An Emergence Story Told Many Ways

Navajo Sacred Places, Klara Bonsack Kelley and Harris Francis's study of Navajo traditional geography, documents how directly the First Man and First Woman emergence narrative anchors Navajo religious identity to specific, real locations within Navajo traditional territory, including sacred mountains and the emergence place itself, variously located by different tellings, reflecting the same broader pattern found across Navajo oral tradition in which a sacred narrative is inseparable from an actual named landscape rather than existing as abstract, placeless myth. As with much orally transmitted Navajo religious material, different medicine people, chantway traditions and family lineages preserve variant versions of the First Man and First Woman narrative with differing details and emphases, a diversity Navajo religious scholarship treats as a normal, expected feature of a living oral tradition carried by many independent ceremonial specialists rather than as a problem requiring a single corrected version, and this atlas presents the broad, widely shared outline of the story accordingly rather than asserting any one telling as definitive.