Note: This story includes details about lethal hate crimes.
Oil. Then settlers. Then violence. Then protests, tensions and more violence, in a cycle of conquest and dispossession. “Those are structural issues that are baked into the psyche of Farmington,” said Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné), assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota. Yazzie co-authored Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation, which examines anti-Indigenous violence in towns abutting reservations— places like Gallup, Albuquerque and Farmington, where Natives buy groceries and building supplies, work, go dancing, or just hang out. “Border towns are places that really help us to see how settler order operates,” she said.
Farmington, New Mexico, a town of 46,000 about 30 miles from the Shiprock community on the Navajo Nation’s eastern border, is an oil and gas town with a reputation for male settler violence. For decades, non-Indigenous teens and young men in the Navajo Nation’s border towns have beaten and harassed Diné people — usually those living on the streets or intoxicated — in a cruel coming-of-age game known as “Indian rolling.” Some non-Natives claim that it’s a thing of the past, but Native residents say it remains a serious problem.
In 1974, one such “game” unraveled into triple homicide, when three white Farmington teens tortured three Diné men in a canyon outside a wealthy neighborhood. They took Benjamin Benally, John Harvey and David Ignacio into Chokecherry Canyon, up a four-wheel trail behind churches and expensive houses overlooking the city. They put firecrackers in the men’s orifices and beat their heads with rocks in what became known as the Chokecherry murders. Afterward, the grieving Diné community protested in Farmington for seven successive Saturdays, with support from leaders of the American Indian Movement. Eventually, Farmington settlers had enough. The police attacked protesters, teargassing them and arresting 30 people.
Some non-Natives, including the current mayor, say Farmington is not a violent place. But longtime Diné community members and human rights activists say improvements have been modest, and underlying issues remain unaddressed.
FIFTY YEARS AFTER the Chokecherry murders, in September 2024, about 200 people marched through Farmington again. Representatives of the Diné community, the American Indian Movement and non-Native supporters made their way up Broadway and down Main Street, downtown’s two arteries, as the pavement radiated desert heat through the soles of their sneakers and moccasins. “Farmington needs to be reminded of its history,” said Chili Yazzie (Diné), former Shiprock Chapter leader and longtime community activist. But he said the demonstration’s primary goal was to bolster healing, especially for the victims’ families.
Chili Yazzie, who is not directly related to Melanie Yazzie, also marched in 2006, after a non-Native Farmington cop killed Clint John, a Diné man, in a Walmart parking lot, shooting him three times in the chest, then once in the head. “As far as we’re concerned, the white police officer murdered this young man,” Yazzie said. After a reportedly all non-Native jury acquitted the officer, the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission was formed. Yazzie, who was chairman for four years, visited 13 border towns around the reservation. “Farmington is the poster child of racial violence,” he told HCN. “This is the hotbed.”
That same summer, three young white men in a truck picked up a Diné man, William Blackie. They asked him to buy them beer but took him outside of town instead and brutalized him alongside the road, yelling racial slurs before fleeing. Blackie, bleeding from the head, called 911 and begged the cops not to shoot him. He survived.
In July 2014, a few hours south of Farmington, “Indian rolling” in Albuquerque left two dead. “Anti-Indianism in New Mexico has a particular flavor,” said Melanie Yazzie. In 1880, an intoxicated Farmington settler shot a Diné man in the street for target practice.
And in 1978, Chili Yazzie picked up a hitchhiker between Shiprock and Farmington, a white boy wearing a Clint Eastwood-style slouchy hat and poncho. When Yazzie pulled over so the hitchhiker could relieve himself, the boy shot him in the right arm, then in the side. He was later sentenced to jail time. Yazzie fled, hitchhiking to the hospital, where his arm was later amputated.
“Farmington needs to be reminded of its history.”
THIS SEPTEMBER’S MARCH was different from the 1974 protests: The city sponsored it, providing bottled water for participants. The police blocked off the streets with patrol cars, but kept their presence discreet. Farmington Mayor Nate Duckett said he gave them no special instructions to do so. The demonstration culminated at the Totah Theater in downtown Farmington — Tóta’, the Diné name for the Farmington area, means “in between water” — where community leaders discussed the racial climate, past and present. The mayor declined an invitation to speak. “I had already had prior engagements that weekend and was out of town, so I was not able to attend,” Duckett told HCN in a phone interview. When asked what those prior engagements were, he said, “I don’t think what I do out of town is any of your business, sir.” He wouldn’t say whether his trip was official or personal: “It was whatever it was. But I already had things that were planned out of town, so I was not able to attend. What were you doing this weekend?”
Instead, he sent a statement to be read, in which he stressed how far Farmington had come since the ’70s. “As much as we remember that painful past,” it read, “we must also recognize the journey this community has made since then. Together, we work to heal, to grow and to overcome.”
John Redhouse, a longtime Diné activist who grew up in Farmington and participated in the 1974 marches, spoke after the mayor’s statement. “White people say that there’s no more racism, there’s no more genocide,” Redhouse said. “That’s not true. They’ve never been on the receiving end of racism and hate crimes. We’re the only ones that have standing and truth to make that statement.”
Melanie Yazzie agreed, calling the statement “total garbage.” She said economics and gender are among the factors contributing to anti-Indigenous border-town violence. Farmington is an “epicenter of resource extraction,” or, as Duckett put it in an interview with Native America Calling earlier this year, a town “built on the backs of oil and gas.” Despite the extraction of Native wealth, Native people have historically held mostly low-paying jobs, and, until recently, had little or no presence in city government. Nevertheless, Navajo Nation residents spend 70 cents of each dollar they have in border towns like Farmington, which is also a hub for other Indigenous communities, including the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and the Jicarilla Apache Nation. “There are such high populations of Native people, and we are seen as a threat. And then we are treated as such by police,” said Melanie Yazzie. When uniformed officers abuse Natives, she said, vigilantes, militias and gangs of settler teens follow — often as a rite of passage. She said it’s no coincidence that Chokecherry Canyon, site of the 1974 killings, is up a trail where male settlers express their masculinity through off-roading.
“If one of the primary expressions of settler masculinity is to uphold settler order, and if settler order is about eliminating Indigenous people so as to claim final jurisdiction to the land,” she explained, “then that helps to understand why these things happen.”
Most non-Natives aren’t committing hate crimes. “Racism is perpetrated by a small pocket of the community,” said Chili Yazzie, “while the majority of the white community may just be immersed in white privilege, whether they realize it or not.” He noted the good-hearted white residents who are friends, like the First Presbyterian Church leaders who helped organize the September march.
James Klotz, pastor of First Presbyterian, said he’s long been haunted by the question of the church’s stance on racial issues. Klotz helped organize the march after talking with Diné congregational members and the victims’ descendants. In a church newsletter, quoting the Presbyterian Church’s statement of faith, he wrote, “I was gratified and humbled to see that, as far as First Presbyterian Church goes, we make our stand on the side ‘to hear the voices of peoples long silenced and to work for justice, freedom, and peace.’”
Duckett said racism exists in every community. He believes the solution is for people to treat each other with civility. A 2005 report about Farmington by the New Mexico Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights declared that “the climate of tolerance and respect between the two cultures is a marked improvement from the conditions the Committee observed 30 years ago in 1974.”
“White people say that there’s no more racism, there’s no more genocide. That’s not true. They’ve never been on the receiving end of racism and hate crimes.”
But activists say it isn’t enough: They want a city monument commemorating the Chokecherry murder victims. Duckett told HCN that he’s open to considering a “positive” monument “that focuses on how we work together going forward.” He said he hasn’t seen the proposed plans yet. “There’s too much divisiveness in the world.”
Melanie Yazzie argues that the problem runs deeper than individual animosity: “It has to do with the very foundation of settler colonialism.”
Racism, Chili Yazzie added, is an offshoot of the global problem of white supremacy, which he never expects to see solved. But things can still improve. “White privilege is very prominent in Farmington,” he said. “For there to be healing, that needs to be addressed.”
If you’re a Native in the West who’s experienced racism in a reservation border town, we want to hear from you. Email your story to b.toastie@hcn.org.
This article appeared in the December 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Anatomy of a border town.”
