Music

Navajo musician reaches halfway point of a multi-year performance commemorating the Long Walk

Four Corners Public Radio

Published July 15, 2026 at 10:12 PM MDT

Delbert Anderson leads musicians in performing a single note, as part of a 4.5 year long performance of a composition called "The Long Walk."

Delbert Anderson channels his ancestors to honor those lost in the 1860s forced relocation of the Navajo. He's performing his composition over four and a half years, playing a new single note every few months.

Almost three years ago, Delbert Anderson, a Farmington, New Mexico-based jazz musician and composer, launched a performance of a piece he calls The Long Walk.

It's composed of just 50 notes, played over the course of four and a half years.

In December 2024, Anderson gathered with community members and musicians at an art gallery in Farmington. The performance that night was a single note — a Concert D — played at a 30-second interval.

Each note of the composition comes every month or two over the span of 1,674 days.

That’s the length of the Long Walk, when Navajo people were forced from their homeland from 1863 to 1868 by the U.S. government. The U.S. Army used scorched-earth policies to forcibly remove Navajo and Mescalero Apache people from their traditional homelands to an inhospitable outpost at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, at the center of the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation.

“When I started seeing how our ancestors were treated, it was mind-blowing,” said Anderson.

Delbert Anderson at the 2023 Green Box Arts Festival Wednesday July 12, 2023.

Anderson has woven cultural history into his avant-garde performance. In his research, he learned Navajo people were malnourished and weren’t clothed properly. They were forced to walk 450 miles to an internment camp in New Mexico. During some periods, 20 to 30 people starved each week.

It's such details that performers and audience members consider in the moments before the note is played.

Anderson said that his Long Walk project received a grant from the Creative Capital Foundation.

“I'm going to devote 10 notes of the remaining notes that are left to the Indian Relocation Act of 1956. There was a lot of relocation of Diné People to 10 prominent [U.S.] cities,” said Anderson.

Anderson plans to bring The Long Walk performance to each city that Indigenous people were forcibly moved to.

“The idea was to have these Long Walk notes presented in those areas of the relocation,” Anderson said.

The performance of the piece's final note will be at the Bosque Redondo Memorial at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on June 1, 2028.

On July 22, Anderson will perform note 29 out of 50 of The Long Walk.