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Diné Nihi Kéyah Project

Mapping Navajo Nation land history, law and custom

To be independent, there must be informed engagement.

This project gathers information in order to map laws and trace them to their origins. The goal is for Navajo Nation communities to have a whole foundation on which to envision the wellbeing of future generations through practicable reform. Content is frequently revised and added with assistance of scholars and students. The project is led by retired Navajo Nation Chief Justice Herb Yazzie (2005-2015). 

The site was last revised on October 10, 2024

Diné Nihi Kéyah Project

The Diné Nihi Kéyah (Our Land) Project is a community-based educational effort which is led by retired Navajo Nation justices, judges, and land use planners and advocates. We are further assisted by legal scholars and law interns. 

Going live online on August 9, 2021, the project aims to provide legal, historical and customary knowledge on Navajo Nation reservation land. The goal is for our communities to be informed and empowered to reach a unified governance, including an integrated land use vision that allows for local stewardship, decisions and ingenuity. Such a vision needs to be in place in order to seek the waiver or revision of existing legacy federal land use regulations. A unified vision is critical to serve as the foundation for our future tribal land use without loss of Diné customary practice. In essence, the project hopes to provide communities with a “decolonization toolkit” through knowledge and information.  

Blessing to open the project

Let there be beauty from here my mother earth, my blue heaven, the sun. Let there be beauty extended from all the holy ones. From here this morning we will be speaking to one another. Hear the planning we speak on, for the things we need. For this reason we are doing this, take heed to them. Please my mother earth, blue heaven, and holy ones. Each and every one of us we have our homes, acknowledge them. We are your children. From here, according to what we are capable of, we talk about planning and thinking with relationships as we speak, acknowledging each other with empathy, with love. Recognize us. Make it possible for us to walk on a straight corn pollen road. These things we plea for. We are thankful for our lives. We are certain, with our thinking and planning, good will materialize in the future, even if small. This way I say my prayer from all directions. Let there be beauty from the east, from the south, from the west, from the north and from the center of the earth and from everywhere there is holiness. Beauty exists again, beauty exists again, beauty exists again, beauty exists again.

Live, Work, Govern Using
Diné Fundamental Law

The below video was made from a live panel presentation on Tuesday, August 6, 2024 at The Navajo Nation Plant & Animal Summit organized by the Navajo Nation Dept. of Fish and Wildlife at Twin Arrows Navajo Resort.

Play Video
Capstone Project – Navajo Nation Land Planning

In 2022, a Masters of Sustainable Energy Development student at the University of Calgary began researching Integrated Resource Land Plans (IRMPs) and Community Land Use Plans (CLUPs) as mediums provided by the U.S. federal and Navajo Nation tribal governments respectively for tribal community voices to be heard in land planning. The research is part of an academic-industry partnered Capstone project. The student, Kelley Rutledge, surveyed CLUPs and draft IRMPs available to the public. On August 6, 2023, Kelley made this presentation when her research was completed. 

Call to Action

Retired Navajo Nation Chief Justice Herb Yazzie, Black Mesa

This call to action first appeared in the Navajo Times, July 11, 2022

I have lately been participating in informal community discussions on governmental and land-use reform, both of which no doubt go hand in hand.

Why has a Diné governmental structure not yet been found that grows out of Diné life and that would be of practical use to our realities? Why have we not found a land governance system that reflects our familial Diné land realities? These are the questions.

Over the years, Diné leaders have attempted to take our people beyond colonized thinking, by asserting that we have our own value system on which to base all governmental action. In 2002, Diné bi beenahaz’áanii (Fundamental Law) was established, through which we asserted that we will think this way, the Diné way.

We further asserted that our government will be founded on Diné bi nahat’á.

However, how we will live and govern as a people continue to be in the hands of lawyers who thrust upon us pieces of laws that, when viewed together, is shapeless, unduly complex, and unnurturing, not unlike destructive nayée.

People are restrained by lawyers from even expressing a comprehensive vision of what our government, Diné bi nat’áá, our lands and our way of life will look like. The temporary structure now in place in Window Rock is copied from Washington.

The lease and permit system of land, that the tribe has adopted, was imposed on us by those who did not expect reservations to be permanent.

Even our Navajo Nation Code was copied from surrounding states. None of these create a coherent whole that allows us to pursue our familial, our cooperative way of life, that gives the Navajo Nation a reason to exist.

Piece by piece, Window Rock has pursued enactment after enactment with no plan that envisions how our government and land systems must look like, and how they must operate for our descendants to remain on the Navajo Nation and exercise their ingenuity and stewardship. Envisioning has been put aside for someone else to get done.

Every Diné knows that the lack of a vision has deepened our colonization and made things worse for all Diné. A unified vision – for what the Navajo Nation will look like for our children and future generations – is the only way to decolonize our thinking.

A unified vision for why we exist, and how we will exist for generations, these are critical. This vision has to be expressed in Diné bizaad and in the English language.

Law-making without a comprehensive tribal vision puts inordinate power into the hands of lawyers who advise our elected leaders and our courts. When we are unable to plan our own reality, the lawyers are the ones who tell communities what can and cannot be done within the existing framework of laws that come from somewhere else.

Yet, these same lawyers would admit that the power currently exercised by them, can and should be in the hands of our communities, so long as we can agree on a foundational vision that serves as the basis of all laws. Such a foundational vision would be the basis for reform of all present tribal laws and the creation of future laws.

Such a vision would be an expression of our sovereign authority as a Nation. We would then work with Wááshindoon to waive or remove multiple federal law restrictions that the federal government has long underfunded and which the federal government itself knows are unworkable for permanent tribal communities.

Current federal Indian policy has encouraged such a tribal vision for each tribe since the early 1990s, especially in the area of integrated resource management. We, ourselves, have not risen to the challenge. We have not acted upon our communities’ desire for reform.

Every election, we criticize people who run for office. “You mention reform, where is it?” is always the question in our recent history. The return to fundamental law has become formalities without substance.

Presidential candidates talk about preserving our traditions, language and our way of life, but they and we have never undertaken the hard task of developing the vision, and launching a new government based on the vision.

We fault our leaders for not correcting this or that law. We condemn the lawyers for setting limits on what can be changed for our benefit. We fault our three-branch tribal government for being dictated to by the lawyers. Yet, the true fault is us.

We Diné need to envision our Nation’s land-based structure, our government structure, and our legacy for future generations.

It is well past a critical time to reach our consensus.

There is no doubt that lawyers have been in charge of us, to the extent that we do not recognize our way of life in our own tribal laws. In almost every instance, the lawyers are unfamiliar with Diné customary daily life – our ceremonies, our relational arrangements, our stewardship role.

Without knowledge of our arrangements, lawyers who draft our laws and advise our leaders cannot uphold us. Meanwhile, our leaders rely on their “expertise.”

There is an insight, that I have, from my 50 years of being advised by lawyers who impress upon us the need for compliance with laws. There are many who believe their job is to press human beings into existing boxes. Overall, lawyers lack imagination. They fulfill their contractual duties.

What the lawyers do not realize is the extent to which they control and limit us without asking us in a manner that would help decolonize our thinking. The limitations imposed by various interpretations of laws prevent our communities from even daring to express how the preservation of our way of life, our government, and our land use should be done.

How we are governed and how we use our land are the most fundamental and specific visions we need to make ourselves, subject to no artificial limitation. The three-branch Anglo form of government that is now in place in Window Rock was never intended to last as long as it has (more than 30 years).

The temporary land-use system of individually-held land leases and permits was never intended to be the method of governing ancestral land use among ourselves.

An awful example of unintended results is the designation of Local Governance Act chapters as “political subdivisions,” a term slipped into the LGA by lawyers, that is borrowed from off-reservation uses. This term has resulted in the chapters not being able to directly be given ARPA money due to their being structurally separate from Window Rock, yet at the same time, are deemed lower levels of government subject to Window Rock controls.

This was not the original intention of community leaders, who recognize that local governance preceded the creation of the Window Rock government. A model closer to the local autonomy intent would be the “tribal enterprise,” or “home rule,” some kind of indigenous variation of these that we must develop, which operates independently.

What we need to think and create for ourselves, exercise our inherent self-governance, is a local autonomous model that can be entirely of our own envisioning.

There are some basic areas of agreement that can be built on. We want to preserve the Navajo Nation for future generations in a manner that makes sense and gives pride for us to exist as a Nation. We want to support the distinct and principled self-sufficiency of the Diné family.

We want to support Diné youth who increasingly seek to establish some kind of “cooperative” that integrates land use, business, and homesteading in a way that makes human sense.

We want local autonomy and responsibility for local matters, including disputes, daily life, and conservation matters. We want stability, livelihoods, in a manner that our youth may have ingenuity, and raise their own children as Diné.

We want relationships with land that reflect Diné life as practiced or as Diné life may be restored. We want a land system that does not create conflicts between us and even within families.

We want a governmental system that belongs to us and which looks like real life to us. We want to fully participate in the management of our lives and our land. We want the land base of the Navajo Nation to be preserved.

There is this notion that any government must be supported by the people. In order to get that support, people have to feel that they help create or develop that Nation. It’s our government. We complain about lack of people’s involvement, apathy, lack of initiative. To me, that comes from a feeling that this is not our government.

Navajo Nation presidents and Council delegates always use this word, táá hó ajít’éego, which they explain means “you have to be self-sufficient.” This is even emphasized in Diné wellness models taught at the Indian Health Service, in which it seems to be emphasized to our people that they must rely on their own self-help.

Yet, Window Rock takes no measures to establish a government and system in which self-sufficiency is truly supported. Window Rock should understand the other interpretation of táá hó ajít’éego, which is, “it’s up to you to make good things happen.”

We must take it upon ourselves to now verbalize and document our foundational vision. Good things will follow.

Now let us come together to envision the specific systems, structures and patterns. It is not yet too late.

Necessity for a Tribal Vision 

The Diné People are the largest tribe in the U.S. by land area (the size of Portugal, 27,425 sq. miles straddling the states of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah). Since May 21, 2021, we have also become the largest U.S. tribe by population, with our official tribal member enrollment rising to 399,494 from 306,268 in 2020, according to the Navajo Nation Office of Vital Records and Identification  

The Navajo Nation lost elders and tradition to COVID-19. There is also youth flight for jobs, consistent loss across the 110 tribal chapters in the 18-21 age range according to the 2020 census tribal consultation report. 52.7% of Diné now live off-reservation compared with 20.9% in 1980, according to the 2010 Navajo Population Profile40% of reservation Diné  live below the poverty line. There is widespread conflict, loss of family life, and alcohol and substance abuse. 

Most Diné trace our poverty and social ills to overly restrictive or incompatible governing. Our cultural practices, including land-based principles on which our family kinships are based, have failed to find alignment with government practice. The challenge facing us is to ensure community wellness. For this, the health of our land, our culture, and our language play the central role that will support those of us who have remained on the reservation, and bring our young people back.  

Can the federal and Navajo Nation governments accommodate how we, ourselves, arrange our cultural stewardships of our land and one another? The surprising answer is yes. The problem is we have never provided a vision of how we need our future relations with each other and with our reservation lands. 

There are 2 mechanisms for communities and the Tribe to provide this vision–Community Land Use Plans (CLUPs), and the Integrated Resource Management Plan (IRMP). CLUPs are local chapter plans, and the IRMP is a Navajo Nation-level plan. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs–

A plan is simply a map of how we wish to reach a vision; a shared destination to which we wish our actions to take us. Without that vision of the intended destination, a plan will lead us nowhere . . .  The tribe’s vision is a statement guided by the values of those creating it. In Indian Country, components of the vision are based on cultural issues which reflect traditional values. BIA IRMP Guidance.

Thus far, CLUPs and IRMPs have been left to outside and BIA consultants to create. These consultants have prepared data-filled documents rather than a map towards our vision. These consultants have neither the knowledge nor the authority to make this vision for us. There has been no vision component in Navajo Nation land use planning. 

So long as our vision is missing, the consultants assisting in our CLUPs and IRMPs have no choice but to emphasize existing laws and regulations that have long misunderstood our communal land use roots and future.