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[article provided by Paul Pureau. Thanks...]

>Relocation's wounds
>
>Jerry Kammer
>The Arizona Republic
>Feb. 1, 2000
>
>Navajos hurt in clash with Goldwater
>Navajos: Bound to the land
>
>SANDERS - Natalie Joe gazes around her free new home and is
>consumed by sadness.
>
>The house is frame, with peach-colored vinyl siding. It came with
>four bedrooms, carpeting, a modern kitchen and a gravel road to
>the door.
>
>But the 72-year-old widow speaks in a slow monotone, the numbed
>voice of someone who's lost her place in the world.
>
>"This is a nice house, but here I am lonely and I miss my land," said
>Joe, who speaks only Navajo.
>
>She lives in the so-called New Lands, a government-built community
>for relocatees near the New Mexico border.
>
>Joe, who used to live in the enormous, wind-swept expanse west of
>Canyon de Chelley, retains a single reminder of life before her
>homeland was transferred to the Hopi tribe: a cornfield.
>
>"She is the saddest person I know," said Alice Chee, a tribal social
>worker. "Sometimes, she won't let me in. She tells me to leave her
>alone."
>
>They are the worst casualties of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute:
>Hundreds of elderly Navajos torn from the only life they knew - a
>life of land, livestock and the nurturing web of family and clan
>relationships that Navajos call ke.
>
>Many younger and more educated Navajos have done well with
>the federal benefits provided for relocation. But there are hundreds
>of stories of relocation's toll in broken families and broken hearts.
>
>The relocatees once had a safe place in a wide land. There was
>room in the mornings to walk to an eastward-facing ridge to say a
>prayer and sprinkle corn pollen, to ask the Navajo deities called the
>Ha'yol Ka'll Dine, or Dawn People, to bless the new day.
>
>Now they say they are strangers, confined in the strange land of
>relocation.
>
>On the New Lands, at least, there is room for some grazing. But
>most relocatees have been cut off from the traditional life of land
>and livestock. They struggle with alien concerns: utility bills,
>insurance premiums and - if they move off the reservation -
>property taxes.
>
>Some have lost their homes to their creditors. Others have moved
>in with relatives on the reservation and are renting their relocation
>homes. A few have simply abandoned them.
>
>Paul Tessler, the top administrator of the federal agency responsible
>for relocation, is proud of its success. But he also acknowledges
>the widespread hardship among older Navajos.
>
>"Relocation has accelerated inevitable social change," he said.
>
>Critics speak in harsher terms. They say it has forced premature and
>needless change upon some of the United States' most vulnerable
>citizens, an isolated group of traditional Indians bound by religious
>belief to their homelands.
>
>Many critics blame Congress for not comprehending the meaning of
>relocation to elderly Navajos.
>
>"They didn't have a clue what relocation would do to these people,"
>said Christy Chisolm Tures, once a social worker with the special
>relocation commission set up to do the job.
>
>
>Costly relocation
>
>If the human cost is hard to calculate, the cost to taxpayers is clear.
>In the 25 years since relocation became law, its price has soared
>from the $40 million anticipated by Congress. The cost is expected
>to reach a half-billion before relocation is done.
>
>Relocation has been slowed by a host of forces beyond that
>underestimation. The job has been hampered by political cronyism
>in the appointment of relocation commissioners, internal dissension
>and unscrupulous business people chasing a quick buck.
>
>The misery of relocation became apparent shortly after the first
>families were moved. In 1979, the Indian Health Service reported
>that Navajos marked for removal were seeking psychological help
>at a rate eight times the general population.
>
>An IHS researcher recorded a medicine man's account of the despair:
>
>"He . . . says everyone's health is going bad now. He says he notices
>the people's minds are sad; even the livestock notices this, even
>nature knows this. That's why there's no rain for a long time.
>
>"He says sometimes he thinks about this and feels silly when he
>cries like a baby when he remembers the time when he was a little
>boy. . . ."
>
>For the elderly, relocation's ultimate wound is that they can no longer
>perform the most basic Navajo responsibility - passing on a place
>that the young can live on, or at least return to as an anchor in a
>shifting world.
>
>"A lot of people have died from the depression and the stress and
>worries," said Ben Nez, 47, assistant foreman on a railroad track
>crew. He blames relocation for the recent deaths of his mother,
>father and two uncles.
>
>"They used to enjoy laughter," Nez said. "They would have their kids
>and grandkids nearby. The relocation took that all away."
>
>But there is another side to relocation, especially for young Navajos -
>educated and culturally mobile. They have been leaving the reservation
>anyway, pushed off by a stagnant economy and an unemployment
>rate of nearly 50 percent.
>
>Many have taken their relocation benefits - a new home and moving
>expenses - to communities in 28  states. Others have relocated to
>border towns like Flagstaff and Winslow. More than 150 families have
>come to the Valley.
>
>"Financially, it is good," said Betty Pahi, 47, a single mother and a
>secretary at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office. Yet Pahi also talks
>of loss, of a milder form of the alienation rampant among the elderly.
>
>"The thing is, you used to live in a big open space and now you've
>lost all that," she said. "Here, you're closed in. My feeling is I got
>cheated out of all that. That place was my birthplace."
>
>
>Inhumane relocation
>
>The hard feelings were exacerbated by the combativeness of one of
>the relocation commissioners, Hawley Atkinson, who had a knack for
>antagonizing people. He raised eyebrows among Navajos, for
>example, when he compared the relocation law to the darkest hour
>of Navajo history. It was, he said, "the greatest political setback for
>the Navajo Tribal Council since the Kit Carson War of 1863."
>
>"I suppose I could have been a little more diplomatic," Atkinson, 83,
>said recently from his Sun City home. He also acknowledges that
>he got the job - and kept it - because of his connections with the
>Arizona Republican Party, especially Sen. Barry Gold-water.
>
>". . . I didn't want to get into the emotional end of things. . . ," he
said.
>"I wanted to get the damn job done."
>
>The commission's haste left a hole in its planning that was often filled
>by fly-by-night contractors and con men.
>
>Many of the first homes built for relocatees quickly developed cracked
>foundations and walls. Many of the first relocatees, moved before a
>counseling program was set up to help, lost their homes because
>they couldn't pay taxes or keep up with utility bills.
>
>A few lost their homes to fast-talking real-estate agents and loan
>sharks who promised to help with financial problems. They introduced
>the relocatees to the concepts of loans secured by the house.
>
>They later gave lessons in foreclosure.
>
>Ruth Yazzie, 98, finds a simple formulation for the meaning of
>relocation among elderly Navajos.
>
>"Now I have a nice home," she said through her granddaughter's
>translation, "but I also have depression."
>
>Pointing northward, toward her former homeland 75 miles away,
>she said, "When I go to sleep, my dreams are over there. I dream
>about shi-keyah - "my land.' In my dreams, I am young and I am
>riding my horse. I am moving free on my land."
>
>The New Lands are 372,400 acres of rolling rangeland south of
>Interstate 40 near the New Mexico border. Congress authorized
>purchase of the lands and the expenditure of millions of dollars to
>build roads, a water system, community buildings and homes for
>230 families.
>
>
>Kinder relocation
>
>Developed in the 1980s after relocation's trauma had become
>apparent, the New Lands has allowed extended families to stay
>together and to bring livestock from their old lands. It has thus
>offered a small percentage of relocatees an alternative to the
>disorientation of a move to a border town.
>
>Tim Varner, a planner for the relocation commission, is proud of
>the project.
>
>"I don't support the concept of relocation at all," Varner said. "I think
>it never should have happened. But there are some good things
>happening here."
>
>Some relocatees have adjusted well. A 79-year-old medicine man
>whose name translates as "Ram Herder" says the new land has
>better forage for his livestock than his old home near Coal Mine
>Mesa. His daughter, Helen, said: "When they first came here,
>he did a ceremony with prayers so the nature would accept us
>and the livestock. He said this is our Mother Earth, just like it was
>over there."
>
>But even Ram Herder says relocation is one of the policies with
>which Washington has upset the natural order of the Indian world.
>As a result, he said, the sun and the wind have lately spawned
>hurricanes and tornadoes and have even caused the crashes of
>commercial planes.
>
>"They are our protectors," he said in Navajo about the natural forces.
>"They are striking back."
>
 

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