The Land Bases of the Navajo Nation
Introduction to Reservation Land Base Formation
Revised 4/21/26
The Navajo Nation reservation land base came into being at different times. Lands established following hwéeldi in the 1868 Treaty on the signature of the U.S. President gave rise to the “trust responsibility” of the U.S. federal executive branch based on the promises in the Treaty itself. The promises applied to lands incrementally added by the U.S. President until the Act of June 30, 1919, and the Act of March 3, 1927 (44 Stat. 1347), which transferred the sole authority for reservation expansion to Congress.
By general legislation in 1919, later specifically affirmed on March 3, 1927, Congress banned further Indian reservation expansion by the President. This began the modern extensive era of congressional power over Indian lands and congressional legislation on Indian affairs. Congress has added to the Navajo Nation land base incrementally and significantly, imposing conditions, and using powers and justifications through enacted laws based on Congressional votes and findings.
Care should be taken to distinguish general trust responsibility land from Congress enacted lands that carry different, and often highly restrictive conditions specific to that enacted land. In its push toward governing the reservation as a united whole, the Navajo Nation tribal government may have unnecessarily imposed area or activity-specific restrictions reservation-wide.
The Navajo people have been unable to express a unified vision for the desired future conditions of their community’s cultural, economic and social wellbeing. Even the expression of a vision runs into difficulties, constraints, due to multiple regulatory restrictions that have long lacked support for permanent, generational communities, and ignored the stewardship role of the people. Understanding origins of the present restrictions is a necessary beginning to expressing, and adopting this very necessary tribal vision.
Source of above copyrighted map: Quickworld.com.
Roots of Federal Land Policies
Because each portion of the Navajo Nation’s landbase was added at different times by different federal entities for different purposes, federal Navajo Nation land policies and regulations on the reservation are not uniform. The land bases differ in type, from Executive Order tribal trust land, Congress enacted tribal trust land (including partitioned lands), individual trust land, fee land, and public lands purchased by the Navajo Nation.
The different land types create internal federal regulatory and policy boundaries which the Tribe must negotiate, none of which align with our traditional land use and relational practices. Like all Indian tribes, the Navajo Nation must work across these boundaries.
Federal regulations are implemented by many agencies of the Department of the Interior (DOI), among which is the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) which implements trust responsibility services on reservations. Other DOI agencies and programs manage natural resources on public land only since the 20th century, prior to which the federal government acquired or disposed of land rather than managed them, including indigenous treaty reservation lands and indigenous treaty surrendered lands. With reservation trust services and public land management all under a single department (DOI), policies and methods to limit the footprint of human beings in public lands came also to be a priority on reservations while tribal governments separately work towards our own governance for the permanent benefit of our own people and our way of life for future generations. Federal law (AIARMA and NIFRMA) mandates integrated planning, yet the BIA’s reliance on “single-use permits” contradicts the federal government’s own statutory goals for “Sustained Yield.” (It is to be noted that land management of federal public parks and forests, in which human beings are temporary visitors, takes little account of large population increases, nor significant adjustments for human activity that will grow and keep growing).
Methods to support permanent tribal communities are not at the root of federal land policies.
Single-purpose, time-limited leases and permits were established by the federal government as its land use regulatory system on both tribal and public lands in the early 20th century. As early as 1960, the federal government saw that the single use approach did not work, and began multi-use approaches to public land management. Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960 expanded single tract public land uses to multiple uses in forests, calling for public lands to be “utilized in the combination that will best meet the needs of the American people; making the most judicious use of the land for some or all of these resources or related services over areas large enough to provide sufficient latitude for periodic adjustments in use to conform to changing needs and conditions.” This culminated in the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976 (43 U.S.C. §§ 1 — 3208).
The 1960 Sikes Act further allowed partnered multi-use management to generate income, build community and conserve forests on “military reservations.”
In 1988, the BIA Integrated Resource Management Planning (IRMP) Initiative extended the integrated management concept to tribal lands, later codified in the National Indian Forest Resources Management Act (1990) (NIFRMA) (25 U.S.C. § 3101-3120) and the American Indian Agricultural Resource Management Act (1993) (AIARMA) ( 25 U.S.C. §§ 3701 — 3746)). Emphasis changed from single use to a whole system approach — comprehensive, integrated planning that encompasses natural, cultural, economic and social resources for each reservation according to tribal community vision for the future. The hope was that each tribe would assert its own cultural imperatives and establish unique flexible, self-renewing, and multi-use management approaches. However, tribes including the Navajo Nation have not been able to create unique IRMP all these decades. For the Navajo Nation, the primary barrier has been establishing a community-driven integrated tribal vision.
We are all familiar with the federal methods of leases and permits. These are individually-issued rather than communal; time limited rather than enduring; highly restrictive rather than flexible. Any tribal community member will tell you that such federal methods of limiting the human footprint have not only failed on the Navajo Nation, but has been destructive of our families and have all but ended our way of life. Our tribal courts have done their best to compromise this permit system with our customs, but their best efforts have not been successful. In the meantime, our own tribal government appears to have fully adopted the lease and permit system under Navajo Nation law as if there are no other possibilities to truly support our way of life.
Bila gáana k’ehgo nitsáhakees
The land use scheme today is based on federal land use laws, Bila gáana k’ehgo nitsáhakees (Anglo Thinking & Concepts). All our tribal laws conform to federal land use thinking and concepts, in particular a sole reliance on leases and permits that we understand was a system initially designed for parks and reservations in which no permanent human communities are encouraged to grow and thrive for generations. Our Navajo Nation judges have attempted, in very limited and highly conflicting ways, to insert Diné land concepts in tribal court decisions. References to Diné methods and values may also be found in the Navajo Nation Code. However, the substance of our laws and even our form of government do not reflect Diné thinking. Compounding the difficulty, Anglo thinking and concepts controlling land management on public lands have evolved over time, but Indian Country laws have remained largely static.
For well more than a hundred years, regulatory laws of federal government origin on the Navajo Nation have controlled land use in ways that would be unrecognizable to ancestors of Diné today. To our communities, Anglo land use laws seem to be only about their written wording without regard to their origins or history, or how they fit into one another. The Anglo manner of thinking, bila gáana k’ehgo nitsáhakees, seems to only strive to be like a line or spear leading away from the point of beginning, towards a target, further and further away from origins. For Diné thinking, which relies on origins, this linear way results in lack of wisdom and chaos.
That regulatory schemes and policies interfere with traditional community life is something every Diné knows. Less understandable is what all the laws are, why they exist, what they do, what they protect and what they do not protect, and even which government is responsible, because they are scattered. They have never been gathered.
Understanding such things are necessary to have an empowered connection with these regulations including the ability to question them, use them, and most importantly, do the necessary tasks to reform them to make sure that bitsé siléí underlies them. Change is possible through knowing the context and content of laws. Ultimately, the goal is to ensure that the full scheme of laws enable future generations to remain in our communities, nurture familial kinships, and thrive.
We need the help of all levels of decisionmakers to achieve this –from the various governments, to our practicing lawyers and advocates, legal scholars, the matriarchs, community leaders, and most important of all, our youth.