DescriptionThis dissertation argues that over several decades between Navajos' Long Walk in the late 1860s and the effective end of federally enforced livestock reduction in the 1940s, Navajos resisted and adapted to US government assimilation policies focused on housing and property use both to assert Navajo sovereignty over tribal lands and to establish Navajo cultural standards as the legal basis for managing land use and habitation rights. In this context, this dissertation examines contending American and Navajo cultural concepts of housing and property within the framework of United States policies to assimilate American Indians. This dissertation contributes to the literature on US government policies to assimilate American Indians and Navajo conceptions of domestic architecture, land use and subsistence patterns, and sovereignty by considering how they interacted with American cultural concepts of housing, home ownership, domesticity, and private property during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.