For hundreds of years, the San Juan Southern Paiutes have lived in the shadow of the Navajo people.
But as early as next spring, if things go as expected, the Paiutes could have their first official reservation on about 5,100 acres within the Navajo Reservation about nine miles northwest of Tuba City.For the past month, Navajo Attorney General Herb Yazzie and other tribal lawyers have been meeting with residents of Western reservation communities in Arizona to explain details of a proposed land treaty between the Navajos and the Paiutes.
"What we don't want is for this to become another legal battle like the one we have been in with the Hopis," Navajo Nation President Albert Hale said.
That battle, now more than 20 years old, has cost the Navajos more than $10 million and more than 900,000 acres of what they consider to be Navajo land.
Not all Navajos are happy about a proposed treaty with the Paiutes. Several argued at the meetings that the Navajos cannot afford to give up any more land. But Hale said the Navajos effectively have no choice, since the federal courts already have ruled that the Paiutes have rights to their own reservation within what is now the Navajo Reservation.
But many Navajos contend the Paiute Tribe doesn't exist because over the generations Paiutes have married Navajos and are so integrated that it's impossible to tell a Paiute from a Navajo.
Evelyn James, president of the Paiutes, said that is not so. She and about 300 other residents of the Navajo Reservation who consider themselves Paiutes say they always have known their roots.
"I've never said I was a Navajo, even at tribal meetings. I'm a Paiute," she said.
James notes that the Paiutes have their own tribal government, including a seven-member council, and their own constitution. They also have their own ceremonies and traditions that are considerably different than the Navajos', although some members also take part in Navajo traditional practices as well.
Many of the older Paiutes speak a language that is similar to their cousins, the Southern Utes.
But most of all, James and others in her camp say, the Paiutes have a long history living in northwestern Arizona.
In fact, said Martin Link, who teaches Navajo history and culture and served for 18 years as director of the Navajo Tribal Museum, historians believe the Paiutes probably settled in the region before the Navajos.
Until about 1930, the Paiutes had lived along a stretch of land on the Utah-Arizona border near Navajo Mountain that once was known as the Paiute Strip.
But when surveys were done of the area, federal officials said they couldn't find any Paiutes there, and all of that land became public domain until four years later, when Congress turned it over to the Navajos and other Indians living there.
The congressional action was the basis of the Hopis' longstanding lawsuit, which alleges that half of the western portion of the Navajo Reservation belongs to the Hopi tribe. The Hopi claim has since been drastically reduced. The Paiutes joined the suit, and the courts agreed that they deserved their own reservation.
However, that version of events differs from research done by Pamela Bunte, a California State University professor in the anthropology and linguistics department. She also is co-author with her husband, Robert Franklin, of the book, "From the Sands to the Mountains: Change and Persistence in a Southern Paiute Community."
Bunte said the San Juan Southern Paiutes in fact had a reservation that covered land in Utah as well as northern Arizona that was established by executive order in 1908.
"It went from the Arizona-Utah border up to the San Juan River, all the way over on the west to the Colorado River and San Juan River where it comes into Arizona, and the eastern boundary was in Monument Valley."
Bunte said non-Indian businessmen wanted to search for oil there in the early 1920s but were temporarily stopped because it was Indian land. The prospectors persisted and the federal government sent a man to inspect the land.
"He said he didn't see any Pauites there but saw Paiute horses," Bunte said.
The federal official talked to Paiutes on farms in Arizona, but "the ones he talked to utilized the Utah part at different times of the year," Bunte said. "The other area towards the east where the horses were, there probably were Paiutes there. He just didn't find them."
Bunte said the U.S. government took the land away from the Paiutes, opened it up for oil exploration, but no oil was found.
"The Navajos in the Monument Valley area on the Arizona side put in a petition saying this land should be returned to Indian land. It was given to the Navajo Tribe in an Act of Congress in 1933, but Paiutes still live there," Bunte said.
In Utah, there were five bands of Southern Paiutes who also had land of their own. "They were terminated by the federal government - that made the land they owned nontrust land. Many of them eventually sold the land because they couldn't pay the taxes," Bunte said.
The good part of all this latest proposal in Arizona, at least as far as the Navajos are concerned, is that the new reservation being proposed for the Paiutes would not require any relocation, since no Navajo families live in the area.
David Laughter, a tribal council delegate from the nearby Navajo Mountain area, said he expects that a lot of Paiutes will remain living on the Navajo lands since they have homes and friends there.
James said she finds it an irony that between 150 and 200 Navajos have called her office about joining the Paiutes because they say they are tired of belonging to a tribe so large - 220,000 members at the latest count - that it's difficult to get services.