Diné (Navajo)

The Diyin Dine'e, the Holy People, are a defined company rather than an open field, and that is the first structural point. They are named, they are known, they act in the narrative of the emergence, and they are not added to.

The world was not manufactured by a creator standing outside it. The account is one of emergence: successive worlds below, left in turn because conduct in them made them untenable, until the people arrive in this one, which is then ordered and bounded. Origin here is a journey upward through conditions rather than a single act of making.

That order is spatial and it is exact. Four sacred mountains mark the boundaries of the homeland, one at each cardinal direction, each associated with a colour, a time of day and a material. Living within those bounds is part of what the tradition means by living correctly.

There is no route by which a human being becomes one of the Holy People. The relationship runs the other way: the Holy People established the ceremonies by which imbalance is corrected, and it is the practice of those ceremonies, by people qualified to conduct them, that maintains the condition the tradition calls hozho.

Dine religion is living and is listed by this atlas as a restricted tradition. The chantways are ceremonial property held by those entitled to conduct them, and none of their content appears here.

The ceremonial system of the Dine is transmitted by apprenticeship. A singer learns a chantway over years from a singer who holds it, in full, including the songs, the prayers, the sequence and the sandpaintings, and the knowledge is inseparable from the entitlement to use it. This is not information that happens to be private; it is an office.

The outside record is nonetheless very large. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology documented Dine ceremony in exceptional detail, including reproductions of sandpaintings that are made and destroyed within a ceremony and were never intended to persist. Some of that work was done with the cooperation of singers who had their own reasons for wanting a record made; some was not. The results circulate freely and are still reprinted.

The consequence is a genuine asymmetry: material that the tradition holds under strict conditions is available to any reader in a library, and its availability is not evidence that it was ever meant to be given.

The Navajo Nation has since developed its own research protocols, and access to sites, ceremony and material is governed by the Nation rather than by whoever wishes to study it.

This atlas therefore states what kind of institution the ceremonial system is, records the structure of the religious order, and reproduces no ceremonial content. Where a reader wants more, the appropriate route is the Nation and its scholars.