In March 1979, James Wright, Head of UNM's Fine Arts Library and Director of the Archive of Southwestern Music, was given a grant by the University's Research Allocations Committee. Its purpose was to support Wright's efforts to record the musical culture of the Southwest, especially the ceremonies of the Navajo in the area of White Cone, Arizona. But this project soon grew into something quite different--the documentation of the forced relocation of many Navajos and some Hopis as a result of the Congressionally-imposed resolution of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute in 1974.
Wright originally focused on White Cone because of the ties that his assistant, Merlene DuBre, had there. Her father, Francis Powell, had run the White Cone Trading Post for many years, and was eventually adopted into the Navajo Tribe; DuBre herself was raised on the reservation, and still had many friends in the area. As it happened, White Cone was located in the Joint Use Area, a huge and long-disputed tract which, according to the provisions of Public Law 93-531, would soon be partitioned equally between the Navajos and the Hopis.
Wright and DuBre, impressed by the grief and suffering that forced relocation was bringing to the affected Navajos and Hopis, decided to shelve the recording of Navajo ceremonies, and to concentrate instead on documenting the land dispute and collecting the oral histories of the relocatees. The end product was to be two programs for public radio, explaining the land dispute and its result, the relocation of perhaps 9,000 Indians with a traditional lifestyle, virtually all of them Navajos.
By late 1979, Wright was applying for grants to support the larger project, which was eventually funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. After dozens of trips to the reservations, hundreds of interviews, and the collection of a large body of documentary material, the project was completed in 1982.
From the guide to the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute Documents, 1854-1984, (University of New Mexico. Center for Southwest Research.)
