I suppose comments like this reenforce my worries about the involvement of
"solidarity"-type people in indigenous affairs. You know, people who say
Nee-cah-rrah-gwa but not May-he-coe or Es-pahn-ya. They always want to take
sides with the most vocal or those whose agenda match theirs, regardless of the
merits.
I strongly support the just cause of the Navajo as a people who have been in
North American for thousands of years. They share with all native peoples in
the Americas oppression and lack of opportunities in education, health, and
other aspects of life. However, on the Joint-Use Area problem let me play
devil's advocate and provide a little of the untold Hopi viewpoint. A little
education is in order here. First, the Hopi have been in Arizona for thousands
of years, the Navajo have not. Some say the Navajo came about the time of the
Spanish or shortly before as Athabascans from Northern Canada and/or Alaska.
Anyway, it is clearly not Dine ancestral land. Athabascans, by the way, are a
distinct racial group separate from Amerinds and came in a separate wave across
the Bering Straits thousands of years after the Amerinds. Their languages are
unrelated to those of the indigenous people they met here. A relationship to
Sino-Tibetan languages has been postulated.
The problem we have today it that the Navajo greatly outnumber the Hopi in
historically Hopi land areas. What to do? What has been worked out is a
compromise that may need to be reviewed in light of TODAY'S demographics.
However, to have outsiders inflame the situation for non-native causes helps
neither the Navajo nor the Hopi.