Hopi, Navajo make deal

A federal court order has officially ended a decades-old land dispute between the Navajo and Hopi nations, after the tribal councils of both nations reached an agreement.

The agreement allows the 20,000 people who live on about 700,000 acres on the western Navajo Nation to develop the land, and allows Hopi access to sacred sites.

"The job at hand now is to try to find big money to try to refurbish and develop that land, whether it be housing, grocery stores, gas stations, schools, hospitals, police stations, paving the roads," said Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr.

The order, signed Monday by Federal District Judge Earl H. Carroll, ends the 40-year-old Bennett Freeze Intergovernmental Compact, which had generally barred construction and development on about 700,000 acres on the western Navajo Nation. The freeze was the result of a 1966 administrative order amid a land dispute, in which the Hopi claimed ancestral and religious ties to the land.