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The Second Long Walk: The Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute
Jerry Kammer
Signed / inscribed
Jerry Kammer's *The Second Long Walk* is a clear-eyed account of one of the most painful land conflicts in the modern American Southwest: the dispute that forced the relocation of thousands of Navajo (and some Hopi) from lands their families had lived on for generations. Its title invokes the original nineteenth-century "Long Walk," when the U.S. Army marched the Navajo into exile — a history the twentieth-century removals painfully echoed. Kammer, a journalist, lays out how a tangled century of federal policy, tribal politics, lawyers, and energy interests produced a court-ordered partition of the joint-use lands and the human upheaval that followed. Published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1980, it combines reporting, interviews, and analysis. For anyone trying to understand Native land rights and the costs of government solutions, it is a sober, humane primer.
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The author
Jerry Kammer is an American journalist who has reported extensively on the Southwest and on federal Indian policy; his work on immigration and border issues later earned national recognition. Here he brings a reporter's discipline to a story of bewildering legal and political complexity.
The book
Published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1980, The Second Long Walk traces the Navajo-Hopi land dispute over the reservation lands the two tribes had long shared. Kammer follows the decades of federal policy, litigation, and competing interests — including coal and other resources — that led to a congressionally mandated partition and the forced relocation of families, drawing on interviews, chronology, maps, and photographs.
How it has aged
Written while the relocations were still unfolding, the book has the immediacy of contemporary reporting; later scholarship has extended the story, but Kammer's account remains a standard, balanced introduction to a conflict that resists easy villains.
For more context
It pairs with histories of the original Navajo Long Walk and with later studies of the Navajo-Hopi relocation and its human toll.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Jerry Kammer
- Publisher
- University of New Mexico Press
- Place of publication
- Albuquerque, New Mexico
- Year
- 1980
- ISBN
- 0-8263-0549-0
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Maine
For Mark, from Rachel. Christmas '87