Navajo Nation Council Chamber

The Navajo Nation Council Chamber stands at Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, in Apache County in the high red-rock country of northeastern Arizona near the New Mexico line. The chamber was built in 1934 and 1935 as the principal meeting place of the Navajo Tribal Council, which had been organized only a few years earlier as the central representative body of the Navajo Nation. The site, beneath the sandstone arch from which Window Rock takes its name, was deliberately chosen for its symbolic and sheltering quality.

Construction is locally quarried red sandstone laid up in rough coursed rubble, finished with stuccoed and wood-trimmed accents, in a strong Pueblo Revival idiom that draws on the regional masonry vocabulary of the Colorado Plateau rather than on formed adobe block. The defining features include the octagonal council hall, modeled in plan on a traditional Navajo hogan, with a stepped clerestoried roof, projecting roof beams, and large interior murals depicting Navajo history and ceremonial life. Subordinate office wings extend from the central council volume in a low single-story massing consistent with the surrounding landscape.

The building was the seat of the Tribal Council from the 1930s onward and remains the meeting chamber of the Navajo Nation Council, the principal legislative body of the largest reservation in the United States. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2004 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places under reference number 04001155, in recognition of its central place in the political history of the Navajo Nation.

The chamber continues in active government use and is accessible to the public in connection with council meetings and interpretive programs. Within Arizona's adobe and pueblo-derived tradition it stands as an unusually powerful example of the Pueblo Revival idiom adapted to Navajo governmental purpose, marrying hogan plan to plateau stonework at the symbolic capital of the nation.