Rethinking colonization and resistance, in the context of this chapter, refers to historically analyzing the formation of the legal-political category “Navajo” and suggests contemporary implications for how we think about it and the people called Diné today. 1 In other words, the story of the Navajos as a tribe is in part the story of Navajo legibility—that is, the process of making an Indigenous group in the American Southwest into a standardized and simplified ethnic group within the United States. It is also a story of state formation, decades in the making, that sought to turn the people who collectively refer to themselves as Diné into a decipherable population subject to the control and sometimes manipulation of a colonial authority. Once existing on the periphery of the expanding US empire, the Diné people would eventually be organized into a federally recognized Indian tribe called the “Navajo Tribe of Indians.” As a tribe within the United States, we became members of our conquering population. When trying to understand Navajo thought in an era of colonialism, we must also examine how we became the Navajo Tribe in the first place. The creation of a tribe in lieu of the people called Diné was primarily about establishing limitations on the people. The notion of Navajo nationalism, which serves as a premise to this volume in some ways, is about challenging these limitations.