[1][2] A 1985 documentary Broken Rainbow depicts the struggle of the Navajo amid government enforced relocation of thousands from Black Mesa in Arizona after the enactment of the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974.
Her known family are her maternal and paternal grandfathers, Tł’ízíłání and Naakaii Dine’é, as well as her daughter Mary Katherine Smith.
One Navajo philosophy in particular was the Native ties to the land based on the tradition of burying the Umbilical cord into the ground after a child is born, which Smith's own mother had practiced.
When the Act was approved and the Bureau of Indian Affairs came to Big Mountain to build a fence, which would require her relocation in 1974, Smith armed herself with a rifle at their arrival.
In Fall of 2005, Smith wrote a letter to the U.S. government regarding how the settlement Act infringed on Dinétah : "According to our oral historical traditions, from the beginning of the Fifth World, the Holy People- placed us “the Dineh” with Natural Laws-here within the six sacred Mountains, between the Male and Female Rivers.