The Longest Walk Quotes

“For generations more than ten thousand traditional Navajo people have lived on Big Mountain, supporting themselves by sheep raising and rug weaving. They lived in old-style hogans, moving with their herds from pasture to pasture. They had little contact with the outside world. Their forced evacuation has been going on for several years and “relocation” is supposed to be finished in 1995. Already over eight hundred families have been driven off their ancestral land and “resettled” in Winslow, Holbrook, or Flagstaff, many without ever getting their relocation money. They are penniless and desperate. Some got a little money and some miserable house to live in, but they are desperate too. They were used to living in self-built hogans. Now they have to pay rent. They used to heat their hogans with old-fashioned wood stoves and the wood they gathered cost them nothing. Now they have to pay for gas and electricity. They used to run their sheep and weave their own clothing. Now they are unemployed ghetto dwellers in a strange, hostile, and frightening environment. All this happened to the Navajos before, in 1863, when Kit Carson and the army laid waste to their land. He and his men destroyed crops, cut down fruit trees to make their country uninhabitable, and forcibly herded thousands of Navajos to a place in the desert hundreds of miles away called Bosque Redondo, where most of them died of disease and malnutrition. It is still remembered with horror as “The Longest Walk.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman