Navajo (Dine)

Dine tradition begins with emergence: the Dine Bahane tells how the people rose through a succession of lower worlds into this, the Glittering World, where the Holy People, the Diyin Dine'e, set the four sacred mountains in place and taught the ways of right living. Most beloved of the Holy People is Changing Woman, Asdzaa Nadleehe, who grows old and young again with the seasons; she gave the people their central blessing rites and is the mother of the warrior twins who cleared the world of monsters. James McNeley's study of Holy Wind, nilch'i, shows how a single animating wind, standing within every person and the world alike, carries thought, speech and guidance, a philosophical psychology embedded in the language itself.

The purpose of Dine ceremony is hozho, a word gathering harmony, beauty, order and health into one idea. When illness, contact with dangerous things or disorder disturbs it, a hataalii, a singer who has spent years learning a single ceremonial, restores it through a chantway: nights of song, prayer and precise ritual action, often including sandpaintings through which the Holy People are present, made and unmade within the ceremony itself. Blessingway holds the central place, with other ways addressed to particular needs.

Ceremonial knowledge belongs to the tradition's own practitioners, and the Nation has repeatedly gone to court to protect the living places of that religion, as in the long litigation over the San Francisco Peaks. This atlas therefore describes, and does not reproduce.

The Dine are Southern Athabaskan speakers whose ancestors reached the Southwest centuries before European contact, settling the canyon country they call Dinetah in present northwestern New Mexico. From Pueblo neighbors they absorbed farming and weaving, and from Spanish herds they built a pastoral life of sheep and horses; Navajo weaving and, later, silverwork became arts of world reputation. Klara Kelley and Harris Francis have documented how deeply this history is written into place, a sacred geography of mountains, springs, trails and story running far beyond any reservation boundary.

In 1863 and 1864 the United States Army under Kit Carson burned crops and herds and force-marched some eight thousand Dine three hundred miles to internment at Bosque Redondo, the Long Walk that remains the central trauma of Navajo history. The treaty of 1868 allowed the survivors to return to a portion of their homeland, an unusual outcome in American Indian history, and the reservation has since grown into the largest in the United States, spanning Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

The Navajo Nation today governs itself with an elected president and council from Window Rock. The Dine language, made famous by the code talkers of the Second World War, remains among the most spoken Native languages north of Mexico, taught now in immersion schools. Traditional ceremony continues alongside the Native American Church and Christian congregations, and the Nation continues to defend its sacred places in federal court.