Navajo

Language, Culture, and Society

From one perspective, Navajo success seems explainable by fortuities of geography: before modern irrigation and air conditioning, few Spaniards, Mexicans, or Americans desired to settle in areas like Dinetah—far from water or cost-effective farming conditions. Before 20th-century discoveries of oil and uranium, Americans saw little there to attract them, sparing southwestern peoples the annihilation Native peoples in more hospitable regions sometimes suffered.

The enduring successes of the Navajo clearly owe immensely to the courage of the Navajo themselves and the resilience of their cultural traditions. Lacking the secrecy requirements of Pueblo peoples (like the Hopi), the Navajo generally welcomed anthropologists and scholars, so outsiders obtained comprehensive descriptions of Navajo culture, including their renowned “chantways” (óji)—both the healing chantways that utilize sand paintings and the more fundamental “Blessingway” (hózhóóji), which demonstrates women's centrality in Navajo life. The Navajo are matrilinear, and women hold legal primacy.

“Singers” (hataii)—religious authorities who preserve the chants that empower individuals’ lives within the community—preside at the most sacred Blessingway ritual, the kinaaldá, whereby each Navajo girl at adolescence becomes identified with “Changing Woman” (the source of Earth's life). Such features of Navajo life endured to become photographed, filmed, and detailed in many publications, while those of many other Native Americans were lost long ago.

Scholarly research also explains what the Navajo share with their Pueblo neighbors as well as what makes them unique. The Pueblo peoples speak several unrelated languages. The Navajo, like the nearby Apache, speak an Athabascan language, a family otherwise represented by languages in Alaska and western Canada. Unlike the Apache, who speak seven distinct languages and maintain distinct cultures, the Navajo people are linguistically and culturally homogenous.

Scholars are convinced that less than a millennium ago, the Navajo and Apache (for reasons unclear) migrated from the far north and ultimately settled in the southwest not long before the Spanish arrived. However, there is little archaeological record of that migration, nor any mention in Navajo oral history. Navajo culture shares much more with the Pueblo peoples than with most Apache, especially a complex religious culture focused on the sources of life, including the myth of emergence from worlds below, and ceremonial celebration of the primary food source, corn (maize). Unlike the Hopi, the Navajo never formed specialized religious societies with separate social and ritual roles. Navajo houses (hogan) were also distinct from Pueblos’ stone/brick dwellings, and most chantway ceremonies were conducted in the family home. Also, the Navajo did not adapt Pueblo ceremonials featuring masked dancers, as some Apache did.

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