In November 2023, Diné jazz trumpeter Delbert Anderson sounded the first note of a composition, “The Long Walk,” whose performance will be completed in about four and a half years, mirroring the length of time in the 1860s that the Diné were forcibly removed from their ancestral homeland by the United States government before winning the right to return. That note initiated a solemn ceremony of remembrance, and people around the world have joined the performance.

The Long Walk
In the early 1860s, the United States government determined it could better manage the Diné, with whom relations had been deteriorating as the number of European American settlers encroaching on their territory grew, if it moved them from their ancestral lands to a remote and more easily controlled area. The government required the surrender of the Diné, and when that proved difficult, it initiated a scorched earth policy, effectively conducted by Kit Carson, that ultimately resulted in the surrender of thousands of Diné. Beginning in early 1864 and continuing over several years, these Diné were brutally force-marched hundreds of miles from what is now western New Mexico/eastern Arizona to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, a perilous journey known as The Long Walk.

Hundreds perished on the walk, from malnourishment, exhaustion, and murder at the hands of the U.S. soldiers, and many others were carried off by marauding Mexican and Indigenous slavers. Uprooted from everything they knew, stalked by deprivation and disease in deplorable conditions, subjected to the army’s inept management of what was essentially an internment camp, the Diné suffered through four and a half years before negotiating the Treaty of Bosque Redondo with the United States, which returned them to their homeland.

Learning the details
Anderson first learned of The Long Walk in middle school and high school. “We would basically study it from, at the time, our history books,” he says. While some mention was made about the mistreatment of the Diné, “most of it was spoken of in terms of how the U.S. did the native people a favor during that time, helped them survive, helped them, I guess, organize their life a little better is kind of how those books made it sound,” says Anderson. Teachers, however, noted that that description was “coming from the winners’ side,” he says, “and I always wondered what that meant because we never got into the details in that early time of education.”

In college, in 2006, Anderson was asked to write a song about The Long Walk as part of Native American Heritage Month, and he began to research the subject. “I actually created a song with lyrics about The Long Walk, and that was sort of my first deep dive in lyric writing and music composition in general,” Anderson says.

During a residency at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Anderson was researching Jacob C. Morgan (1879–1950), a successful Diné cornetist who came from a military background and grew up in the boarding school system. Morgan’s ideas about The Long Walk motivated Anderson to dig deeper. He learned that the first Diné surrenders came in late 1863, and with the Treaty of Bosque Redondo being signed in June 1868, the time of suffering stretched across 1,674 days.

An inspiration
What Anderson learned in his research at IAIA, particularly from journals and letters of the soldiers charged with running the camp, led him to want to create a wider awareness of The Long Walk.

Over lunch about a year ago, Anderson and his friend Franklin Piland fell into discussion about John Cage’s well-known piece 4’33”, which invites performers to sit silently with their instruments for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The conversation turned to the consideration of sound and silence and to Cage’s piece ORGAN²/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), scheduled to be performed in its entirety over more than 600 years.

From those reflections, Anderson developed the idea of performing a piece of music over 1,674 days to vividly communicate the time the Diné suffered in their failed removal. “The meaning is what I was really after, creating awareness of The Long Walk,” says Anderson. “When talking with elders about The Long Walk, a lot of them would say, ‘That story needs to be retold.’ ” Others would say to leave that story alone, that there is no reason to return to Hwéeldi, the Diné term for The Long Walk, which means a place of suffering.

Mapping the ceremony
For Anderson, the need to fully understand what happened and share that awareness outweighed other considerations. Turning to the piece he wrote in 2006, “The Long Walk,” he and Piland conceived a ceremonial performance that maps out the 50 notes of that composition over 1,674 days, with each quarter note corresponding to approximately 33 days. The first note was played on November 1, 2023, and the last, which will be played at Bosque Redondo, will be played on the anniversary of the treaty signing, June 1, 2028. (The schedule for the notes can be found here.)

Anderson believes that the ceremony allows the Diné to reclaim the narrative, offers a healing experience, and will lead to an enhanced cultural sensitivity for all who participate.

For Anderson, the silence between the notes underscores the pain of those 1,674 days. “During the silences, I feel like is the time that I feel is the most hurtful,” he says. It’s when his thoughts and heart are with the people who suffered, when he struggles with the knowledge that he cannot undo that suffering. “The notes are starting to feel like a deliverance,” says Anderson. “That might be the healing part because it is then that we can do something.”

How it works
On the designated days at the designated time—always 7:30 p.m. MST (as in Arizona, no change to Daylight Time)—Anderson, wherever he may be, will play the note for that day, and anyone anywhere is invited to join him. (Anderson may be playing a September 2024 note in Albuquerque with UNM jazz students. Details are in process of being sorted out.)

Even though only one note is played at a time, Anderson stresses that this is a composition that is being played from beginning to end, and the rules of performance apply. “It’s important to perform [the note] at 7:30 Mountain Standard Time because if you perform it early or late, it’s just the same as you came in too early or came in too late,” he says. “Those who want to play it perfectly have to start their note on November first. It doesn’t matter what year.”

Much to Anderson’s surprise, people around the world are participating in the ceremony. “People have started community circles, little gatherings in their communities when the note is about to happen,” he says. Others are participating in the privacy of their homes, with some posting it on social media.

The sheet music can be downloaded for free or purchased along with an activity sheet that offers, for each of the 50 notes, information and activities designed to further participants’ understanding of the history and provide a starting point for discussion prior to the playing of a note.

Notes are to be played as directed by a new musical notation created by Anderson in collaboration with Renata Yazzie, a Diné musicologist now at Columbia University in New York. The term is roughly translated “to play the notes, one after another, until an end comes.” On the sheet music, it is explained that this means that “the note should continue in an intentionally or spiritually meaningful way from its sounding until the sounding of the subsequent note.”

“Right after we play the note, every time that we play it, there’s always this pause at the end where I can tell all the musicians are in very deep thought,” says Anderson. “They’re really thinking during that pause moment. Like I was saying, it feels nice to play the note, and then when it goes silent—oh, man—it gets heavy. The idea is that during that time, hopefully by going through that process, we become different human beings—more expressive, more aware of the culture, more sensitivity.”

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© 2024 Mel Minter