The Navajo Nation is bigger than ten US states, and it kept growing
Most Native American reservations shrank over time. The Navajo Nation did the opposite: from about 3.3 million acres in 1868 it expanded, reaching its current borders in 1934, and now covers roughly 17.5 million acres across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. It is the largest reservation in the United States.
The United States took ownership of the region in 1848 at the end of the Mexican-American War. In the 1860s the Army waged scorched-earth campaigns against the Navajo, burning homes and fields and seizing livestock to force surrender. In 1864 about 8,000 people were marched some 300 miles to confinement at Bosque Redondo, an ordeal remembered as the Long Walk. The treaty ratified on July 25, 1868, signed by leaders including Barboncito, let them leave and created a reservation. It promised a square of a hundred miles each way, but the land actually granted was barely more than half that, a patch still shown as a dark-brown rectangle on the Navajo flag.
With no fences or markers, many Navajo simply went back to where they had lived before, and some had never been imprisoned at all. Expansion came mostly by executive order: President Hayes moved the western line 20 miles in 1878, and a 1905 addition around Aneth, Utah, was confirmed by Congress in 1933. The eastern edge tells a different story. Under the Dawes Act of 1887, land was split into household plots, and whatever was left over could be sold to outsiders, producing the patchwork still called the checkerboard area.
Governance grew out of matrilineal clans. Children belong to their mother's clan, the mother's eldest brother traditionally helps raise them, and clan leaders still act as a local government in practice. Resentment ran high in the 1930s when federal officials forced herd reductions to fight overgrazing; livestock carried deep cultural prestige, and that anger helped sink a proposed constitution modelled on the US one.
The seat of government is Window Rock, Arizona, and the official language is Navajo. The tribe adopted the name Navajo Nation on April 15, 1969, and its council twice rejected switching to Dine, the people's own word for themselves, in 1994 and 2017. Enrollment reached 399,494 in 2020, overtaking the Cherokee Nation as the largest tribe by membership. A federal buy-back programme had returned 155,503 acres to the Nation by March 2017.
Source: Navajo Nation
