Long Walk of the Navajo

Long Walk of the Navajo

The Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo (Navajo: Hwéeldi), refers to the 1864 deportation and attempted ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the U.S. government. Navajos were forced to walk at gunpoint from their reservation in what is now Arizona to eastern New Mexico. Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. Some anthropologists claim that the "collective trauma of the Long Walk...is critical to contemporary Navajos' sense of identity as a people".^[2]

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long Walk of the Navajo
• Pages 445-451 - Sides, H., 2006, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West: First Anchor Books, New York, 578p.