Navajo officials hope money will come their way.

CAMERON, Ariz. —

This is the land where Larry Gordy was destined to live, until it was made unlivable.

The Navajo believe a person always will be tied to the place where his or her umbilical cord is buried. When Gordy was born in 1968, his father put his son's cord in this rust-colored dirt. Gordy's father dreamed of one day building homes for his children on the family's ranch on the edge of the Painted Desert, and of tilling a field where watermelon and corn could grow.

But the Gordys were forced to put their dreams on hold. In 1966, Indian Affairs Commissioner Robert Bennett, an Oneida Indian who died in 2002, halted development on 1.6 million acres of tribal land claimed by the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe. Bennett imposed the ban to stop either tribe from taking advantage of the other while they negotiated ownership of the land in northeastern Arizona.

It became known as the "Bennett Freeze." The Gordys and the 8,000 or so other Navajos couldn't erect homes, open businesses or even repair their roofs. No roads or schools were built; no electric, gas or water lines were permitted.

The land dispute dragged on for 40 years, freezing the people in a state of poverty rarely seen in America. Because few Hopis lived on the disputed territory, the ban affected mostly Navajos. The Gordys deserted their ranch after it fell into disrepair.

The two tribes settled their differences in 2006 — most of the land went to the Navajo — and President Obama in May cleared the way for federal funding to help rehabilitate the area. Yet, no money has been earmarked.

Navajo officials hope some money may come their way. Now, as politicians grapple with how to spend any funds, the people face a question of their own: Is it possible to make up for 40 years of nothing?

Frequent visits to ranch

Gordy is 41, with a wife and four children. They live in a drafty trailer in Cameron, a 30-minute drive from the old ranch. The town was also on the Freeze, but the family at least could string an electrical cord from a neighbor's house and draw water from a working well down the highway. Though now free to do so, the Gordys have not made improvements to the trailer. The cash Gordy makes selling firewood and the money his wife earns selling jewelry to tourists at the Grand Canyon, an hour away, isn't enough.

As often as he can, Gordy takes his children to the ranch, now scattered with rotting buildings, dirt-caked appliances and rusty car parts, to teach them about their heritage and about the land they had to leave.

But he isn't sure where to begin.

"If it wasn't for the Bennett Freeze, we would have a place to live," said Gordy, a large man with a patchy black beard and an amiable manner. "But now we just have a junk pile out here. Now that the Freeze is lifted, we're expected to come out here and build something out of all this junk. Well, with what? It'd be like if a rancher penned up a bunch of sheep for 40 years and then all of a sudden one day he opened the fence and let them loose. They wouldn't know what to do. And neither do we."

The Navajo Nation, which sprawls 27,000 square miles across three states, is America's largest tribe, and one of its poorest and most isolated. The tribe only recently opened a casino, and unemployment hovers around 50 percent. Many people still live without electricity and plumbing. But conditions on the former Bennett Freeze are astonishing, even by Navajo standards.

Shabby houses, tainted water

A study commissioned by the government found that 24 percent of houses here are habitable. Most lack plumbing. And while one-third of residents haul water, others resort to drinking the same well water as their livestock — water found in some cases to be contaminated by bacteria or uranium.

Nearly 60 percent of houses lack electricity, even though the land is strung with steel power lines buzzing with the energy they carry from the Navajo Generating Station in Page south to Phoenix and west to Los Angeles.

But on a recent afternoon, on a high, dust-blown plain known as Black Falls, the sounds of promise rang out from a rooftop. Two men had spent all day on top of Mary and John Knight's 47-year-old cinder-block home, hammering down a tarp to protect the roof from the elements. It was a simple act that had been illegal for nearly half a century.

When the Freeze lifted, a local community organizing group informed the Knights that they now were eligible for federal money. They secured roofing materials from a weatherization program and called friends to help install it. As a gesture of thanks to the workers, they planned to slaughter a sheep to make mutton stew.

The Knights had tried to fix the roof twice before. Rangers from the Hopi tribe came by and told them to stop.

The tribes have been rivals since the 1500s, when the nomadic Navajo arrived on the Hopi-occupied Colorado Plateau, a stretch of high-altitude desert where Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico now meet. The conflict over land rights began in 1934, when Congress set aside a large tract in Arizona for "the Navajo and such other Indians as may already be located thereon." The land was populated mostly by Navajos, but Hopis laid claim to the area because a tribal village, Moenkopi, was located in its midst.

In 1966, while the tribes negotiated ownership, Bennett imposed the development ban. Moenkopi and the Navajo town of Tuba City were exempt. But residents on the Freeze lived under continuous monitoring.

"Our parents felt like they had to hide and sneak around," Gordy said. "If you tried to do an addition the Hopi would pay you a visit and say 'Hey, there's no agreement yet.' "

Clandestine repairs

Some people found ways to evade the Freeze by building horse corals slowly, post by post, to avoid attracting attention from Hopi rangers who circled overhead in helicopters. Others camouflaged improvements by remodeling only the inside of their homes. Gordy's family stored hay for their horses in a junked bus and built their corral on the side of a sandstone rock, where it was somewhat hidden. But they couldn't hook up to water or electricity. The hardship eventually drove them out.

Many living on the Bennett Freeze, such as Katherine Peshlakai and her daughter, Eleanor, stayed.

The Peshlakais live about an hour's drive from Gordy's ranch in a neatly kept house on top of a windswept hill. They can see hundreds of miles in all directions, from the burnt-orange mesas in the east to the San Francisco Peaks — one of the Navajo's four sacred mountain ranges — in the west.

"Our children and our grandchildren is why we stay," said Katherine Peshlakai, in her 80s. Since the Freeze lifted, the Peshlakais' home has been outfitted with a solar panel and a small wind-power generator, which they rent for $25 a month. They say they are in line to receive a hauled-water sanitation system that would include bathroom fixtures from the Indian Health Service.

But they complained that the aid extended so far from the Navajo Nation and the federal government had been too top-down. "They don't want to hear our suggestions," Peshlakai said. "They don't want to work with us."

Many people who lived through the Bennett Freeze say they have little faith in the federal government and complain that the tribal government should have done more to get the Freeze lifted.

Roman Bitsuie, a Navajo official who is working with the office of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to craft legislation to infuse money into the Bennett Freeze, said it may be impossible to repay people for damage done to their physical and psychological health.

"How do you compensate for someone's spiritual scars?" he said. "I don't think there's a price on that."

Bitsuie said he did not know how much money might be included in the bill, which could be introduced this year, or how it would be distributed.

Navajo government scandals

Don Yellowman, president of Forgotten People, a Navajo community-organizing group that is one of the only groups doing work in the former Bennett Freeze, said redevelopment money should not go through the Navajo government but through federal agencies.

The people don't trust the tribal government to handle rehabilitation, he said, because of a history of corruption — the Navajo president recently was put on leave while he and other top officials are investigated for fraud — and because they feel let down.

"There was no real public education about what people were enduring," Yellowman said.

People carry on. If Larry Gordy learned one thing while living through the Bennett Freeze, it was this.

Although he no longer lives on the ranch, he still keeps a few horses on it. When his children were born, he buried their umbilical cords in the corral.

Now that the Freeze is lifted, Gordy hopes to rebuild the ranch and move his family back onto the land.

He said he will start by tilling a field in March. The children want to grow pumpkins. He'd like to try his hand at watermelon and corn.

Seattle Times staff contributed

to this report.