![]() National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution Neg 55766 For four years leading up to the treaty, nearly 9,000 Navajos had been imprisoned by the U.S. government hundreds of miles from their homeland at the hated Bosque Redondo Reserve in eastern New Mexico. Before the Navajo internment, Barboncito led a rare Indian attack on a U.S. Army fort when the Navajos almost overran Arizona's Fort Defiance in 1860. But when the Army retaliated with a pervasive and crushing assault on the Navajos in late 1863, Barboncito urged his followers to placate their enemy. Plagued by bad water, bad soil, a dire shortage of firewood and repeated attacks by rival Indians, the once-mighty Navajos wilted at Bosque Redondo. Conditions were so bad that Barboncito fled the reserve on two different occasions (later returning both times). "I used to think at one time that the whole world was just like my own land, but I fooled myself. Outside my own country, we cannot raise a crop, but in it we can grow food almost anywhere. Our families and livestock get larger. Here they get smaller. We know this land does not like us," Barboncito told General Sherman. I ![]() National Archives The year 2018 marks the 150th anniversary of the Bosque Redondo treaty, which was signed in early June 1868. The new reservation was only a small fraction of the Navajos' original homeland, by mid-July, the first Navajos (or Diné, as they call themselves) began returning to the sandstone canyons of northeastern Arizona. It would take years of hard work and struggle for the Diné to re-capture their former prosperity. In the years since their return, the Diné nation has more than tripled in size. It now encompasses more than 27,000 sqare miles in the Four Corners region and is the largest Indian reservation in the country. The Diné population on and off the reservation is about 332,000, including those of mixed race. |
Last updated: January 16, 2018