Diné (Navajo) Religion

Hozho is the organising term of Dine religion, and it has no single English equivalent: beauty, order, harmony, health and rightness at once, a condition in which things are as they should be. Its opposite, hochxo, is disorder, ugliness and sickness, and the two are not permanently separated. Life produces disorder as a matter of course, through contact with death, through lightning, through certain animals, through war, through violation of rules. Ceremony is the technology for restoring hozho, which is why Dine ceremonial is overwhelmingly curative rather than calendrical. There is little in it resembling a weekly service.

The Diyin Dine, usually rendered Holy People, are the beings of the emergence narratives who established the world and the ceremonies. Changing Woman, Asdzaa Nadleehe, is the most important: found as an infant, grown to maturity in days, mother of the Hero Twins and giver of the Blessingway. She ages and renews with the seasons. Her twin sons, Monster Slayer and Born for Water, cleared the world of the beings that preyed on people, and the war ceremonies derive from what they did. First Man and First Woman, Spider Woman, Talking God and the Sun figure across the cycles.

Four mountains bound Dinetah and hold the directions: Blanca Peak to the east, Mount Taylor to the south, the San Francisco Peaks to the west and Hesperus Peak to the north. Each has an associated colour, mineral, time of day and Holy Person. The relevance is not decorative. Development on these mountains, notably the use of treated wastewater for snowmaking on the San Francisco Peaks, has been litigated by the Navajo Nation and other tribes as a religious injury, and lost.

Ordinary Dine practice runs on rules rather than on doctrine: greeting the dawn with corn pollen, avoidance rules regarding the dead, restrictions on when certain stories may be told, and attention to the direction things move.

Dine ceremony is organised into chantways, each a long ordered performance of song, prayer, dry painting, herbs and physical procedure, conducted by a hataalii, a singer, over one, two, five or nine nights. The names indicate what a ceremony treats and where its authority comes from: Blessingway, Hozhooji, the foundation of the system, used for good order, for a house, for a pregnancy, for a departure; Enemyway, for the sickness brought by contact with outsiders and with violence, used for veterans returning from both world wars and from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; Nightway, Mountainway, Beautyway, Shootingway and others, each with its own narrative of how a hero obtained it from the Holy People.

The dry painting, made from coloured sand, pollen, charcoal and ground stone on the floor of the hogan, places the patient in the design so that the depicted Holy People act on them, and it is destroyed before the next dawn. The commercial sand paintings sold in the Southwest are deliberately altered so that they are not the real thing.

A hataalii learns a chantway by apprenticeship, memorising hundreds of songs in fixed order over years, in a ceremonial register of the language that is not casual Navajo. Getting it wrong is understood to be dangerous rather than merely ineffective. The number of singers holding a full nine-night ceremony has declined sharply, traceable in large part to the boarding schools that punished the language.

This entry deliberately does not reproduce ceremonial detail. A large body of chantway text, song and painting was recorded and published between the 1890s and the 1950s, some of it by researchers who paid singers in no position to refuse, and much of it restricted by season, by initiation, or absolutely. Reproducing it now, on the excuse that it is already in print, compounds the original act. Dine institutions have worked for decades to restrict circulation of such material and to bring ceremonial objects home under repatriation law.

Two accounts of origin sit side by side and are not reconciled. Dine tradition describes an emergence upward through a series of worlds, each left behind because of disorder, into this one, followed by the establishment of the mountains and the ceremonies. Archaeology and historical linguistics describe the Dine and the Apache as southern Athabaskan speakers related to peoples of the western subarctic, with the separation usually dated near 1300 and securely dated building in the Dinetah region of northwestern New Mexico from the fifteenth century. Estimates of arrival range from as early as 800 to as late as 1500, the material trace is thin because mobile people leave little, and Dine oral tradition contains no account of a migration from the north. Both accounts are held sincerely, and the disagreement will not be settled by more evidence of the kind now available.

What is not disputed is that Dine practice took its recognisable form in the Southwest, in contact with Pueblo neighbours, with refugees from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and with Spanish livestock. Sheep became central to Dine economy and thus to Dine ceremony.

In 1864 the United States Army, under Kit Carson, applied a scorched earth campaign to Dine fields, orchards and flocks and forced roughly 9,000 people to walk more than 300 miles to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, where up to 3,500 died over four years of exposure, disease and inadequate rations. The internment failed on its own terms, and the treaty of 1 June 1868 permitted a return to a reservation inside the four sacred mountains. The Long Walk is a religious event in Dine memory, not only a political one: it removed the people from the ground on which their ceremonies must be performed, and the return brought them back inside the mountains.

Federal stock reduction in the 1930s, intended as conservation, destroyed hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats and horses and is remembered as a second dispossession. Uranium mined on the Nation from the 1940s left contaminated ground and water and a legacy of disease; mining is prohibited there today. The Nation now counts more than 399,000 enrolled members, and Dine religion is practised alongside substantial Native American Church and Christian membership, with many families involved in more than one.