First Man

First Man, Altse Hastiin, is described in Navajo emergence narratives as having been formed from an ear of white corn by the Holy People at the beginning of the tradition's cosmology, appearing together with First Woman, formed from yellow corn, at the close of the underworlds and the beginning of the ascent through the sequence of worlds that leads eventually to this, the current Glittering World where the Dine now live.

Navajo cosmology describes this emergence as passing through several prior worlds, most commonly counted as four, each ended by conflict or disorder that forces the people upward into the next, and First Man plays a central organising role throughout this journey, frequently credited with establishing key elements of the created order once the people reach the present world, including aspects of ceremonial practice, the placement of the sacred mountains that bound Navajo traditional territory, and the naming of the days and seasons. His role as an organiser and namer of the created world's structure gives First Man a function closer to a culture hero and cosmic architect than to a distant, purely originating creator figure.

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.