We Are Still Here:
The Diné, The Long Walk,
and the Weight That Doesn't Lift

I Am Diné — This Is the Record

My name is Jerry Kien Jr. I am Diné. The name "Navajo" was given to us by outsiders — a word that does not come from our own language or our own identity. We call ourselves Diné, which means simply: The People. What follows is not a complaint. It is a record.

There is a long line of events — each one documented, each one verifiable — that stretches from the shores where European ships first arrived, across four hundred miles of forced desert march in 1863, to the uranium tailings still poisoning wells on Navajo land today. That line does not end. It has never been allowed to end.

Before the Long Walk: The Mayflower and the World It Destroyed

In September 1620, 102 passengers aboard the Mayflower arrived on the shores of what is now Massachusetts. They stepped onto a continent that was not empty, not unclaimed, and not waiting for them. Indigenous peoples — speaking hundreds of languages, organized into sophisticated nations with their own laws, trade networks, agricultural systems, and spiritual traditions — had inhabited this land for tens of thousands of years.

The documented consequence of sustained European contact was catastrophic. Scholars estimate that within the first century of contact, between 50 and 90 percent of indigenous populations across the continent died — primarily from introduced diseases like smallpox, measles, and typhus to which they had no immunity.

1863: Hwéeldi — The Long Walk of the Diné

In June 1863, U.S. Army General James Henry Carleton ordered Colonel Kit Carson to conduct a scorched-earth campaign against the Diné in what is now Arizona and New Mexico. The orders were explicit: destroy crops, kill livestock, burn hogans, force the Diné to surrender. Carson's forces destroyed peach orchards the Diné had cultivated for generations in Canyon de Chelly, slaughtered sheep herds that were the economic and cultural foundation of Diné life, and contaminated water sources.

By the winter of 1863–1864, thousands of Diné had surrendered at Fort Defiance and Fort Wingate — not because they had been defeated in battle, but because their food had been eliminated and their children were starving.

The Reservation and the Uranium Beneath It

The reservation established by the 1868 treaty was expanded through executive orders in subsequent decades, eventually reaching approximately 17.5 million acres — the largest Native American reservation in the United States by land area. It spans portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

It also sits atop approximately 55 percent of all uranium ore deposits then identified in the United States.

From 1944 to 1986, the U.S. government and private mining companies extracted uranium from Navajo land to fuel the Manhattan Project and the Cold War arms race. The miners were almost exclusively Diné men. They were not told they were being exposed to radiation. They were not given respirators. The ventilation in the mines was deliberately inadequate. The U.S. government, which was simultaneously funding research into radiation's health effects, kept that information from the workers.

Trauma That Had No Name

The clinical term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder did not enter the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1980. The concept of intergenerational trauma — the documented physiological and psychological transmission of traumatic stress across generations — only gained mainstream scientific traction in the 1990s and 2000s.

This matters because for centuries, the harms being done to indigenous peoples — the psychological destruction of forced relocation, the erasure of language and ceremony through boarding schools, the violence of watching children taken away — were happening with no recognized language to name what was being done. If harm cannot be named, it cannot be treated. And if it cannot be treated, it moves — into the next generation, and the next.

"Systemic" Is Not Rhetoric — It Is a Legal Chronology

The word "systemic" is often dismissed as political language. In the context of federal Indian policy, it is a precise description of enacted law. The following is a partial record of official government action — not individual prejudice:

The People Are Still Here

The Diné have survived everything documented above. They have rebuilt governance structures, maintained language revitalization programs, and fought in every branch of the U.S. military — including the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, whose unbreakable code saved American lives and who received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2001, decades after the fact.

This survival is not inspiration to be borrowed. It is not a story of triumph that excuses what produced the need for triumph. It is simply what a people do when there is no other option — they endure, and they remember, even when the rest of the country has decided it would rather not.

The treaty obligations — some of which the federal government is still legally bound to honor — exist. The contaminated wells, the underfunded Indian Health Service clinics, the unemployment figures, the suicide statistics: they exist, and they have causes that are not mysterious.

That question remains open. And the people who live inside it do not have the luxury of treating it as abstract.