Description
It is July 7, 1985, and Indians from across the country are gathered at Big Mountain, Arizona, for the sun dance, a brutal and intensely spiritual ceremony of self-sacrifice. They are gathered to offer strength to the hundreds of Navajo Indians who have refused to be relocated from their homes in this rugged, isolated land in defiance of a government program to settle a land dispute with their neighbors the Hopi Indians. The Wind Won’t Know Me takes us through the next year in the lives of the Navajo and Hopi Indians embroiled in this tangle of history, which has led to the largest relocation of civilians since the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. We learn how the Navajos came to live on land given to the Hopis by the government in 1882. We follow the history of the dispute as it moved back and forth over the years between the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Interior Department, the U.S. Congress, and various administrations, and as it was argued in U.S. District Court – and settled by Congress, which arrived at a Solomonic solution: they divided the land in half, called one side Navajo and one side Hopi, and attempted to move, at government expense, the 10,000 Indians who then found themselves on the wrong side of the new boundary. We see how the law was pushed through Congress and was protected over the years – despite its glaring deficiencies – by a few powerful lawmakers, some influenced by personal feelings, others by a stake in mineral development. We learn about the Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation Commission, a vestige of nineteenth-century patronage. And we see how in the 1990s the thousands of relocated, non-English-speaking Navajos have been takenadvantage of by loan sharks and real estate hustlers in the Arizona border towns, how the new housing and jobs bear little relation to what the Indians want or need, and how the Indians are now trying to take the matter into their own hands. The Wind Won’t Know Me is a heartbreaking, mov
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