Navajo

• CATEGORY: Tribe
• CULTURE AREA: Southwest
• LANGUAGE GROUP: Athapaskan
• PRIMARY LOCATION: Northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, southern Utah
• POPULATION SIZE: 399,494 (2021 Navajo Office of Vital Records and Identification)

There has been disagreement among scholars regarding when the ancient ancestors of the Navajo (or Navaho) migrated to North America. Some believe that they came in a relatively recent Bering Strait migration. The linguistic designation of the main group is Na-Dene. This grouping contains several subgroups, the largest of which is Athapaskan—the Navajo language is part of the Southern Athabaskan subfamily. These hunting and gathering peoples, who once occupied Alaska and northwestern Canada, also began moving south. How and why the Athapaskans migrated into the Southwest is still a matter of discussion among scholars. As they did, they called themselves Diné (“the people”). The Navajo and their linguistic cousins, the Apache, reached the Southwest sometime in the mid-fourteenth century, with the Navajo occupying the area of the Gobernador and Largo tributaries of the San Juan River some 75 miles north of Santa Fe. This became the traditional homeland, the Dinetah, which means “among the people” in the Navajo language.

Prehistory

Anthropologists have pointed out a major difference between the Puebloans and the Navajo in prehistory. By the time the Navajo arrived in the Southwest, the Pueblo Indians had been there for centuries and were firmly committed to the traditions of their ancestors, one of which was putting the good of the group or village as a whole above that of the individual. The Navajo, on the other hand, considered the individual to be of primary importance. They were also not as resistant to change as the Puebloans were.

The first Navajo in the Southwest were organized into fairly small groups, each with a headman whose duties consisted of leading his people to places where water, game, and wild grains and berries were plentiful. As they tended to move with the seasons, following the game, they built semipermanent circular wooden dwellings called hogans. Excavation of several prehistoric hogan sites has established that the Navajo were in the area at least as early as the 1500s.

Most scholars agree that the Navajo were greatly influenced by the culture of the Puebloans, which they recognized as more advanced than their own. Many Navajo myths and folktales portray the Puebloans as sophisticated, rich, and powerful. Apparently, the Navajo were especially impressed by Pueblo religion and the complexity and power of its ceremonials, which surpassed anything in their own culture at the time. Their first rudimentary efforts at agriculture were also inspired by the Puebloans.

The Spanish-Mexican Period

The first Spanish colonists in northern New Mexico, who came with Don Juan de Oñate in 1598, recorded that many raids on their settlements were carried out by “Apache or Apachean” peoples. In 1626, Fray Zárata Salmerón was the first to designate the Navajo as a specific Apachean group. By this time, the Navajo had become a large and powerful tribe, whose various bands were led by both war and peace chieftains. They traded with and raided both the Puebloans and the Spanish settlers equally. As the numbers of the Spanish colonists increased, they became more demanding and cruel, especially to the Puebloans, attacking and burning the pueblos and killing or enslaving the people. As a consequence, the Puebloans began to encourage Navajo and Apache raids on the Spanish. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Spanish effort to convert all Native Americans to Christianity had driven both the Puebloans and Navajo to conduct their own religious rituals in secret.

Navajo-Pueblo Contact

After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Spanish reconquest of 1692, many Puebloans fled north to the San Juan River area, which brought about greater contact with the Navajo. It has been established that, as a result of this interaction, the Navajo continued to learn much from the Puebloans: more sophisticated agricultural practices, styles of architecture, manufacturing techniques, and art forms such as weaving and improved pottery-making. Pueblo and Navajo ceremonial articles have been found in the same caches in the upper San Juan, establishing that Navajo religious practices were also greatly influenced by the Puebloans.

In the last decade of the seventeenth century, in the upper reaches of the San Juan, the Navajo and some of the Pueblo refugees built both open clusters of hogans and small masonry pueblos (pueblitos) consisting of fewer than six rooms each. Then, moving south into the Gobernador and Largo canyons, they built large masonry compounds and pueblitos, where they lived by hunting and gathering, herding, and dry farming. By the end of the century, they had acquired horses, cattle, sheep, and goats by trading with or raiding the Spaniards. In the next fifty years or so, they moved into Chaco Canyon and the Big Bead Mesa area, and then into Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona.

Although the first bands of Navajo to reach the Southwest had been patrilineal, the close contact with the Puebloans in the late seventeenth century led the Navajo to adopt a matrilineal system of descent, with matrilocal residence, a characteristic they have retained into the modern period. The Navajo also adapted the Puebloan idea of clans into their own cultural pattern.

1700–1845

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Navajo continued their raids on Spanish communities and the Puebloans in the Rio Grande Valley, greatly aided by their acquisition of the horse. As many scholars have pointed out, the Navajo considered these raids to be an economic pursuit rather than war, and they were therefore never as anxious to drive the Spanish out as the Puebloans were. Although the Navajo in the Mount Taylor region rejected the Spanish attempt of 1745 to establish missions among them, for example, they remained friendly to the Spanish. On the other hand, Spanish and Mexican reports on the Navajo in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were contained largely in official government documents and therefore dealt mostly with warfare, describing countless Navajo raids and Spanish or Mexican reprisals.

The fact that the horse gave the Navajo greater mobility, increasing their range for hunting, raiding, and trading, has led some to think that the Navajo reverted to nomadism, which was not the case at all. The horse made the Navajo more mobile, but that mobility was confined, in almost all cases, to specific areas where a family might build one or more houses which would serve as fixed centers of family life. With these centers as a permanent base, some family members might follow the sheep herds from their summer to winter grazing lands or go off to hunt or trade, while others remained behind to tend the crops. The fact that clan names are almost always place names as well also reinforces the fact that Navajo nomadism in the historic period is largely a myth.

Sheep and goats were also important to the growth of the Navajo population, providing not only a more dependable food supply but also a renewable source of trade goods, such as raw wool and woolen textiles, that could be exchanged for other necessities.

The US Period

When the United States took possession of the southwestern territories from Mexico in 1846, General S. W. Kearny, arriving with his armies in August of that year, declared that he would stop all Indian raids. After a military expedition against the Navajo in November 1846, Colonel A. W. Doniphan signed a treaty with thirteen Navajo leaders, among whom were Zarcillos Largos, Antonio Sandoval, and Narbono. This was only the first of many treaties into which the United States entered with local headmen in the mistaken belief that they were tribal “chiefs” who could speak for the entire Navajo Nation. Thus, when these treaties were broken by Navajo from groups not led by the signers, United States authorities, completely misunderstanding Navajo social and political organization, concluded that the Navajo were without honor and could not be trusted. In an attempt to control the Navajo, the United States mounted numerous campaigns against them and built military posts in their territory.

With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and the resultant decrease in US troop strength in the Southwest, both the Navajo and Apache took advantage of the opportunity to increase their raids on settlers and Puebloans. The government reacted by adopting a merciless policy of resettlement developed by General James Carleton. In June 1863, Colonel Kit Carson was sent into Navajo country to order the Navajo to surrender at Fort Defiance in Arizona. Many fled and were pursued, and many were killed in the fighting that followed. In the end, however, Carson did not subdue the Navajo by military actions but by destroying their crops and livestock, the economic basis of their lives. Finally, on March 6, 1864, approximately 2,400 people, 30 wagons, 400 horses, and 3,000 sheep and goats began the “Long Walk” of 300 miles to Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. In April, 3,500 more Navajo were forced to make the same trek. Ultimately, more than 8,000 Navajo and 400 Mescalero Apache were held in captivity at Bosque Redondo Reservation, just outside the fort. Several thousand Navajo avoided capture by hiding in the Grand Canyon, on the top of Black Mesa, north of the San Juan River, and in other inaccessible areas of Navajo country.

The Return Home

Now totally impoverished and not understanding their group captivity and the loss of their freedom to roam where they pleased, the Navajo suffered greatly from humiliation and homesickness, illness from an alien diet and bad water, and new diseases caught from their captors. Many died.

Finally, the United States government admitted that the resettlement had been a horrible mistake, and Carleton’s despotic regime was ended in the fall of 1866. Custody of the Navajo was given to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in January 1867. Late in 1868, after the signing of a treaty which created a 3.5-million-acre reservation for the Navajo within their old territory, they were allowed to return home. Although this was only a small part of their previous holdings, the Navajo were happy to be going back. They soon found that their troubles were far from over, however, as they struggled to make a living in a land that had been devastated by Carleton and Carson. All their homes had been razed, they had no livestock, and their fields had been destroyed. Fort Wingate and Fort Defiance served as distribution centers for the rations which the government eventually agreed to issue to help them, but there were many delays and shortages.

More stable conditions were finally established, however, and the Navajo enjoyed a short period of prosperity and growth. About 1870, the first schools promised in the Treaty of 1868 were established, although with mixed results. Some of these boarding schools were run more like reformatories than schools and produced graduates who were prepared neither for life in White society nor life back on the reservation. In the 1880s, the building of the railroad across New Mexico and Arizona brought new problems to the Navajo in the form of liquor, diseases, and economic exploitation. They were forced to give up much of their best rangeland and water to the railroads in exchange for less desirable areas. Since 1868, the most persistent factor of Navajo life has been the struggle with White settlers for land. From time to time, the Navajo reservation has been extended, from the original 3.5 million acres to about 15 million acres located in an area bounded on the northeast by the Continental Divide, on the southeast by the Rio Puerco, on the south by the San Jose and Puerco Rivers, on the west by the Little Colorado and Colorado Rivers, and on the north by the San Juan River. The area contains more spectacular scenery than good farming and grazing land; thus, increases in land holdings have never kept pace with the needs of the people, who depend upon sheep and cattle as the basis of their economy.

The Twentieth Century

The Navajo population increased from an estimated 12,000 to 35,000 by 1930, the beginning of the so-called stock reduction period. (The first attempts at stock reduction had actually begun in the 1920s, when the Navajo were told that they would not be given new grazing lands through congressional approval of boundary extensions until they had reduced the number of horses on the reservation.) In 1930, Indian Service foresters reported that the Navajo range was seriously overgrazed and that land erosion was an immediate problem. When the government instituted a stock reduction program, the Navajo equated it with the destruction of their culture because it affected not only their economic life but also their religious life. Sheep were essential to their entire ceremonial process, being used to pay the medicine men and to feed the large crowds who assembled for many days at a time for each ceremonial. Navajo resistance to and governmental insistence upon stock reduction caused additional misunderstanding and bitterness between the Navajo and White settlers for many years.

The twentieth century also saw the discovery of oil, uranium, and coal on the Navajo Reservation. It was the discovery of this mineral wealth that prompted the creation of the Navajo Tribal Council in 1938 as a major governing body authorized to decide how these new resources could be put to the best use. Prior to that, the only entity that represented the interest of all the Navajo was the Business Council, which first met in 1923. The Business Council consisted of three influential men, including Henry Chee Dodge. Dodge, an intelligent, well-educated man with great leadership abilities, helped guide the Navajo for more than seventy years.

As many scholars have observed, World War II marked the beginning of the contemporary Navajo world. As thousands of Navajo who served in the armed forces or were recruited to work in defense industries were exposed to life beyond the reservation for the first time, they realized that formal education and more consistent economic development were necessary for their survival. During World War II, the Navajo code talkers, a group of four hundred Navajo Marines, gained great fame for their transmission and deciphering of top-secret military commands. Consequently, they built a system of public schools across the Navajo Nation and, utilizing funds from the Navajo-Hopi Long Range Rehabilitation Program, provided highways and other programs to improve their economic development. Their industrial and commercial enterprises include those involving the arts and crafts; timber, oil, and gas production; power plants, and a parks and recreation department with a corps of Navajo Rangers. The center of their tribal government is housed in an attractive complex of buildings in Window Rock, Arizona.

Until relatively recently, the Navajo did not live in groups large enough to be called villages or towns; they settled in smaller family groups in desirable locations dispersed throughout the reservation. In their matrilineal society, the grandmother is the central person in the family, and the children belong to her clan. Since it is taboo for a Navajo man to look upon or socialize with his mother-in-law, a woman and her husband do not live with the wife’s mother but have their home nearby so that mother, daughter, and grandchildren can spend much time together. The typical Navajo dwelling is the hogan, which is round or hexagonal and built of logs and adobe, with an air vent in the center of the roof.

Among the Navajo, ownership of property is individual, so that wife and husband have their own to do with as they choose. The wife usually owns the house and has her own crops and livestock, which she and the children tend. Additionally, the money she makes from her pottery and weaving is hers to keep. The husband has income from his own livestock and crops, plus whatever money he earns from his jewelry making or any other kinds of employment. It is he who represents the family at ceremonials and other public functions.

Weaving and Silversmithing

Traditionally, Navajo women make the pottery and weave the textiles. The earliest Navajo weavings were woolen wearing blankets, made on an upright loom which was adapted from one used by the Puebloans to weave their own cotton textiles. After the establishment of trading posts on the reservation in the early 1870s, the traders persuaded the Navajo to weave heavier textiles which could serve as rugs, having discovered that there was a market for these in the eastern United States. At the time, Turkish carpets were very popular with eastern buyers but were fairly expensive, so Turkish designs had been reproduced on linoleum—a less costly floor covering. Each trader provided the weavers in his area with samples of different Turkish designs on linoleum, declaring that he would henceforth buy nothing from them but rugs woven in these patterns. The Navajo weavers made their own adaptations from these designs, which evolved into beautiful and exquisite Navajo rugs.

Navajo men have always excelled in silversmithing and have led the way in the overall development of this art in the Southwest. The first smith was Atsidi Sani, who learned to work iron from a Mexican smith around 1850. He made knife blades, bits, and bridles, which he sold to earn his living. During the Bosque Redondo captivity, he taught other Navajo to work with iron, copper, and brass. After returning home, Atsidi Sani learned to work silver from the same Mexican smith and then taught his sons and other Navajo. The forms and the decorative styles originated by the Navajo have been adopted by other tribes, but Navajo silver has remained the most widely known and is the badge of distinction among the Navajo themselves.

Twenty-First Century Navajo

The population of Navajo Nation increased throughout the early twenty-first century, and by 2021 the tribe superseded the Cherokee to become the largest Native American tribe in the United States, with close to 400,000 members. The tribe saw a significant jump in population growth of about 30 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many Navajo updated their enrollment information as they sought to gain benefits provided by the US government during the pandemic. The Navajo Nation was particularly hard hit during the pandemic, and payments offered as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act benefitted many tribal members who struggled during that period.

Bibliography

Baker, Brynn. Navajo Code Talkers: Secret American Indian Heroes of World War II. Capstone Press, 2016.

Dutton, Bertha P. American Indians of the Southwest. Rev. ed. U of New Mexico P, 1983.

Dyk, Walter. Son of Old Man Hat: A Navajo Autobiography. Harcourt, 1938.

Kluckhohn, Clyde, and Dorothea Leighton. The Navaho. Harvard UP, 1974.

McPherson, Robert S. The Northern Navajo Frontier, 1860-1900: Expansion through Adversity. U of New Mexico P, 1988.

Pavlik, Steve. The Navajo and the Animal People. Fulcrum, 2014.

Romero, Simon. "Navajo Nation Becomes Largest Tribe in U.S. After Pandemic Enrollment Surge." The New York Times, 21 May 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/navajo-cherokee-population.html. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.

Underhill, Ruth M. The Navajos. U of Oklahoma P, 1967.