The Navajo Nation, also known as Navajoland, is a Native American reservation of Navajo people in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The seat of government is located in Window Rock, Arizona.
Navajo or Navaho is a Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dené family, through which it is related to languages spoken across the western areas of North America. Navajo is spoken primarily in the Southwestern United States, especially in the Navajo Nation. It is one of the most widely spoken Native American languages and is the most widely spoken north of the Mexico–United States border, with almost 170,000 Americans speaking Navajo at home as of 2011.
The Long Walk of the Navajo, also called the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, was the deportation and ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people by the United States federal government and the United States army. Navajos were forced to walk from their land in western New Mexico Territory to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Some 53 different forced marches occurred between August 1864 and the end of 1866. In total, 10,000 Navajos and 500 Mescalero Apache were forced to the internment camp in Bosque Redondo. During the forced march and internment, up to 3,500 people died from starvation and disease over a four-year period. In 1868, the Navajo were allowed to return to their ancestral homeland following the Treaty of Bosque Redondo. Some anthropologists state that the "collective trauma of the Long Walk...is critical to contemporary Navajos' sense of identity as a people".
Diné College is a public tribal land-grant college based in Tsaile, Arizona, serving the 27,000-square-mile (70,000 km2) Navajo Nation. It offers associate degrees, bachelor's degrees, and academic certificates.
Annie Dodge Wauneka was an influential member of the Navajo Nation as member of the Navajo Nation Council. As a member and three term head of the council's Health and Welfare Committee, she worked to improve the health and education of the Navajo. Wauneka is widely known for her countless efforts to improve health on the Navajo Nation, focusing mostly on the eradication of tuberculosis within her nation. She also authored a dictionary, in which translated English medical terms into the Navajo language. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 by Lyndon B. Johnson as well as the Indian Council Fire Achievement Award and the Navajo Medal of Honor. She also received an honorary doctorate in Humanities from the University of New Mexico. In 2000, Wauneka was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
The Navajo Nation Council is the Legislative Branch of the Navajo Nation government. The council meets four times per year, with additional special sessions, at the Navajo Nation Council Chamber, which is in Window Rock, Arizona.
The Navajo are a Native American people of the Southwestern United States.
Gary J. Witherspoon was a professor of Native American studies at the University of Washington. His area of expertise was the Navajo language and Navajo culture.
Melanie A. Yazzie is a Navajo sculptor, painter, printmaker, and professor. She teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Vee F. Browne is an American writer of children's literature, and journalist. She is from Cottonwood and Tselani Arizona, and a member of the Navajo Nation, belonging to the Bitter Water and Water Flows Together clans.
Sharon Burch of Navajo and German origin is a founding advisor of First Nations Composer Initiative. Sharon Burch is an organizer, composer, teacher of general music, author of educational music-books, singer besides being a recording artist.
Uranium mining and the Navajo people began in 1944 in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah.
Lilakai (Lily) Julian Neil was the first woman elected to the Navajo Tribal Council. After a serious automobile accident, she withdrew from public service.
Thomas Henry Dodge (1899–1987) was a Native American lawyer and Navajo leader.
Southern Athabaskan is a subfamily of Athabaskan languages spoken primarily in the Southwestern United States with two outliers in Oklahoma and Texas. The languages are spoken in the northern Mexican states of Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila and to a much lesser degree in Durango and Nuevo León. Those languages are spoken by various groups of Apache and Navajo peoples. Elsewhere, Athabaskan is spoken by many indigenous groups of peoples in Alaska, Canada, Oregon and northern California.
Diné College Press is the publishing division of Diné College, headquartered in Tsaile, Arizona, but whose territory spans throughout the Navajo Nation. Diné College Press has published books by and pertaining to Native Americans. While most titles focus on the issues of the Navajo people, others have dealt with broader issues pertaining to Native American studies. Authors include Acoma Pueblo poet and author Simon J. Ortiz and Pawnee-Otoe-Missouria author Anna Lee Walters.
Laura Tohe is a Native American author and poet. She is poet laureate of the Navajo Nation for 2015–2019, and is a professor emerita of English at Arizona State University.
Margaret "Peggy" Speas is a linguist who works on syntax, specifically evidentiality and Navajo. She is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Speas received her PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. Speas's work focuses on differences between elicitation, documentation and linguistic data analysis on North American Native Languages. She also works with preservation of Navajo and is a founding member of the Navajo Language Academy.
Rhiana Yazzie is a Navajo playwright, actor, and filmmaker. She is based in the Twin Cities where she founded New Native Theater in 2009.
Evangeline Parsons Yazzie was a Navajo educator and author of the first textbook adopted by the U.S. public education system to teach the Navajo language.
