Why is the Bosque Redondo Memorial called the Site of Conscience?

Answer 1

Tourists passing along N. M. State Highway 60/84 whiz by a sign demarcating Billy The Kid's grave. Little do they realize that a recently erected sign announcing a newly declared New Mexico state monument marks the location of the greatest Holocaust ever wrought on a single site upon American soil and upon American conscience: a prison camp which held thousands of Americans against their will without trial by jury, never having been accused of a crime, and in which thousands died of starvation, exposure to the elements, contaminated drinking water, venereal disease, and rotten food, and from having been worked to death - buried, nameless, faceless, without record, in mass graves. These Americans - men, women, and children - guilty of no more than defending their right to their homeland, arrived at this "place of suffering" via a forced march, along which route hundreds more perished. Hardly a Navajo family lives today without the stark memory of a grandmother having collapsed on the trail, a child stopping to rest, a woman pausing to give birth to a child, a prisoner lingering to tie a moccasin - all having been summarily shot to death by the cavalry escorts. A higher percentage of souls were lost on the Long Walk than on the Bataan Death March! For the Navajo people, "The Long Walk" is a clear "yesterday" in their experience. Each new generation suffers from the story having been passed on as well as the inability to facilitate its release. Such is the legacy of those suffering from a collective form of post-traumatic stress disorder. "Hweeldi", meaning in the Navajo tongue "the place of suffering" was a forced labor prison camp which was subsequently studied by Nazis in order to perfect their death camps for Jews. It served as a prototype for Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and other sites of mass murder of the Third Reich. When, finally, the Navajo tribe had been rendered almost extinct, General William Tecumseh Sherman, of the notoriety of rendering a path of charcoal fifty miles wide across the South to Atlanta during the American Civil War, was summoned to the camp in the role of inspector general, he was aghast. His statement to congress was one of rage and urgency. The Navajo people were finally released, but only based upon the rationale of economic expediency. It was costing the American taxpayer over $1M per year to keep the tribe incarcerated. America decided on liberation merely to cut its losses. On June 18, 1868, the Navajo leaders signed a treaty and the people were released to return to their homeland. Somehow, the hundreds who returned managed to survive and multiply. Today, the Navajo Nation is America's largest tribe of American Natives, numbering perhaps 350,000! i cant find the answer