- These Dine (Navajo) women resting in Malcolm X Park at the end of The Longest Walk of 1978 are two of the hundreds of American Indian people who walked across Turtle Island (North America) from California's Alcatraz Island, symbol of the current American Indian spirit of liberation and site of its emergence, to Washington, D.C. They marched together to symbolize the unity of American Indian peoples in the fifth generation, when the Sacred Hoop comes together again as prophesied by Black Elk. Indian representatives met with government officials to demand the protection of human Page 397 →rights and the preservation of existing treaty relations between the United States and the Indian Nations. The Longest Walk had spiritual as well as political goals. At its end, the Dine, Lakota, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) nations called upon “all the peoples of the world to join us in seeking peace, and in seeking to ensure survival and justice for all indigenous peoples, for all the Earth's creatures, and for all nations of the Earth.”
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