Navajo
Identification. The Navajo are a large American Indian group currently located in Arizona and New Mexico. In sixteenth-century Spanish documents the Navajo are referred to simply as "Apaches," along with all the other Athapaskan-speaking peoples of the New Mexico province. The more specific designation "Apaches de Nabaju" appears for the first time in 1626 and sporadically thereafter until the end of the seventeenth century. From about 1700 on, the people are always called "Navajo" (or "Nabajo") in Spanish documents, and the name has been retained throughout the Anglo-American period. The source of the name is uncertain, but is believed to derive from a Tewa Pueblo Indian word for "cultivated fields," in recognition of the fact that the Navajo were more dependent on agriculture than were other Athapaskan peoples. The spelling "Navaho" is common in English-language literature, but "Navajo" is officially preferred by the Navajo Tribe itself. In their own language, however, the Navajo refer to themselves as "Dine," meaning simply "the people."
Location. In the Southwest, the traditional home of the Navajo has been on the Colorado Plateau—the arid and deeply dissected upland of northwestern New Mexico and northeastern Arizona. Elevations range from thirty-five hundred to more than ten thousand feet, with hot summers, cold winters, and relatively scant rainfall Most of the area is covered by a scattered growth of piñon and juniper trees and sagebrush, but there are also extensive pine forests at the highest elevations and open grasslands at the lowest. The earliest known home of the Navajos was in the area between the Jemez and Lukachukai mountains, in what today is Northwestern New Mexico, but subsequently the people expanded westward and northward into portions of present-day Arizona and Utah. The present Navajo Reservation occupies about twenty-five thousand square miles in the Four Corners area where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado come Together.
Demography. The Navajo population in 1864 was probably somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000. By 1945 it had increased to about 55,000, and in 1988 it was estimated at about 200,000. The Navajo are the largest Indian tribe in North America today. There are large off-reservation Navajo populations in many cities of the Southwest, but the great majority of Navajo still live on the Navajo Reservation.
Linguistic Affiliation. The Navajo language belongs to the Apachean branch of the Athapaskan family and is particularly close to the languages of the Tonto and Cibecue Apache tribes.
Entry from Encyclopedia of World Cultures
Books & eBooks
Navajo Places by ISBN: 9780874806236Publication Date: 2004-09-01A Navajo homeland place name guide that includes sections on Navajo history & the relation of ritual & sacred legend to landscape.
The Navajo Political Experience by ISBN: 9781442221444Publication Date: 2013-10-24Native nations, like the Navajo nation, have proven to be remarkably adept at retaining and exercising ever-increasing amounts of self-determination even when faced with powerful external constraints and limited resources. Now in this fourth edition of David E. Wilkins' The Navajo Political Experience, political developments of the last decade are discussed and analyzed comprehensively, and with as much accessibility as thoroughness and detail. The Din people and their governing leaders have recently experienced a host of events that dramatically affected the shape of the nation - a plethora of effective grassroots organizations that had a profound impact on the structure of the Navajo political system, a dramatic reduction in the size of the legislative branch from eighty-eight to twenty-four members, the introduction of institutional gambling, unresolved battles over water rights, and a tense political crisis that pitted the legislative branch against the judicial branch as the court sought to ensure that the Fundamental Law was to be adhered to by all governing bodies. These and other developments are examined in this new edition, which includes three new appendices: The Navajo Fundamental Law of 2002; The Din Natural Resource Protection Act of 2005; and Nelson v. Shirley (2010), which add to the book's value as a classroom tool and a primary source.
Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics by ISBN: 0826348017Publication Date: 2009-12-31Of the nearly 300,000 people who identified themselves as Navajo in the 2000 U.S. Census, 178,014 identified themselves as speakers of Navajo. While these rough numbers give an impression that the Navajo language is widely spoken, scholars continually point out that it is a threatened language and that young Navajos are not learning the language at a rate that will ensure its continued use. Poetry, however, written and performed in both Navajo and English, continues to emerge as an important voice for Navajos, providing an outlet for recounting the past through storytelling and offering the Navajo perspective on a wide range of issues including what it means to be Navajo. Linguistic anthropologist Anthony Webster began over a year of dissertation research on contemporary Navajo poetry on the Navajo Reservation in the spring of 2000 and returned for additional fieldwork in the summers of 2007 and 2008. In this study he investigates the devices found in Navajo written and oral poetic traditions. He then explores aspects of language such as code-mixing, punning, and ideophony (sound symbolism), often considered marginal in linguistics literature, revealing how they are central to the study of ethnopoetics and a discourse-centered approach to language and culture.
The Sound of Navajo Country by ISBN: 1469631857Publication Date: 2017-03-13In this ethnography of Navajo (Diné) popular music culture, Kristina M. Jacobsen examines questions of Indigenous identity and performance by focusing on the surprising and vibrant Navajo country music scene. Through multiple first-person accounts, Jacobsen illuminates country music?s connections to the Indigenous politics of language and belonging, examining through the lens of music both the politics of difference and many internal distinctions Diné make among themselves and their fellow Navajo citizens. As the second largest tribe in the United States, the Navajo have often been portrayed as a singular and monolithic entity. Using her experience as a singer, lap steel player, and Navajo language learner, Jacobsen challenges this notion, showing the ways Navajos distinguish themselves from one another through musical taste, linguistic abilities, geographic location, physical appearance, degree of Navajo or Indian blood, and class affiliations. By linking cultural anthropology to ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and critical Indigenous studies, Jacobsen shows how Navajo poetics and politics offer important insights into the politics of Indigeneity in Native North America, highlighting the complex ways that identities are negotiated in multiple, often contradictory, spheres.
Bitter Water by ISBN: 9780816528981Publication Date: 2011-05-15Many know that the removal and relocation of Indigenous peoples from traditional lands is a part of the United States' colonial past, but few know that--in an expansive corner of northeastern Arizona--the saga continues. The 1974 Settlement Act officially divided a reservation established almost a century earlier between the Diné (Navajo) and the Hopi, and legally granted the contested land to the Hopi. To date, the U.S. government has relocated between 12,000 and 14,000 Diné from Hopi Partitioned Lands, and the Diné--both there and elsewhere--continue to live with the legacy of this relocation. Bitter Water presents the narratives of four Diné women who have resisted removal but who have watched as their communities and lifeways have changed dramatically. The book, based on 25 hours of filmed personal testimony, features the women's candid discussions of their efforts to carry on a traditional way of life in a contemporary world that includes relocation and partitioned lands; encroaching Western values and culture; and devastating mineral extraction and development in the Black Mesa region of Arizona. Though their accounts are framed by insightful writings by both Benally and Diné historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Benally lets the stories of the four women elders speak for themselves. Scholars, media, and other outsiders have all told their versions of this story, but this is the first book that centers on the stories of women who have lived it--in their own words in Navajo as well as the English translation. The result is a living history of a contested cultural landscape and the unique worldview of women determined to maintain their traditions and lifeways, which are so intimately connected to the land. This book is more than a collection of stories, poetry, and prose. It is a chronicle of resistance as spoken from the hearts of those who have lived it.
