For decades the state site at Fort Sumner told two stories: the army post, and the outlaw buried in the old military cemetery nearby. The thousands of Diné and Ndé, the Navajo and Mescalero Apache people, held on the Bosque Redondo reservation around it from 1863 to 1868 were a footnote, though nearly a third of the captives died there. In 1990 a group of Navajo young people challenged the site's managers over that.
What followed took fifteen years. The legislature paid for a design in 1993 and Congress authorized a memorial in 2000. The museum, designed by the Diné architect David Sloan and paid for largely by the Defense Department, opened on June 4, 2005. Sloan had wanted the building to recall the brush shelters the captives made for themselves from whatever they could find; the budget forced a simpler form, a hogan and a tipi, and the shape has raised questions ever since. In 2021 the exhibits were rebuilt after long consultation with Diné and Ndé elders, leaders and tribal historians, so that the story is told in the voices of the people held here and their descendants.
A trail leads from the museum toward the Pecos, past the little that remains of the fort, to the river, whose cottonwood bosque, the round grove of the Spanish name, gave the reservation its name. Each June the memorial marks the signing of the Treaty of 1868, which let the Diné go home and stands at the foundation of the Navajo Nation's sovereignty. Diné and Ndé visitors and other tribal members are admitted free.
The closest stops worth working into your route