Interesting Facts & Legends from the...
Navajo or Dine
The Navajo spoke the Athabascan language and arrived in the Southwest sometime during the 15th and 16th centuries.
The Navajo populated the northeastern of today's Arizona and northwestern portion of New Mexico.
The Navajo were known to themselves as Dine and became increasingly distinct from their ancient Apache kinsmen. Settling in scattered groups through northern New Mexico in a land they came to call Dinetah -"home of the people"-they adapted so thorougly to this new environment that they virtually reinvented themselves.
The Navajo, like other nomadic tribes, had arrived in the Southwest with a rich spiritual tradition but few material possessions. They dressed in skins, wove reed baskets, hunted and foraged for food. To them the Pueblo villages, with their well-stocked granaries and abundant stores of pottery and blankets, must have seemed like centers of fabulous wealth. Their hunger whetted for the amenities of Pueblo life, the Navajo began by raiding. Gradually, though,as they settled in, they turned from plunder to emulation.
No other Athabascan group took so readily to farming. Picking up the basics from their Pueblo neighbors, they were soon harvesting family plots of beans, squash, tobacco, and corn; their very name derives from the Tewa nava hu meaning "place of large planted fields." Their clothing changed as well. Discarding their buckskin tunics, they began wearing cotton shirts and richly dyed cotton blankets in the Pueblo fashion.
Pueblo influence increased during the Spanish wars of the late 1600's, as thousands of displaced villagers from the Rio Grande battlegrounds fled west into Navajo country. The Navajo gave the refugees protection, and soon the two groups began to intermarry. The Navajo learned the refinements of weaving, sandal making, and ceramics, and they acquired the technique of diverting streams to irrigate their cornfields. Overtones of Pueblo rituals and beliefs crept into Navajo religion. Celebrations began to center on the agricultural cycle of planting and harvest, and kachina-like masked figures called yeibichai would dance the appropriate rites. Navajo priests developed the Pueblo-inspired technique of ritual sand painting into a high art. Corn pollen became an essential sacrament, used to promote fertility and prosperity.
"The Colorado River, you bless it. Every time you go across it, you say a few prayers. To go across it, you get your corn pollen-we carry it around all the time, corn pollen-so we take it out and bless the water. If we don't have water, we can't get anywhere."-Navajo medicine man.
The Navajo also took freely from the Spaniards. Metal tools and firearms, the cultivation of fruit trees and other European crops, all became part of Navajo tradition. So did livestock-not just horses and cattle but, most important of all, sheep. The Navajo became the great master shepherds of the Southwest. Family flocks sometimes numbered in the hundreds, and every child, as part of his or her education, would be given a lamb to raise. Wool from the flocks, carded and dyed, was woven into blankets of remarkable beauty. Even today, Navajo blanket weaving still counts among the highest expressions of Native American artistry in the Southwest.
Yet even as they borrowed from others, the Navajo retained key elements of their Apachean heritage. Resisting all overtures by Spanish missionaries to learn Castillian and convert to Christianity, they continued to speak an exceptionally pure form of Athabascan. Even as they intermingled with the Pueblos, they continued to live in hogans, mud-plastered, log-framed structures that resembled permanent wickiups. Like their Apache cousins, they cherished independence while at the same time observing a complex code of family obligations. Women played an equally powerful role as owners of property and as family matriarchs. Newlyweds set up housekeeping near the bride's relatives, even as the groom maintained close ties to his own parents. To avoid family conflicts, Navajo men treated their sisters-in-laws with distant courtesy; if their mother-in-law so much as entered the same area, they had to leave without speaking a word.
The Navajo strove to avoid external conflict as well. A people who in earlier times had made their way by marauding, they now went to extreme lengths to prevent confrontation. An traditional tale describes how the first ancestral humans wandered through successive worlds of chaos and confusion, then eventually arrived in a land of perfect harmony....
The original world lay deep within the present earth. Lit by neither sun nor moon, it contained dimly colored clouds that moved around the horizon to mark the hours. At first life was peaceful; then the evils of lust and envy took hold, and violence broke out. So the ancestral Navajo fled into exile, grappling upward through a hole in the sky to another world directly above. Here, where the light was blue, harmony at first prevailed. Then again the same story: bitter quarreling, followed by escape and a climb to yet another world, and then another.
Finally, First Man and First Woman, the direct ancestors of humankind, emerged on the present earth. Water covered the earth's surface, but sacred winds gusted in to blow it away. With the aid of a sacred medicine bundle, and guided by beings known as diyin dine, the holy people, First Man then filled the world with all its natural bounty and wonder. He laid out each object in the bundle and by chanting transformed it into an animal, a plant, a mountain peak, an hour of the day.
Everything in the new universe resided in perfect balance, controlled by a kind of spiritual symmetry: four directions, four winds, four seasons, and the four basic colors of black, blue, amber, and white. Most of all, an essential harmony prevailed, called hozho, which blended the concepts of beauty, peace, happiness, and righteousness.
As every Navajo still knows, hozho must be maintained. The principal method was to follow closely the strict codes of behavior and custom laid out by the Holy People, in which any careless or unseemly act might upset the delicate balance of the universe. An unintended lapse of good manners, a clumsy movement while hunting, even a badly made basket might throw the world into turmoil.
"This covers it all, the Earth and the Most High Power whose ways are beautiful. All is beautiful before me, All is beautiful behind me, All is beautiful above me, All is beautiful around me."-Navajo song.
To ensure the preservation of hozho, the Navajo accompanied virtually any important activity with a song or chant. There were hundreds of songs, all in some way drawing on tribal myth and legend. Sometimes they would be chanted as people went about everyday tasks-herding sheep or grinding corn on a metate. On other occassions, lengthy rituals were held for specific purposes-to cure the sick, ward off evil, bring good luck, commemorate a birth or a housewarming, or simply to maintain tribal harmony. Perhaps the most important was, and is, the Blessingway.
The Blessingway ceremony might last anywhere from two days to four. Chanters versed in tribal lore would reeenact an episode from the creation story or other pertinent myth, all the while manipulating holy talismans and praying over a medicine bundle containing earth from each of the four sacred mountains. A priest might fashion a dry painting of colored sand, corn pollen and crushed flowers. Variations of the Blessingway rite would be held to celebrate a marriage, to protect a mother in childbirth, to guide a pubescent girl into womanhood, or to ensure success in any great enterprise.
Like so much else in Navajo tradition, the supreme artistry of tribal weavers had divine origins. Legend recalls the many deeds of Spider Man, who taught the Navajo how to make the loom, and even more importantly of Spider Woman, who taught them how to use it.
In one tale a Navajo girl was walking through the barrens when she saw smoke rising from a tiny hole in the ground. Looking inside, she spied an ugly old crone-Spider Woman. "Come down and sit here beside me and watch what I do," said the old woman. She was passing a wooden stick in and out between strands of thread. "What is it that you do, Grandmother?" asked the girl. "It is a blanket that I weave," the ancient woman replied.
Over the next three days, the Navajo girl watched Spider Woman weave three different blankets of wonderful design. She then went home and showed her people all she had learned. Later she visited Spider Woman again and told her how everyone was now busy weaving. "That is good," the old woman replied. But she also gave the girl this warning: "Whenever you make a blanket, you must leave a hole in the middle. For if you do not, your weaving thoughts will be trapped within the cotton-not only will it bring you bad luck, but it will drive you mad." Since then, Navajo women have always left a spider hole in the middle of their blankets.
Even today in Navaho country, the sacred rites endure. Navajo men who joined the US Army during WWII took part in a Blessingway ceremony much like those sung in ancient times to ensure the protection of warriors going into battle. Many who returned from combat were purified in an Enemyway ritual designed to protect them from the spirits of slain enemies.
And the Navajo are not alone. In communities throughout the Southwest-among the Apache, Pima, Tohono O'odham, and others, on the mesas of the Hopi, in the pueblos at Zuni and Acoma and along the Rio Grande-sons and daughters of the tribal groups remember the old ways. Each time they perform a sacred ceremony, they breathe new life into the traditions, summoning up spirits that have dwelt in this stark, spectacular landscape since the earliest days of human habitation.
In the 17th century was the well established colony of Santa Fe, the Spanish maintained a near monopoly on horse trading until 1680, when rebellious Pueblo Indians drove Spanish colonists and priests south out of New Mexico. Whole stables were suddenly unguarded; horses were there for the taking. Pueblo Indian traders and their Navajo allies wasted little time making these mounts available to the Comanche, who also became quite accomplished at stealing their own.
As Anglo-American settlers began trickling into the region in the 1840's, the Navajo considered them fair game as well the Mexican and Pueblo settlements had been in their history. Losses of sheep, horses, mules, and cattle rose steadily, as did public clamor for the authorities to do something about it. The US government tried to negotiate peace treaties in 1846 and 1849, but there was no possiblility of coordinated talks among the far-flung Navajo-an estimate 12,000 poeple living in small, autonomous clans, herding sheep in canyons and mesas across the vast desert between the Rio Grande and the Grand Canyon.
A more aggressive approach was signaled in 1851 by the construction of several military posts, including Ft Defiance about 30 miles southeast of Canyon de Chelly. Land that the Navajo had long used to graze their sheep was abruptly taken over for the soldiers' horses. The result was predictable: a long, increasingly bloody cycle of attacks and reprisals, climaxing in 1860 with all all-out attack by 1,000 warriors on Ft Defiance, which the army soon abandoned.
Any celebrations of this symbolic victory were cut short, however, by a punitive military campaign that cut across Navajo country, systematically destroying crops and confiscating livestock. Facing a threat of mass starvation, Navajo leaders signed a peace agreement early in 1861; its terms included a promise of government rations for the tribe, and later that year they were duly distributed at a fort in New Mexico. The atmosphere was festive, highlighted (as such gatherings often were) by horse racing and heavy betting by both sides. In the final race the army's rider was accused of cheating, but the judges-all soldiers-named him the winner. An uproar ensued and the troops hastily withdrew into the fort, whereupon their commander ordered them to open fire on the crowd. Within minutes more than 30 Navajos lay dead, a dozen women and children among them, and a brutal new round of vengeance seeking had begun.
Following the outbreak of the Civil War, General Carleton-who had so ruthlessly dealt with the Apache raiders in southern Arizona-turned his attention to the Navajo. In the summer of 1863, on Carleton's orders, Col Christopher "Kit" Carson began a new campaign against the Navajo homesteads of northeastern Arizona, a larger version of the scorched-earth policy used three years earlier.
By January his forces were sweeping into Canyon de Chelley, the ancient and sacred stronghold of the Navajo. Families living in and around the canyon were rousted from their adobe-covered hogans, which were then burned-along with their saddles, clothing, and blankets. Their sheep, cattle, and horses were seized or slaughtered, their peach orchards were hacked down, and about 2 million pounds of Navajo corn went up in smoke. Families hiding in caves in the canyon walls were hunted down. Tribal accounts tell of some who chose to leap from the cliffs rather than leave their homeland. Before long, some 8,000 men, women, and children-most of the Navajo nation-were under armed guard.
After months of harsh internment at Ft Wingate and elsewhere, the prisoners were forced to make the infamous Long Walk,a grueling 300-mile forced march across most of New Mexico. Their destination was a narrow strip of land along the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico, a dry, desolate place known as Bosque Redondo. There, as General Carleton envisioned it, they would "acquire new habits, new ideas, new modes of life...and thus, little by little, they will become a happy and contented people."
The Navajo men were conscripted to mold adobes and construct Ft Sumner, while their families suffered terrible privations for nearly four years. The drinking water was bitter, the sterile land no good for growing corn. The fort used up all the available wood, so there was not enough fuel for fires to withstand the winter rains and cold winds. Illness was rife.
"Most of the people got sick and had stomach trouble. The children also had stomach ache. The prisoners begged the Army for some corn, and the leaders also pleaded for it for their people. Finally they were given some-one ear of corn each."-Navajo survivor of Bosque Redondo
One Navajo headman, a silversmith named Herrero, complained to Senate investigators in 1865 that his people were "dying as though they were shooting at them with a rifle....There is a hopsital here for us, but all who go in never come out." Starvation, prostitution, venereal disease, and sheer despair were wasting them away before his eyes.
Initially a few bands of Navajo renegades evaded Carson's search-and-destroy campaign. Led by such men as Manuelito, a war chief of the Folded Arms People clan, and Barboncito-"The Orator"-a signatory of the ill-fated peace treaties of 1846 and 1849, they endured great hardships as they hid in canyons and caves. Most were eventually forced by hunger, thirst, or disease to surrender at Ft Sumner. At least one small band of Kayenta Navajo held out, however-having found freshwater springs in a hidden canyon behind the top of Navajo Mountain (called "Head of Earth Woman" in their language) that sustained them during the four years of the Ft Sumner captivity.
The crushing of the Navajo resistance and their Ft Sumner incarceration ultimately had its desired effect. "If we are taken back to our own country," one subdued tribal spokesman promised General Sherman, "we will call you our father and mother."
The treaty they finally signed in 1868 was in fact quite generous: the Navajo survivors retraced their Long Walk back to a new 3.5 million acre reservation covering the old country they loved so much and virtually encircling the Hopi mesas, and the government let them keep 35,000 sheep and goats to give them a fresh start.
During the ordeal of 1864-1868, the Navajo had lost about one-quarter of their population. No longer a threat to their white neighbors, they quietly set about rebuilding their shattered lives and replenishing their treasured herds of sheep and cattle. In the process not much more than 10,000 in 1868 to an estimated 17,000 by 1890-a conspicuous exception to the fate awaiting so many other native nations during the same dark period.
In the late 1800's, schools, such as Albuquerque and the one at Ft Wingate, also in New Mexico, Navajo students learned traditional weaving. Pueblo painters worked with Santa Fe Indian School students to create murals of Indian life and Indian symbols on the walls of the cafeteria. The outstanding Navajo silversmith of his day, Ambrose Roanhorse, began to teach his art. Parents began to feel more welcome on the Santa Fe campus.
But don't be deceived, leading up to this point....the boarding schools children were forbidden to speak their native languages, forced to shed familiar clothing for white men's garments, and subjected to harsh discipline. Denied the teachings of tribal elders, the company of kin, the familiar foods, smells, and sights of home, students sometimes ran away from school or hid when it came time to leave in the first place. Youngsters who had seldom heard an unkind word spoken to them were all too often verbally and physically abused by their white teachers.
For parents, as well as students, the prospect of such long separations was a cause for deep anxiety. Many argued to keep their children at home, contending they were needed to work or to help out, or would miss necessary rituals or were simply too young to go away. But they usually had little or no say in the matter. Children without parents and children from the the poorest families constituted likely recruits; the food and clothing offered by the schools enticed some to enroll.
As time proved, the slow pace of white settlement meant an advantage for many native residents. The Navajo had survived the agony of their Long Walk to exile and imprisonment at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico in 1864, and by 1868 they had returned to a portion of their homeland. The reservation established by the government initially consisted of a 3.5 million acre rectangular tract situated on either side of what became the Arizona-New Mexico state line.
The rapid increase of the Navajo population and the need for additional territory for their livestock made an expansion of the reservation crucial. Congress had put an end to treaty making in 1871, but reservations could still be created or enlarged by executive order. By 1917 a total of nine such orders quadrupled the size of the Navajo estate.
