Navajo

The Navajo are an Indigenous people of the Southwestern United States who call themselves Diné, “the people”. Their language, Diné bizaad, “the people’s language”, is a Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dené family, with two mutually intelligible dialects, and is closely related to the languages of the Apache. The name Navajo came through the Spanish from the Tewa language, in which it referred to large cultivated fields; Spanish writers used Apachu de Nabajo in the 1620s and Navajo by the 1640s.

The Navajo and Apache are believed to have migrated from northwestern Canada and eastern Alaska, where most Athabaskan speakers live. A southward migration of Athabaskan peoples from subarctic North America has been dated to around 1,000 years ago, part of it along the Rocky Mountains. One suggestion is that a volcanic explosion in the Saint Elias Mountains of Alaska around 803 AD set them moving.

The Diné tell of an emergence through three earlier worlds into this one, the Fourth or Glittering World, and of the Holy People’s instruction to keep to Dinétah, the homeland bounded by four sacred mountains. Oral history also recalls a long relationship with the Pueblo peoples and a readiness to take in Puebloan ideas. In the 1670s the Spanish wrote that the Diné lived in Dinétah, about 60 miles west of the Rio Chama Valley.

At first the Navajo lived largely by hunting and gathering. They later took up farming from the Pueblo peoples, growing the “Three Sisters” of corn, beans and squash, and herding sheep and goats from the Spanish. Meat became essential to the diet, and sheep became a form of currency and of family standing; in the 18th century the Spanish reported large Navajo herds and fields. Like other Apacheans, the Navajo were semi-nomadic from the 16th to the 20th century, their extended kin groups moving between seasonal dwelling areas for herding, farming and gathering.

Society is ordered by clans, k’é, which define the ties between people and families. Clans are exogamous: one may marry only outside one’s own clan and those of one’s four grandparents. Children are “born to” the mother’s clan and “born for” the father’s, and the mother’s eldest brother has a strong role in their lives. Four original clans are said to have been given by Changing Woman, Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé; there are now more than 100. Traditionally the women’s families owned the livestock, dwellings and fields, a husband lived near his wife’s mother, daughters inherited, and in a separation the woman kept the property and the children.

The hogan, the traditional home of logs and mud with its door facing east, is still preferred by many families, though most Navajo now live in houses and apartments in urban areas.

Navajo spiritual practice seeks to restore balance and harmony to a person’s life to bring health. The Diné distinguish Earth People from the Holy People, the Diyin Diné. In the Diné Bahaneʼ, the creation story, First Man and First Woman came into being in the First or Dark World and passed through the Blue World and the Yellow World, which a great flood forced them to leave, before reaching the Fourth or Glittering World, where true death, the seasons, the sun, moon and stars began. The Holy People told the Earth People never to leave the land within the four sacred mountains, and the number four runs through Navajo practice: four original clans, four colours and times of day, and usually four songs to a ritual.

Most ceremonies are to prevent or cure illness, and corn pollen is offered in prayer. One half of the great song ceremonial complex is the Blessingway, Hózhǫ́ǫ́jí, for “peace, harmony, and good things”; the other is the Enemy Way, Anaʼí Ndááʼ, against influences from outside. The Night Chant lasts several days, with up to 24 dancers in buckskin masks representing gods, prayers and detailed sandpaintings, to purify and heal the patient. Ceremonies also correct curses that cause some illness, though witchcraft is rarely discussed in detail with outsiders.

The Blessingway tells that Coyote, helped by the Beaver People, built the first hogan, and those who practise the Navajo religion hold the hogan sacred.

Navajo women spun and wove wool into blankets and clothing that were highly valued and traded. The Navajo brought weaving traditions of their own and learned to weave cotton on upright looms from the Pueblo peoples. By the 18th century they added imported red bayeta yarn and indigo to their black, grey and white wool, and their fine Chief’s Blankets, striped in three phases of growing pattern, were collected by Ute and Plains peoples. When the railroads brought cheap blankets and Germantown yarn, weavers turned to rugs for outside buyers, in styles such as Two Gray Hills, Teec Nos Pos, Ganado and Crystal, many with a fourfold symmetry thought to express hózhǫ́, harmony.

Silversmithing is an important art. Atsidi Sani learned it from a Mexican smith, Nakai Tsosi, around 1878 and taught other Navajo; by 1880 smiths were hammering coins and ingots into bracelets, necklaces and bracers. The squash blossom necklace, with its naja pendant, first appeared in the 1880s, turquoise inlay came in the late 19th century, and the concha belt derived from the Southern Plains peoples.

Oral tradition carries the creation story and the story of the Sun, Moon and Stars. Music, traditionally ceremonial chant, now ranges from country to rock and rap in English and Navajo. Frybread, created when the Navajo were forced to relocate to New Mexico, is regarded as a symbol of Native American perseverance.

The Navajo traded long with the Pueblo peoples: mid-16th-century Spanish records tell of maize and cotton cloth exchanged for bison meat, hides and stone. With the Spanish came a long pattern of raids, expeditions, trade and peace-making among Navajo, Spaniards, Hopi, Apache and Comanche. Spanish forces marched against the Navajo in the 1770s, in 1800 and in 1804 and 1805, and the pattern continued until the Americans arrived in 1846.

Treaties with the United States in 1846 and 1849 did not hold, and the peace leader Narbona was killed on the way to the second. In 1860–61 New Mexican militia killed Navajo warriors, captured women and children as slaves and destroyed crops and homes, a time the Navajo call Naahondzood, “the fearing time”. In 1863 General James H. Carleton sent Kit Carson to kill Navajo, destroy their crops and dwellings, foul their wells and seize their livestock; facing starvation, Navajo groups came to Fort Defiance. From 1864 the army forced around 9,000 people on the Long Walk of over 300 miles to Bosque Redondo, where crop failure, disease, cold and raids made the internment a disaster. The 1868 treaty let the survivors return.

On the reservation, children were sent to boarding schools that punished them for speaking Navajo, and the government leased grazing land, took land for railroads and permitted mining without consulting the tribe; after uranium was found on Navajo land in the 1940s, the Navajo have claimed high rates of death and illness from lung disease and cancer caused by the contamination.

The reservation grew from 3.5 million acres to 16 million, and Navajo raiding came to an end as herds and crops grew. Chief Manuelito founded the Navajo Tribal Police, and Navajo served as army scouts at Fort Wingate from 1873 to 1895. From 1933 the federal Livestock Reduction cut the herds that gave the Navajo half their cash income, hurting women most, and left lasting opposition to John Collier’s Indian New Deal. In 1937 the singer and medicine man Hastiin Klah co-founded the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe to preserve Navajo religion and tradition.

In the Second World War many Navajo volunteered for military service, and up to four hundred served as code talkers with the Marine Corps; Chester Nez was the last of the original code talkers.

With more than 427,414 enrolled citizens in 2026, the Navajo Nation is the second largest federally recognised tribe in the United States, and its reservation, slightly larger than West Virginia, straddles the Four Corners. The 2020 census counted 315,086 people as Navajo alone. Leaders such as Peterson Zah, first president of the Navajo Nation, and Annie Dodge Wauneka, writers such as Luci Tapahonso, weavers such as D.Y. Begay and films such as The Return of Navajo Boy, in which Navajo shaped their own portrayal, carry the people’s story on.