Homelands: A Geography of Culture and Place across America

ELEVEN: The Navajo Homeland

c h a p t e r e l e v e n The Navajo Homeland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stephen C. Jett The Navajo ([T’áá] Diné[’é], [ Just] the People, or Naabeehó [Diné’é]) are an Apachean-speaking people, the large majority of whom currently reside on and near one major reservation and its smaller satellites in northeastern Arizona , northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah. The area of Navajo occupance is over 24,000 square miles and exceeds the size of West Virginia. The most populous Native American group, numbering about 219,000 in 1990, the Navajo have by far the largest reservation and quasi-reservation population (143,405). In 1990, they comprised a third of all U.S. reservation Indians (Paisano 1993; Shumway and Jackson 1995, 187–89, 199), despite some 35 percent living outside these lands. Thus, spatio-demographically, the Navajo are the most important Indian “tribe” in North America north of Mexico. They also control vast resources, notably in the realm of energyproducing mineral wealth. Unlike many tribes, especially eastern ones, the bulk of the Navajo population remains in its traditional area of occupance (map 11.1), it is the majority group there, to the point of near exclusivity almost everywhere, and it has retained its traditional culture to an unusual degree. These facts contribute to a highly developed sense of “homeland”—unequaled among non–Native American ethnic groups in the United States. This strong sense of homeland exits even though history and archaeology indicate that the ancestors of the Navajo arrived relatively recently in the American Southwest (Perry 1991), an arrival not attested to before the fif168 Fig. 11.1. Shiprock, northwestern New Mexico, with Navajos in foreground. This sacred volcanic neck is seen as part of a gigantic avian figure and was the nesting site of the people-devouring Rock Eagle Monsters. The homeland was freed of these and other monsters through the efforts of Monster Slayer and Born For Water, twin offspring of the earth deity Changing Woman by the Sun Bearer. Photograph courtesy the Western History Department, Denver Public Library, author and date unknown. Map 11.1. Navajo Country, 2000. teenth century. These “pre-Navajos” migrated southward after splitting off from their Northern Athapaskan-speaking kin in western Canada. Settling in the upper San Juan River drainage of northwestern New Mexico and adjacent Colorado on the edges of Pueblo Indian territory, these people from a northern hunter tradition adopted flood-water farming (stressing maize, squashes, and beans), aspects of religion (for example, the idea of directional sacred peaks), and a variety of items of material culture (including weaving) from the Puebloans. Subsequent to the arrival of the Spanish around 1600, these “proto-Navajos” borrowed livestock-raising, especially of goats, sheep, and horses, from the newcomers, via the Pueblos. Their domesticated animals increasingly replaced wild game as a source of meat. Acculturation went on from early times but was probably particularly intense in the period following the return in 1692 of the Spanish after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, which had forced withdrawal of the latter for a dozen years. At this time, a considerable number of Rio Grande Puebloans fled to the Navajo Country to escape Spanish reprisals, and there seems to have been intermarriage (Brugge 1968), leading to a fusion into fully Navajo culture. By 1750 a way of life had developed among the Navajo, that revolved around maize agriculture and pastoralism, supplemented by hunting and gathering . This lifeway continued to develop over time; the degree of emphasis on one or another of these activities varied locally according to environmental possibilities and constraints and temporally according to military pressures from outside groups (Brugge 1983). Settlement was in small, often isolated, extended-family homesteads ( Jett 1978b, 1980) featuring hogans—conical (and later domical) earth-covered one-room dwellings ( Jett 1992b). The people made seasonal moves, usually between summer lowland farms and higherelevation winter sites where firewood was available, or between lowland and highland pasturage ( Jett 1978a). A distinctive cultural landscape came to characterize the region: patches of farmland, mostly on floodplains; homesteads with hogans, brush-roofed summer shades, corrals, and beehive ovens; and conical sudatories ( Jett and Spencer 1981). Sacred Mountains, Sacred Land The Navajos’ Origin Myth “tells The People something about their place in the universe. . . . Man is understood as part of nature along with animals, inthe navajo homeland . . . 171 sects, and features of...