Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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My own family’s stories of boarding school trauma and survival, and a more contemporary story of my grandmother’s experience (being removed permanently from her home in Cactus Valley, an area located in the central-eastern region of the Navajo Nation, on Black Mesa, Arizona), steeled my resolve. In my lifetime, that area has been contested space, reclaimed by the Hopi or lost by the Navajo. The recent relocation is known as the “Second Long Walk.”

It was stories like these and many others that inspired me to focus on what I knew and what I was culturally bound to reveal. “The Navajo Long Walk” is a primary section in the mural, exploring the uprooting of the Navajo people and the rise of Colonel Kit Carson, as a complex character in the frontier west, and the positioning of power and reservation policies in the region. He was ultimately responsible for the capturing, uprooting, and the imprisonment of many Navajos to Bosque Redondo, in New Mexico. Raat expands on this story in detail, covering the events, timelines, and tense relationships in the region that led to the aftermath in Lost Worlds of 1863: Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest.