Return and End of Long Walk
On June 18, 1868, the once-scattered bands of people who called themselves Diné, set off together on the return journey, the "Long Walk" home. This is one of the few instances where the U.S. government relocated a tribe to their traditional boundaries. The Navajos were granted 3.5 million acres (14,000 km²) of land inside their four sacred mountains. The Navajos also became a more cohesive tribe after the Long Walk and were able to successfully increase the size of their reservation since then, to over 16 million acres (70,000 km²).
After relating 20 pages of material concerning the Long Walk, Howard Gorman, age 73 at the time, concluded:
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- "As I have said, our ancestors were taken captive and driven to Hwéeldi for no reason at all. They were harmless people, and, even to date, we are the same, holding no harm for anybody...Many Navajos who know our history and the story of Hwéeldi say the same." (Navajo Stories of the Long Walk)
Read more about this topic: Long Walk Of The Navajo
Famous quotes containing the words return, long and/or walk:
“... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Front yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)