The Wind Won't Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Dispute

by Emily Benedek

For the past twenty-five years, our country’s last Indian war has been raging in the Joint Use Area around Big Mountain and Coal Mine Mesa, Arizona. There Navajos are pitted against their Hopi neighbors--and against a United States government that has divided the land between the two tribes and then decreed that Indians living on the "wrong" side must move. With the narrative sweep and emotional veracity of a great novel, Emily Benedek recounts the tortuous progress of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute and portrays the lives it has consumed.

Genres: History, Native American, Nonfiction, Westerns, American History

480 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1992

About the author

Emily Benedek graduated from Harvard College. Her articles and essays have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vogue, The Dallas Morning News, Mosaic, Tablet magazine, and on NPR, among others. Her first book, The Wind Won’t Know Me: A History of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute (Alfred a. Knopf, Inc.), was a finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. Her books include Beyond the Four Corners of the World: A Navajo Woman’s Journey (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), and a memoir, Through the Unknown, Remembered Gate (Schocken). She is also the author of Red Sea (St. Martins Press), a thriller about terrorism and counter-terrorism, and Hometown Betrayal: A Tragic Story of Secrecy and Abuse in Mormon Country, an Amazon Best Seller. She has two daughters and lives in New York City. For more information, go to www.emilybenedek.com

Reviews

[Peggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing and intricate piece of reporting about the enormous and complex land dispute that lasted over decades of the 20th century between the Hopi and Navajo nations in Arizona. Nobody comes out looking like any kind of angel but the federal Commission that supposedly was handling the dispute and creating resolution is the big villain of the story and rightly so. As usual, government representatives—all old white guys (with a few young white guys)—put their own priorities and ideas first and screwed over the indigenous people (all Navajo) who were caught up in short-sighted and cruel and feckless government solutions. Barry Goldwater (no surprise) does not come out of the story with a good look and many others, including most of those serving as commissioners, are shown to be avaricious and crooked. The Hopi also don’t look great, especially in the earlier years of the dispute, but in the end amazing strides were made and most of the dispute was resolved before the turn of the century. Now to do some research on how things have gone since 1998.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to confess, it took me 25 years to finish this book. I bought it on a trip to Tucson in the mid-1990's, and initially completed about the first quarter. Two decades later, I read another quarter. I picked it up once again a couple weeks ago--pandemic reading--and finished it. 2020.

Any deficiencies suggested by this pattern of reading are my own and not the book's. It is a masterful piece of journalistic and historical writing. Just as Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams filled in a blank area on the map of my geographic and historic imagination that encompassed pretty much everything north of the arctic circle, Benedek's book about the Navaho-Hopi land dispute does the same for Native American lands in northern Arizona. The land dispute itself--beyond complicated--is set within a rich context of the history of the peoples and of the land, as well as intimate portrayals of those affected by and active participants in the dispute.

As for the outcome, I do not know where things stand in 2020. Benedek's epilogue to the Vintage edition was completed in 1993 and, at that point, a resolution of the dispute was hanging in the balance. A few days ago, while nearing the end of the book, an article came across my news feed about the dispute which I bookmarked. That is where I am headed next with a whole lot of context in hand.

[Fei Ji]

Too granular on the topic for my needs.

[Bonnie_blu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The long lasting issue of who owns the land in the four corners reservation of the Navajo and Hopi is a needless conflict created by the racism and greed of the U.S. government. The government created the Navajo and Hopi reservations without understanding the needs of the two tribes, failed to fairly monitor the changes taking place over two hundred years, and then stepped in to "equitably" determine who could live where. The impetus for this involvement was the desire of a private business to exploit coal reserves on the reservation.

Ms. Benedek does a very good job relating the history of this conflict and exposing the various issues and concerns of both tribes. My main takeaway from the book is that the U.S. government continues to abuse Native Americans, and some Native Americans are more concerned with their own desires than the care of their people.

[Lillian Vancel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book when it was first published, and was very much moved by the plight of the Navajo elders. I understand it much more with this reading, because of the information I have been exposed to as a docent at the Heard Museum. The lesson to take from this book, is that the Federal Government interceded and made decisions that greatly affected these people, without talking to them, or attempting in any way to understand their plight. Very sad. There were no winners in the Indian communities.

[Kipi (the academic stitcher) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting story that highlights the mess that results from government interference in people's lives.