The Navajo Nation (Naabeehó Diné Biyaad), also known as Navajoland, is a Native American reservation of Navajos in the United States. It occupies portions of northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The seat of government is located in Window Rock, Arizona.
At roughly , the Navajo Nation is the largest land area held by a Native American tribe in the U.S., exceeding ten U.S. states. It is one of a few indigenous nations whose reservation lands overlap its traditional homelands.
In 2010, the reservation was home to 173,667 out of 332,129 Navajo tribal members; the remaining 158,462 tribal members lived outside the reservation, in urban areas (26 percent), border towns (10 percent), and elsewhere in the U.S. (17 percent). In 2020, the number of tribal members increased to 399,494, surpassing the Cherokee Nation as the largest tribal group by enrollment.
The U.S. gained ownership of what is today Navajoland in 1848 following the Mexican-American War. The reservation was first established in 1868 within New Mexico Territory, initially spanning roughly 3.3 million acres; it subsequently straddled what became the Arizona-New Mexico border in 1912, when the states were admitted to the union. Unlike many reservations, it has since expanded several times since its formation, reaching its current boundaries in 1934.
In English, the official name for the area was "Navajo Indian Reservation", as outlined in Article II of the 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo. On April 15, 1969, the tribe changed its official name to the "Navajo Nation", which is displayed on its seal. In 1994, the Tribal Council rejected a proposal to change the official designation from "Navajo" to "Diné", a traditional name for the people. Some people said that Diné represented the people in their time of suffering before the Long Walk, and that Navajo is the appropriate designation for the future. In the Navajo language, Diné means "the People", a term many indigenous nations identify within their respective languages.