Hopi Tribe sues Navajos to gain access to sites

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Phoenix claims the Navajos agreed in 2006 to permit Hopi religious practitioners to engage in certain practices in designated areas of the Navajo Nation. That includes the "sacred gathering of golden eagles."

Attorney Timothy Macdonald said those sites even are set out on a map.

But Macdonald, in the lawsuit, said the Navajo Nation is preventing Hopi tribal members from going on to some of those sites because they are on specific "allotments," parcels of land held by the federal government for individual Navajos.

It even got to the point where a member of the Hopi Tribe was arrested last year, he said.

A bid to have the dispute resolved by a special Joint Commission went nowhere, Macdonald said, when the panel concluded it lacks jurisdiction over individual allotments.

So Macdonald now wants the court to grant the Hopi full access or rule that the Joint Commission can make a decision.

Harrison Tsosie, the Navajo Nation attorney general, said Tuesday he is still studying the case, but said the allotments are "off limits" to Hopi religious practitioners. He also said those areas were not part of the 2006 agreement, and the sites in question are not on the map.

Macdonald disagreed.

It will have to be up to the court to decide not only what the agreement says. but what is on the map: It is considered confidential and was filed with the court under seal, making it off limits to anyone not involved in the case.

The lawsuit is the latest skirmish in what has been more than a century of dispute over the land and who has the historic rights of access, and at least 50 years of litigation over ownership of nearly 10 million acres in northeast Arizona - a dispute that was supposed to have been solved with the 2006 agreement.