The Navajo Nation (Navajo: Naabeehó Diné Biyaad), also known as Navajoland, is a Native American reservation in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah; at roughly 71,000 km2, the Navajo Nation is the largest land area held by a Native American tribe in the U.S., exceeding ten U.S. states.
The United States gained ownership of this territory in 1848 after acquiring it in the Mexican-American War. The reservation was within New Mexico Territory and straddled what became the Arizona-New Mexico border in 1912, when the states were admitted to the union. Unlike many reservations, it has expanded several times since its establishment in 1868 to include most of northeastern Arizona, a sizable portion of northwestern New Mexico, and most of the area south of the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. It is one of a few Indigenous nations whose reservation lands overlap its traditional homelands.
Several museums educate visitors about the Navajo Nation’s land, history and ceremonial life, including the 7,000-square-foot Explore Navajo Interactive Museum in Tuba City. Nearby, the Navajo Code Talkers Museum showcases how the Code Talkers transmitted information on tactics, troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield information via telegraphs and radios in their native dialect during World War II. The system was far faster than Morse code, and it has been said that, if not for the Code Talkers, the Marines would have never taken Iwo Jima.
The Navajo people’s tradition of governance is rooted in their clans and oral history. The clan system of the Diné is integral to their society. The system has rules of behavior that extend to the manner of refined culture that the Navajo people call “walking in beauty”. The philosophy and clan system were established long before the Spanish colonial occupation of Dinétah, through to July 25, 1868, when Congress ratified the Navajo Treaty with President Andrew Johnson, signed by Barboncito, Armijo, and other chiefs and headmen present at Bosque Redondo, New Mexico.
According to en.wikipedia.org; discovernavajo.com. Source of photos: internet
