Navajo sacred geography. I am not the only scholar of Navajo sacred mountains to have climbed Gobernador Knob or to understand its correct location, but the detailed landscape exploration and understanding of mountain symbolism that I used to find the exact sacred summit reveals important aspects of place attachment and the value of qualitative methods in fieldwork.[ 4]
SEARCHING FOR GOBERNADOR KNOB
The misinformation about the exact location of the knob stems from many factors. Greater scholarly emphasis has typically been placed on the higher and more dramatic four cardinal mountains, resulting in less attention to the details of Huerfano Mountain and Gobernador Knob. Also, Gobernador Knob has the second-lowest elevation of the six sacred mountains ( 2,316meters) and the least local relative relief compared with the surrounding terrain, only about 60 meters to the east and 220 meters to the west. Simply put, it is not nearly as visually or topographically impressive as are many Four Corners landforms. Complicating matters is the limited visibility of the knob from any major roadway. The knob is barely discernable from U.S. Highway 64, even if one knows exactly where to look. Next is the matter of accessibility. Even if one knows the approximate location of Gobernador Knob, actually getting there is relatively difficult. It is well off the beaten track, and although the effort is not all that strenuous, it requires persistence and route-finding skills by automobile and on foot. The distant location of Gobernador Knob from major population centers further conspires to keep the knob in obscurity, with little visitation.
Confusion is also created by the multitude of “Gobernador” place-names in the area (Julyan 1996). A Spanish word for “governor” the name “Gobernador” was also given to a major tributary of the San Juan River, a town site, and, most significantly, a survey benchmark. No maps for this area include the name “Gobernador Knob,” but the county, Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service, and U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps all show survey benchmark designations, including the one named “Gobernador.” When someone wants to locate Gobernador Knob, the natural tendency is to zero in on the Gobernador benchmark. Placed in 1945, this benchmark sits atop Manzanares Mesa overlooking Gobernador Canyon.[ 5] The problem with this location is that nothing there quite looks like a prominent knob. The terrain is fairly nondescript, hardly what one expects for a sacred mountain. In reality, the Gobernador benchmark is located nearly 26 kilometers northwest of Gobernador Knob. Why is the Gobernador benchmark not on Gobernador Knob? When the knob benchmark was placed in 1906 it was named “Snyder.”[ 6] The etymology of “Snyder” is long forgotten—the survey record book simply notes that the summit of Gobernador Knob had the name (Marshall 1910).[ 7] The crux of the misunderstanding is that the Snyder benchmark is on Gobernador Knob and that the Gobernador benchmark is on Manzanares Mesa.
Evidence supporting the assertion that the Snyder benchmark is on Gobernador Knob begins with the observations of Richard Van Valkenburgh, a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee in the 1930s who compiled a detailed geographical dictionary of the Navajo lands (1999). His notes, now on deposit in Tucson, describe the location of Gobernador Knob, and he also made a sketch showing the knob just southwest of four small knoblike summits or cerritos (Van Valkenburgh n.d.). Barely noticeable along Laguna Seca Mesa to the northeast of the Snyder station are the four cerritos, hardly enough to merit a glance without the archival map. To actually find the knob I searched for each benchmark in the area, driving the maze of narrow and winding back roads maintained in various states of decay by the Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, or natural-gas production companies. The closest road access to the Snyder benchmark still requires a moderate hike westward through a dense piñon pine and juniper woodland. Suddenly, emerging from the forest at the edge of the mesa at the headwaters of Gobernador Canyon, a knob comes into view (Figure 2). Indeed, this is the place! It is the only prominent knob in the area, and it fits the Van Valkenburgh description and map perfectly, located on the western escarpment of Laguna Seca Mesa, 8 kilometers south of U.S. Highway 64.[ 8]
SACRED—MOUNTAIN SYMBOLISM
Even more significant to the identification of Gobernador Knob as one of the central Navajo sacred mountains than the Van Valkenburgh archives is the symbolism of the landform shape. On top of Gobernador Knob, First Man created Changing Woman, the most trusted Navajo spirit and the near-personification of the natural order of the universe. Here she gave birth to her twin sons, who heroically killed the monsters that once imperiled all of the Navajo country (Reichard 1950). The centrality of Gobernador Knob in Navajo lore created a symbolic link between the shape of the summit and the first type of Navajo dwelling. The hogan, or Navajo home place, is most commonly seen today with a (female) rounded top, but the earlier style was called a (male) conical forked-pole hogan because of its construction method (Wyman 1970). The Navajo spirits decreed that this form of hogan have a fine tapering shape in association with Gobernador Knob (Figure 3).
The summit of the knob is surprisingly fiat and large (10 by 30 meters). In addition to the Snyder station mark at the high point, three aspects of sacred-mountain symbolism are visible: a symbolic tie to a Navajo toponym, intervisibilities with other sacred places, and evidence of ceremonial visits. The Navajo descriptive name for Gobernador Knob is “Ch'óol'í'í,” a name that likely refers to a lookout or vantage point and perhaps also to spruce trees (Julyan 1996). The knob certainly is a superb lookout, commanding a view of nearly 200 kilometers across northwestern New Mexico and into northeastern Arizona and southern Colorado. Spruce trees are absent at Gobernador Knob, yet in clear skies the westward view can encompass the Chuska Mountains in northeastern Arizona, whose Navajo descriptive name means “White Spruce Mountains” (Wyman 1970). Another key intervisibility is a view to the southwest from Gobernador Knob that includes Huerfano Mountain, the other central sacred summit, approximately 50 kilometers distant (Figure 4). The relative position of Gobernador and Huerfano along a line trending northeast-southwest results in a solstitial alignment: At sunrise on the summer solstice, a view from Huerfano sees the sun rise over Gobernador, and on the winter solstice the sun sets behind Huerfano when viewed from Gobernador.[ 9] Completing the symbolic accretions at Gobernador Knob are the numerous pottery shards found in a wide area to the north and east, as well as their ceremonial arrangement at the summit. There is no recreation in this area, and no casual visitor would seek this out-of-the-way knob—the pottery-shard arrangements speak to Navajo visits. Repeated fieldwork at the summit confirms that stones, shards, and forked sticks are part of the ongoing ceremonial display at the summit.
This fieldwork has proved once again the value of get-your-boots-dirty fieldwork. I would never have found the correct sacred summit without immersing myself in the exploration of the area, and this also furthered my understanding of the contribution that precise knowledge of Gobernador Knob's location makes to Navajo place attachment. A resurgence of Navajo identity based on traditional sacred geography has occurred in recent years. In part this is indicated by the teaching curriculum in Navajo schools, which includes a section on the locations of the sacred mountains, and it is also manifested in Navajo visits to the sacred peaks. In each case, knowledge of exactly where the spirits rise is elemental to place attachment.
Paradoxically, the virtually unknown summit of Gobernador Knob is among the Navajo sacred mountains most threatened by development. Natural-gas wells and booster stations in the San Juan Basin have long been visible and audible from the summit of Gobernador, but an expansion of the drilling activity since 1999 places drill pads and well operations within 0.8 kilometer of the knob, well within the zone of pottery shards (Figure 5).[ 10] Energy development causes great change in the character of a sacred place (Talbot 1985), making it all the more important to know the exact location of Gobernador Knob. Without an understanding of the symbolic significance of the landform, little can be done to monitor and potentially modify the drilling activities.[ 11]
Knowledge of the exact location of sacred summits is elemental to place attachment and to determinations of appropriate land uses given the pertinent environmental ethics. Gobernador Knob should be protected for its symbolic qualities, even if that involves transfer of the land from the Bureau of Land Management to the Navajo. Unlike many other Navajo sacred sites located off the reservation, such as Rainbow Bridge or the San Francisco Peaks, Gobernador Knob has little significance to other cultures, and an appropriate transfer might only involve about 1 square kilometer. Precedents exist for the transfer of sacred sites to American Indians, including the return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo (Talbot 1985) and a portion of Huerfano Mountain to the Navajo (Brugge 1999). But limits must exist on the degree to which Gobernador Knob is signed or otherwise popularized. In the long run, even gas wells would likely have less impact than would the trammeling of a constant stream of sacred-mountain curiosity mongers. After all, every culture needs wild places like Gobernador Knob to explore and to reaffirm spiritual awareness.
NOTES
1. My efforts to find Gobernador Knob commenced in 1994 and culminated in field explorations of the summit in 1996, 1999, and 2000.
2. Gobernador Knob's location is misplaced or grossly generalized on the maps of Brugge (1983), Jett (1992), Trimble (1993), Time Traveler Maps (1998), and Jett (200l). The knob is omitted from the maps of Gilpin (1968), Goodman (1982), Kelley and Francis (1994), and Baars (1995), even though other sacred places are mapped and the sacred mountains are explained in the text. A photograph caption in Baars mistakenly identifies Huerfano Mountain as Gobernador Knob (1995).
3. Bingham and Bingham correctly identify Gobernador Knob in a photograph, but their detailed map misplaces it by approximately 26 kilometers (1982). The gazetteer description in Wilson (1995) generalizes the location of the knob to a similar extent.
4. Wyman (1957), McPherson (1992), Julyan (1996), and Linford (2000) correctly map or describe the location of Gobernador Knob. David M. Brugge, a leading anthropologist of Navajo culture, has also visited the knob, and the Bureau of Land Management Farmington (New Mexico) Field Office is aware of the precise location.
5. The National Geodetic Survey Gobernador benchmark (elevation 2,126 meters) is located at 36°42′55″ N, 107°36′05″ W, in the northwestern quadrant of Section 20, Township 29 North, Range 7 West, Rio Arriba County.
6. The National Geodetic Survey Snyder benchmark (on Gobernador Knob, elevation 2,316 meters) is located at 36°38′15″ N, 107°20′9″ W, in the northwestern quadrant of Section 26, Township 28 North, Range 5 West, Rio Arriba County.
7. Survey station names are generally chosen to reflect a nearby natural feature or a landowner's name. Perhaps Snyder was a local rancher at the time: The initials “D. S.” are deeply carved into a large boulder on the summit.
8. The best access to Gobernador Knob is to follow Forest Road 314 southward from U.S. Highway 64 at a point approximately 0.3 kilometer east of mile marker 105, just west of the western boundary of Carson National Forest. After 8 kilometers in a generally southern direction a right turn leads past the Muñoz benchmark and communications towers, and then the road again bends south. At a total of 11 kilometers the road intersects the graded natural-gas well-production site pictured in Figure 5 (Burlington Resources, San Juan 28-5, Unit 103M). From this parking area, the knob is approximately 0.8 kilometer west-southwest. No current maps for the area indicate the correct alignment of Forest Road 314, but the 7.5 minute Gobernador Quadrangle is helpful in orienteering.
9. After being alerted to the possibility of this spatial alignment by David M. Brugge (with attribution to Hugh Rodgers), astrophysicist Steve B. Howell confirmed the solstitial relationship, with Gobernador Knob and Huerfano Mountain along an azimuth of approximately 65.5°. This alignment could in part account for the prevalence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puebloan and Navajo settlements in the immediate area (Brugge 1983).
10. In 1999 the decline of well pressures in the San Juan Basin prompted an aggressive infill well-drilling program that will add approximately 2,000 wells over the next ten years. Additional secondary recovery operations (involving greater use of equipment, such as pumpjack units and more land disturbance) will also supplement the well-drilling program. Most of the mineral production in the San Juan Basin is natural gas.
11. The Bureau of Land Management is aware of the significance of Gobernador Knob and has included it as a 360-acre Area of Critical Environmental Concern in its Noise Sensitive Area Program. The program is designed to monitor and improve noise quality emitting from oil and gas operations, yet other environmental impacts and visual impairments are unaddressed.
In the search for this sacred mountain I appreciate the assistance of William R. Blake, David M. Brugge, Steve B. Howell, Stephen C. Jett, Robert Julyan, and William A. Stone.
Natural Resources. The Navajo Nation Division of Econoimic Development, Window Rock Arizna.
Natural Resources
Energy and Natural Resources
Of the 17.2 million acres comprising the Navajo Reservation, 1.4 million acres are suitable for irrigation. The Nation’s priority rights to water flowing through its lands are established by federal law.
About 40 percent as large as the State of Washington of the Reservation also includes 523,000 acres of Ponderosa Pine and Douglas Fur and 4.5 million acres of Pinon Pine and Juniper.
Navajoland is also endowed with vast reserves of coal, uranium, oil, and natural gas. Peabody Coal Company and the Pittsburgh and Midway Coal Company mine 23 million tons per year. Oil wells produced 6.1 million barrels in 1991, while natural gas productions totaled 4.5 million MCF.
Coal, oil, and uranium have been the foundation of the Navajo economy since the 1920’s. Leases for mineral and petroleum exploration or extraction currently total 400,000 acres, or about 2.5 percent of the reservations land area. Mine-mouth coal generating stations in and around Navajo country provide a substantial percentage of electrical power to the American Southwest and southern California. The Nation’s oil and gas severance is four percent of the value of the minerals extracted from reservation lands, and a three percent possessory interest tax is levies on the value of natural resource leaseholds.
Energy and natural resource revenues, including earnings from forest products and agricultural enterprises, are expected to remain major contributors to the Navajo economy even as it diversifies. The Navajo Nation practices environmentally protection in the prudent development of its mineral resources.
Brieu, Sylvie. All Roads Film Project: Events. Web National Geographic Dec 2010.
“The number 4 is also symbolic. We talk about the 4 directions, the 4 sacred colors and the 4 mountains that surround the Navajo territory.”
Navajo Nation’s Arizona Casion to cost $180 Million. Web Associated Press, 3 March 2010.
FLAGSTAFF - The Navajo Nation plans to break ground this fall on a $180 million resort, spa and casino near Twin Arrows east of Flagstaff.
Navajo Nation Gaming Enterprise chief executive officer Bob Winter said he is seeking an architect to design a "green" resort on the north side of Interstate 40, about 30 minutes from Flagstaff.
Winter said final financing for the gambling house is likely to come through in the coming days with completion estimated in the fall of 2011.
The resort-casino will feature a golf course, hotel rooms and a store selling native arts and crafts.
It will have its own sewage treatment plant, but Winter did not know much water the resort would use or where the water would come from.
The tribe opened its first casino east of Gallup, N.M., in 2008.
Peter, Iverson. Four our Navajo people: Dine letters. Speeches & petitions, 1900-1960. New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press. 2002.
This book takes 1900 as its starting point, when most Americans assumed that Indian reservations were temporary enclaves and that Indian communities were destined for disappearance. It conclude in 1960, by which time it had become quite clear that Indians were here to stay. Although substantial evidence is available from the 1960s to the present, material from the prior six decades is much more difficult to find.
1868: incarcerated at Fort Sumner in east central New Mexico; signed treaty for initial land base the acreage woluld more than quadruple over 70 years. Now 25,000 square miles.
Navajo-Hopi land dispute clashed over resources: still their bread
The Holy People had meant for the Navajo to live between the four sacred mountains
Chee Dodge/ Man Who Interprets; wanted education to come to the reserveation and teach his tribe English and to have a trade school
1926 get ride of horses to make room for grazing sheep
Oil on the Hogback in the Treaty area of the reservation
Underhill, Ruth M. The Navajos.
“If there were no horses, there would be no Navajos” people did not want to get ride of their horses
The washingot had charge 1902; Civil Service adopted a few employees and slowly enclued more employees and in 1906 the Navajos were given paid work on buildings, and the people were divided into chapters, and create a council
Prior to 1933 the main breed of sheep was the little churro ewes and introduced in 1907
Between 1900 and 1925 nine boarding schools and two day schools were set up on the reservation; children taken from camps and put into schools for years: brick buildings, whitewashed corridors, huge dormitories; high discipline
As early as 1893 agents had been agitating for day schools, but the great amount of area between homes and schools was difficult
Particularly pressing was the case of the Navajos. While nearly every Hogan still had its sheep and nearly every man his horse, and while splendid ceremonies still held the old way of life together, the general level of prosperity ahd dropped alarmingly. The largest annual income on the reservation (that of government employees near Fort Defiance) was $2,000, and the smallest, in the barren west, was $31. Navajos who left the reservation to earn money were likely to return after a few months, too lonely to remain away.
High rate of tuberculosis deaths
The New Deal, with its program for national welfare, came in, and with it came a new Indian Commissioner and, for the Navajos, a change that amounted to revolution. When a man had food and flocks, his kinfold knew it and expected hospitality. When he had money, he could conceal the fact and fail in his duty.
Window Rock, near Fort Defiance as the Navajo Capital; Navajos sat huddled in sheepskin coats and bright Pendleton blankets, their shaggy hair in buns, and here and there a long moustache drooping over the green and yellow blanket. When the speech was over the Navajo rose to reply, all he had was: “Yes, but what about our sheep?”
Navajos volunteered for the armed services. The white world was no longer merely an abode of mysterious enemies, but a place one might enter. Should the Navajos refuse this honor of a bearial? Not to touch the body and avoid contact. For the war dead, at least, public burial was accepted
The government instituted a campaign with moving pictures to show why each Indian should take a “paper name” which he would keep all his life, instead of different names, changed after every important event.
Post war- alcoholism
Bruchac, Joseph, Begay, Shonot. Navajo Long Walk: the Tragic Story of a Proud People’s Forced March From Their Homeland. National Geographic Society, 2002.
Tells the tragic story of how, in the 1860s, U.S. soldiers forced thousands of Navajos to march to a desolate reservation four hundred miles from their homeland in an effort to "civilize" them, only to have hundreds die along the way and the rest find unspeakable living conditions at their destination. Teacher's Guide available.
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