About Navajo

The Navajo People

The Navajo people are southwestern US native Americans. The Navajo populate the largest native American reservation, which sprawls over 26,000 square miles of western New Mexico, southern Utah and northern Arizona (roughly the size of West Virginia). The Navajo Nation, which comprises about 240,000 members, may be the largest native tribe in America. Only the Cherokee claim more members, but there is a vast difference in the way the two tribes define their members. The Cherokee require only 1/64th Cherokee ancestry for legal membership in the tribe. The Navajo require 1/4. If they used the 1/64 rule, their membership would be many times larger than the Cherokee.

History

Where did the Navajo originate? Their cultural mythology says the Navajo are the original people of the earth, descended from an original man and woman couple that climbed out of the netherworld to the surface of the earth through a hole on a mountain. Some say the mountain of origin is in the great San Juans of Colorado while others say it is Mount Taylor near Grants, New Mexico, one of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo.

Anthropologists theorize that they originated from Mongolian tribes in extreme western Asia who, centuries ago, migrated across the Bering Straight, either on frozen ocean or an ancient land bridge. They then migrated southward, eventually settling in the present American southwest.

Linguists have pretty much proven the anthropological theory using studies of language development. Recent language studies have concluded that the Navajo language is part of the larger Athabascan family. A language family is a group of languages that share a common historical language. For example, English, French, Spanish, and Italian are all members of the Latin language family. Navajo is known to be related to the Apache and Chippewa languages, all of which have their roots in the Athabascan language. The modern-day Athabascans are an Alaskan tribe. Freddy Hall is a personal friend of a Navajo minister who traveled to Mongolia on a missions trip for the Methodist church. He told Freddy that the Mongolian language was very similar to Navajo. The Mongolian people look like the Navajo.

Culture

The Navajo culture is uniquely their own, developed and adapted from other cultures over the centuries. The Navajo have a very definite social system in which they are historically divided into communities headed by a "headman". The Navajo never had a central "chief" who governed the whole tribe. Instead, various headmen each loosely governed the people of his own area. There was no recognized way of appointing a headman; he simply emerged as a community leader, usually because of his wealth. In the years before the Long Walk, it was not uncommon for a headman to own up to 20,000 head of sheep and employ many other Navajo as shepherds.

The tribe is further subdivided into clans. The clan is an important part of a person’s identity. Whenever Navajo people introduce themselves, they are expected to give their name, where they are originally from on the Reservation, then their mother’s clan and their father’s clan. A person inherits his clan identity from his mother and is born into her clan. It is considered taboo to marry inside one’s own clan. Anyone in your clan is considered to be your relative "clanwise".

Many cultural customs govern the daily life of the Navajo.

The Navajo are a people in cultural conflict and change. The most controversial contemporary question among Christian Navajos is how to separate culture from religion. Does one have to abandon his "Navajoness" to be Christian? To the non-Navajo, these seem like simple questions, but to the Navajo they are serious, complex, and emotional.

Culturally, the Navajo religion is shamanism. The medicine man/woman is the recognized clergyman among the traditional Navajo people and enjoys great honor and respect from the people and wields great power over them.

The Native American Church (NAC) is a relatively new native religion among all native tribes and is prominent on the Navajo Reservation. The Peyote cult is a quasi-new age, native American only (non-natives are not welcome) religion that centers around drinking or eating the peyote cactus bud, a hallucinogenic drug. The Peyote cult entered the Navajo nation in the 1930s from the Utes who live to their north in Colorado. The NAC clergyman is called a "Roadman". Many Navajo medicine men double as Roadmen.

For more information about the Navajo people, check out the web sites on our Links page.