ABSTRACT

The Navajos are an Athapaskan-speaking people who migrated into the Southwest, probably in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Within two to three centuries, the Navajos encountered Hispanic and then Anglo expansion, and fought a series of wars to defend their land in what is now northern Arizona and New Mexico. First, the Navajos fought the Spanish, and then after Mexican Independence in 1821, the Navajos fought against the Mexicans. After the Anglo conquest of Mexico in 1848, uneasy Anglo-Navajo relations eventually erupted into full-fledged war in the late 1850s. As part of their campaign to subdue the Navajos, the U.S. Army envisioned a reservation and outpost, Ft. Sumner, at the Bosque Redondo (an arid, unhealthy locale further to the south in New Mexico), as a permanent home for them and for certain Apache tribes. Navajos who wanted peace with the Anglos as well as captured “hostile” Navajos were forced on the “Long Walk” to Ft. Sumner. Many Navajos died on the “Long Walk” and at Bosque Redondo, where disease and shortages of decent water and food created desperate conditions. Recognizing the failure of Bosque Redondo, the U.S. signed a peace treaty with the Navajos in 1868 that allowed them to return to their homeland, now to be recognized by the U.S. as the Navajo Reservation. Carol Douglas Sparks’s article deals with Anglo images of Navajo women from the Spanish period to the Bosque Redondo period.