i'm Navajo/Diné, & some of this is true, but not everything. first of all, Navajos did not raid anyone. other tribes even admit that we (i am Navajo/Diné) were not malicious people, at all. only the soldiers saw us as such. second, the Puebloans (Pueblo) only taught us how to plant in straight lines because we were already familiar with agriculture. our weaving does not come from the Puebloans either. we taught ourselves how to do. i believe that's why our females were being taken by just about every tribe & people that were around. third, Navajo/Diné were runners & we hid. the only time we fought was when we needed to. also because Navajos don't live in one whole community like other tribes do. we were all scattered apart. that's why they built the forts, so that if we ran, they can strategically capture us from another side. during our incarceration at Bosque Redondo, we never fought or argued with the Mescalero Apache. as a matter of fact, both of our people were being raped & murdered by the US soldiers. as a matter of fact, the memorial at Bosque Redondo features both the history of the Navajo & the Mescalero Apache, & we traded with each other long before the Navajo death march.
my ancestors ..my great great grandma escaped the soldiers at the fort and my ancestors hid in the mountains ..they did not go on this long walk ..the only ones who went on this long walk were women, old people and children ..my grandma used to say to me that , "we are not the children of weaklings" ... cool vid.
Nice video, some things I'll throw in, At one of the first treaty meetings the Americans killed a very prominent chieftain then desecrated his body. This more of less spoiled Navajo views of Americans for the 1800s. Navajos were confused by American hostility at first because for the most part the Americans were acting on behalf of the new Spanish/Mexican citizens of their newly conquered territories. One early meeting between Navajo and Americans another chieftain by the name Zarcillos Largos pointed out what he thought was hypocrisy. Navajos had been feuding with the Spanish speaking settlers of New Mexico for centuries whereas the Americans picked a fight with the Mexicans for no apparent reason. Then to the confusion of Navajos, rather than subjugate them or drive them off made them equal-ish citizens and then immediately took their side against the Indian tribes of the Southwest. In 1868 Navajo leaders imprisoned at Bosque Redondo petitioned for a reservation located in the heart of Navajo Country. However, the Americans tried to persuade Navajos to relocate to Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma. Navajos insisted on the current reservation site and eventually the Americans agreed. One of the most influential Union generals helped see to it that Navajos would be relocated to their old homelands, this was Tecumseh Sherman. Unusual given that Sherman like many other Union generals had no sympathy at all for American Indians. Philip Sheridan after all was the one who coined "only good Indians Ive seen were dead". For some reason Sherman was lenient with Navajos, maybe he saw the Ft Sumner internment camp as an injustice. Or maybe as some old timers believed, the Navajo prayers worked in changing his mind. Despite what Carson's campaign in Canyon De Chelly managed to produce the Navajo was very very large tribe and many others evaded relocation. Americans who made first contact with Navajos organized to meet with their leadership and at that meeting were met by hundreds Navajos. They noticed they weren't very united and words like "anarchy" and "rabble" were used to describe how Navajo leadership looked. One book I read said some Europeans estimated there were probably over 10,000 Navajos in the 1700s. However by the 1860s it would make sense if those numbers dwindled. Navajos referred to it as the "Time of Fear". For pretty good reason. Crops and livestock were being destroyed or confiscated by the Americans, starvation probably killed thousands more than any bullets did. Slave raids were frequent from Utes, Comanches, but the biggest driver were probably the New Mexicans. Hampton Side's book talks about the wedding tradition of Spaniards called a "New Mexico Bachelor Party" where they'd ride out to Navajo Country to scoop up as many women they could get. Carson himself had Navajo children as laborers in his own homestead. Sherman even gave a vague promise to Navajo chieftain Barboncito who's daughters were all kidnapped that the American government would try to find these stolen people and return them. Which as far as I know never happened. You still had slavery being practiced in Union territory even after the South had fallen. Most of what I learned about the Long Walk came from my own reading. It was probably the second largest deportation of American Indians behind the Trail of Tears but my textbooks in school never dedicated more than a paragraph to it most times.
@@vajraloka1 Yes they did. But it wasn't just other Indians that were raided for slaves but also Mexicans, Spaniard settlements, and Anglo-Americans. It was nothing to have one or more of these slaves killed in brutal ways.
The beef betwen the Navajo and Spanish/Mexicans were the Navajo raids on Pueblo and Spanish/Mexican villages. Navajo also kidnapped Pueblos and Spanish/Mexicans. Both sides were assholes.
You are actually standing in the original “Navajoland”, the Chama river valley and the San Juan river areas, it was until the middle 1700 when they would move out further west to present day Navajo Nation reservation. So all that area of Northern New Mexico to Northern Arizona is all Navajo land, pretty cool if you think about how large Indigenous peoples’ lands were.
not all of the navajo ancestors came from alaska, the tribe is made up of various clans and some clans came from athabaskans and some clans were already here along with the pueblo and others, eventually many clans came together and became navajo
The Navajos did not stop raiding even after going on the Long Walk. There are reports of them raiding again well into the 1880's and fighting with Mormon settlers. Because of the growing Navajo population and the increasing their livestock, the land given in the 1868 treaty was not big enough many had move onto lands outside the new reservation and so the US government started land to the Navajo reservation up to around 1930's because they did not want to deal with another conflict with the Navajos.
im a navajo..and there is a story of my people when we came into this land ...we were nomadic people and when we came here we the story says we met people who already lived in this area and that they cut their hair square in front ...they taught us to build dams and taught us healing songs some intermarried into pueblo societies..they taught the first navajo that came that they were dirty and we were like bugs that didnt care for themselves...so they told us to wash ourselves and that we will be visited by a man they call growling god ..he will come in the early morning and we wont understand what he is saying ..eventually he would teach us to create a First Man and First Woman... :-o
Yeah...I wouldn't take this as all facts about the Diné. He didn't mention anything about the Diné chiefs & the Navajo wars. And the whole farming thing isn't quite accurate.
Great video! This is a little nitpick, but I was surprised by you describing Sherman as "probably crazy". As far as I know he wasn't the nicest person and the strategy he employed was certainly ruthless but also effective and honestly, nothing extraordinary in the history of warfare. I didn't encounter any information that made me question his sanity. There were certainly many generals that committed far worse things both before and after him. In 1879 Sherman toured the South and was surprisingly well received. It seems that his image as some sort of a Boogeyman is partially a product of the latter "lost cause" historical myth making. Although it is possible that I don't know something and it isn't the focus of this video anyway.
I would advice this "professor" to take a listen to actual Dine' (Navajo) people. Our creation stories and experiences differ from what any western settler narrative has forced apon this so call nation. #Truth
in the beginning he was a friend to the navajo ...he learned our language and gained our trust :-o but the u.s. government had other plans for kit carson
