The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the United States, encompassing territory in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah — a landscape of extraordinary beauty and genuine harshness, shaped by high desert, deep canyons, red rock mesas, and the vast empty distances of the Colorado Plateau.

The reservation’s land base had been established through a series of treaty negotiations in the 1860s, following a catastrophic episode in Navajo history known as the Long Walk.

The Long Walk of 1864 was the forced removal of approximately 8,000 Navajo people — under military escort, at gunpoint — from their homeland to a reservation at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, a place they called Hwéeldi, a word that has been translated as “place of suffering.” The Long Walk killed an estimated 200 or more people who died of exposure, exhaustion, and violence during the march.

The imprisonment at Bosque Redondo, which lasted until 1868, killed hundreds more from disease, malnutrition, and despair.

In 1868, the Navajo people were allowed to return to a portion of their homeland under the terms of the Treaty of 1868 — the treaty that established the reservation’s initial boundaries and that is still considered by the Navajo Nation as the foundational document of the nation-to-nation relationship between the Diné and the United States.

The return from Bosque Redondo was one of the formative experiences of Navajo national memory, and the treaty that enabled it has remained a central reference point in Navajo political and legal thinking ever since.