| The
Navajo Way
Men's Journal, November 1998 Print Friendly Verson |
| One of the most remarkable
things about this republic is that there exists within its borders a parallel
universe known as Dinetah, a nation of more than 155,000 souls who subscribe
to a mind-set completely different from the modern American belief that
everything in nature is there for the taking. Dinetal is the ancestral
homeland of the Diné, more commonly called the Navajo, a misnomer
perpetrated by the Spaniards, as are many of the names for the native tribes
of the Southwest. An area larger than West Virginia that sprawls
out of Arizona into New Mexico and Utah, Dinetal is bounded by four sacred
mountains - North Mountain (Debénitsaa), in the La Plata Mountains
of Colorado, Sounth Mountain (Tso Dzil), of Mount Taylor, near Grants,
New Mexico; East Mountain (Sis Naajin'i), or Sierra Blanca, in Colorado;
and West Mountain (Dook Oslid), in the San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff,
Arizona -and four sacred rivers (the Colorado, the Little Colorado, the
San Juan, and the Rio Grande). It is some of the starkest, most magically
open-to-the-sky country anywhere -a sagebrush steppe spotted with juniper
and ancient, gnarled pinon trees, occasionally gashed by a yawning canyon
or thrust up into a craggy, pine-clad mountain range, a magenta mesa, a
blood-red cliff, a tiara of lucent, stress-fractured tan sandstone.
"The land is our Bible," a Navajo
woman named Sally once explained to me. Every feature has a name and a
story and is sacred, just as every animal and plant has a "way," its own
particular means of contributing, its right to be there, which must be
respected. Much of a traditional Navajo's energies are devoted to keeping
on good terms with the elements and one's fellow creatures, to "being in
harmony with everything -yourself, mainly, all the living things, the air,
Father Sky, the moon, and on and on," Sally continued. This state of hozho
-or walking in beauty, as it is often translated -is the goal of the Navajo
religion.
"You can be in harmony and sailing
along just fine when suddenly you run into something disharmonious, and
there's always a reason for it," she went on. "Like my brother Roy, who
drowned. He got on bad terms with the Water People. Or my sister Lavine,
who got bitten by a rattler when she was little. Her arm got big and bloated,
and after that, every time I saw a snake I would kill it. Snakes see everything
purple, and one day at noon when I was out with the sheep, everything suddenly
turned purple. A snake slithered up and asked 'Why are you killing all
our brothers?' I explained, because my sister got bitten. So the snake
said, 'Let's make a deal. Don't kill us, and we won't bother you.' "
A few years ago, Sally's husband,
Kee Richard, started having nosebleeds. It turned out there was a tumor
in his nose. The doctor in Flagstaff said it was cancer and zapped it with
radiation, but Sally's aunt, who was a medicine woman, took one look at
Kee Richard and asked him "Did you ever kill a porcupine?" "Well, yes,"
Kee Richard said. "When I was 10, I clubbed a porcupine with a stick from
the fire. It went off to die with blood pouring out of its nose." Sally's
aunt told him he had to offer turquoise and abalone to the porcupine and
make a confession to ask forgiveness.
ACCORDING TO ARCHEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE,
the Navajo were part of,a migration from Siberia somewhere between 11,000
and 16,000 years ago. The Navajo themselves, however, say the People emerged
from Navajo Lake, in northeastern Arizona. "Don't tell me you're falling
for that Bering Strait stuff," Sally's cousin Tom, a traditionalist, chided
me. Glottochronological evidence suggests that the Navajo split off from
the Athabascans of the Pacific Northwest within the past 1,000 years and
began to drift south in loose, highly mobile bands. Their religion was
an animism that evolved from their exceptional ability, as hunters, to
"get inside the skulls of the animals," as one elder put it, a detailed
understanding of the way of each species. Between 900 and 1,500 years ago,
they arrived in the Southwest, where the Anasazi -ancestors of the Hopi
had lived for centuries in cliff dwellings and communal mud pueblos The
Anasazi had learned to grow maize from their Mexican cousins, a practice
the Navajo adopted, along with the Anasazi's elaborate mysticism surrounding
the plant. The Hopi, whose name for the Navajo means "Skull-Bashers" (while
the Navajo call the Hopi "Cliff-Shitters" and "Hopeless"), still live on
their four Tibetan mesas in the middle of Dinetah.
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