The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo

The year was 1864.  About eight thousand Navajo men, women and children were forced from their sacred homeland to march over 300 miles to a barren reservation in New Mexico along the Texas border, called Bosque Redondo.  Many died along the way and during a four-year incarceration.  It was called “The Long Walk.” 

“The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo,” a new documentary by award-winning producer John Howe, tells one of the most important stories of the American West.  It’s a story of heartbreak and triumph against enormous adversity. Narrated by motion picture/television actor Peter Coyote, “The Long Walk” is produced in state-of-the-art high definition television with 5.1 surround sound.

The film focuses on the military campaign against Navajos in the early 1860s, the events leading to it, and the aftermath of the Treaty of 1868. “The landscape of the American West is washed by a thousand tears,” says producer John Howe.  “The Long Walk of the Navajos is a story never to be forgotten.” 

In the Southwest, tension escalated as the Civil War played out on the other side of the country. Navajos saw soldiers and settlers coming to their homeland as part of America’s Manifest Destiny. 

In the summer of 1863, General James Henry Carleton initiated a military campaign against Navajos. Former mountain man and frontiersman Kit Carson was now a Colonel with the New Mexico Volunteers and led the effort. In the summer and fall of 1863 Carson and his soldiers waged war on Navajos with a scorched earth policy that destroyed crops, livestock and homes. Few shots were fired in this war of starvation.  With promises of food and shelter, some Navajos surrendered and the forced relocation -- The Long Walk -- to Bosque Redondo began. Others, like the great Navajo leader Manuelito, resisted domination and capture and remained in their homeland.

After four terrible years the bleak Bosque Redondo reservation was deemed a complete failure.  The Treaty of 1868 returned Navajos to their homeland and defined the Navajo Nation as sovereign.  Then began the Long Walk Home.  The line of about 7,000 Navajos leaving Bosque Redondo stretched for almost 10 miles. The treaty’s provision for Navajos to educate their children in boarding schools would shake their identity.

“It’s very difficult for us to talk about these stories,” Dr. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, a Navajo historian, says in the documentary.  “It makes me cry, and it makes me sad and it makes me angry.  And at the same time, we are also very appreciative that our ancestors had the courage and resilience to keep on going in the face of just incredible catastrophe and incredible trauma.”

The Long Walk: Tears of the Navajo
Tuesday, November 20 at 8:00 p.m.