The high plateau of northern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico is among the most magnificently scenic regions in all North America, but it also is an arid and barren country of sagebrush wastes and inaccessible canyons and buttes. Precipitation and temperatures vary greatly with altitude. Much of the area’s rainfall comes in torrential rainstorms in late summer; for the rest of the year the sun beats down mercilessly on the land. The lower elevations are extremely hot in the summer, but sub-zero temperatures occur frequently in the winter or even in late autumn, and the short growing season is sometimes destroyed by unseasonable frost.
There is a rich wildlife, but it never is abundant. There are dozens of varieties of birds, from eagles and hawks to mourning doves, and there are rabbits and squirrels, prairie dogs, foxes, coyotes and badgers. At one time, too, there were such native animals as bears and mountain sheep and wild turkeys, but they have long since disappeared from that region.
It was in this country that a new people appeared around the middle of the 15th century – a people with a very simple culture and an economy based entirely on hunting and gathering. They were the Athabascans who had broken away from their brothers in the far Northwest more than a century earlier and had migrated southward. They called themselves Dineh – the people; the white men called them the Navajo, a name that does not exist in their native language at all. These Indians are sometimes also called the fifth Apache tribe in the Southwest, and at one time the Navajo and the Apache probably were indeed one ethnic group. By the early 17th century, in fact, the Navajo still resembled their Apache cousins so much that the Spanish called them Apache de Navajo, after a now-abandoned pueblo site in northern Arizona, known as Navajo, which some of that tribe inhabited at that time.
In the Southwest the Navajo found something they had never known. As hunters and gatherers they had always lived barely a step ahead of hunger; now they encountered the Pueblo people’s life of security and relative plenty, and in amazement they gazed upon the patches of corn and pumpkins, beans and cotton. They saw fine pottery being decorated in colorful designs; they saw stone tools, feather robes, blankets and clothing of woven cotton; and they saw the Pueblo’s ornaments and jewelry of turquoise and other bright-colored stones. Having always been raiders, the Navajo saw only one way to acquire for themselves the luxuries and the comforts of Pueblo life, and that was to take them. As the Navajo spread throughout the Southwest, they did what they had always done – they stole. They kidnapped male craftsmen and artisans; they captured young females to intermarry with them and raise children to whom these women could pass on their skills in pottery and weaving. And most of all, they stole these lands of spectacular cliff houses, of multi-storied pueblos on the mesa tops and in deep canyons. And they stayed, and it became their country. They called it Dinetah – the people’s land.
But as the Navajo began to mix with the more advanced Pueblos, Navajo culture underwent a radical transformation. They still remained the enemies of the more sedentary tribes, and later of the Spanish colonists, and both suffered almost continuously from Navajo raids for generations to come. Treaties were made with them as late as the 19th century, but they achieved little. It was not until after the American Civil War that the United States government was finally able to end Navajo hostilities. But long before that time, the Navajo had learned to weave and to farm, and they became almost entirely agricultural, growing maize and beans, squashes and melons, and raising sheep. From the Pueblo, too, they had meanwhile adopted ceremonial rituals, complete with their costumes and masked dances.
Most of the great Anasazi pueblos probably were inhabited by ghosts only when the Navajo arrived in the Southwest. But they did not take over these deserted big towns; Navajo homes remained the same they had been from time immemorial – the familiar hogan, a low, unpretentious structure of logs and sticks, covered with brush, bark or grass, with a smoke hole at the top – a crude, windowless building which blends into the countryside. Not until they settled in the Southwest was the hogan also covered with adobe. The hogan’s floorplan is circular, symbolizing the sun, and its entrance always faces east, as prescribed by mythology. The entire building resembles a low log cabin with a domed roof.
If the Navajo adopted much that was Pueblo, they also retained and mixed in many of the traditions and superstitions from their native northern homelands, as well as traits picked up along the way in the Great Plains and in the mountains. At the heart of Navajo beliefs lay the people’s desire to keep their lives in harmony with nature and with the supernatural. Maize, for instance, was to the Navajo not merely a food plant; it was a gift of the gods to mortals. When the Navajo farmer went into the fields with his hoe – unlike the Pueblo, farming among the Navajo was men’s work – he regarded all phases of his labors as being in harmony with some great mysterious force. The germination of the seed, the dependence on rain, the life-giving sun, the covering of an ear of maize and its silk, all were symbolized in legend, sacred songs and ceremonies. Illness was considered a sign of disruption of this harmony, and curing ceremonies were therefore carried out to restore that harmonious balance. Navajo ceremonies were long and elaborate; all followed a strictly prescribed and well-prepared sequence and had to be performed letter-perfect. The shamans chanted and danced and made symbolic paintings of colored sand and crushed minerals. Any mistake in the ritual disrupted the harmonious relationship with the supernatural spirits, and evil was the inevitable result.
Many of the Navajo superstitions were clearly the remnants of their Athabascan heritage, of the somber moods in the far-northern woodlands. But no Athabascans – in fact, no other North American Indians – were as frightened and horrified of death as were the Navajo. Every human being was believed to have an evil alter ego, and that part of a person became a dangerous ghost, a chindi, upon that person’s death. Chindis always returned to the scene of their death to do harm to the living, regardless of how good or affectionate the living person might have been. A dying person was therefore always removed from the hogan and left to expire outside; but if a death did occur within the house, a hole was broken into the wall to the north, the direction of all evil, to allow the spirit to escape. Still, the hogan was usually destroyed, or at least abandoned as a chindi hogan. The dead were buried as quickly as possible, and afterwards all mourners were required to purify themselves by bathing, by burning incense, and by observing elaborate rituals as protection against the evil spirits.