The Diné

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Stand at the middle of the country and turn all the way around, and the horizon names itself. East, where the sky first goes pale, the land climbs to Sisnaajiní — Blanca Peak, the mountain of the whitening dawn. South stands Tsoodził, the turquoise mountain the maps call Mount Taylor. West, above the pine country, rise the abalone-shell summits of Dookʼoʼoosłííd, the San Francisco Peaks. North closes the circle at Dibé Nitsaa, Hesperus, the mountain of the big sheep. Four peaks a traveler can find on any map of the Four Corners, and four walls of a single room: the land between them is Dinétah, the country of the People, and its edges are not lines a surveyor drew but summits set in place at the making of the world.

A child raised inside that circle learns it early. Before there is any doctrine to recite, there is the walk out at first light behind the churro — the small, hardy, long-wool sheep herded up out of the wash and through the sage while the sun comes over Sisnaajiní — and there is a single word for the shape everything is meant to keep: hózhó. It has no clean English twin. Beauty, and also balance; harmony, and also health, order, and right relation among all the things that are. To live well is to walk in hózhó, in beauty; to fall sick, to grieve, or to be fouled by contact with the alien and the dead is to fall out of it; and the whole long labor of the religion is to set a person, and the world around that person, back inside it.

A Navajo-Churro ram. The long-wool breed, developed by the Diné from Iberian Churra sheep, is central to the herding and weaving life of Dinétah. Just chaos (Flickr), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

The People of the four mountains

The People call themselves Diné — “the People” — and their speech Diné bizaad, and the plain evidence of that language is that they came to this country from very far away. Diné bizaad is a Southern Athabaskan tongue, an Apachean language, and its nearest kin are not the speech of any neighbor in the Southwest but the Dene languages of northwestern Canada and the interior of Alaska, where the great body of Athabaskan speakers still lives. By the reading of the linguists and the archaeologists, a southward movement of Athabaskan peoples out of the subarctic began roughly a thousand years ago, and the Diné and their Apache relatives are the southern end of it — migrants who worked their way down the continent and reached the Four Corners country by about 1400 to 1500. The exact timing and the route remain genuinely contested; scholars argue over which mountain corridors the ancestors followed and how early they arrived, and they have reached no consensus. What is not in doubt is that the ancestors of the People came here, over centuries, out of the north.

That is the documented account, and it is one register. The tradition’s own account of how the People came to stand within the four mountains runs deeper than any migration, and it is told as sacred history, not as a tale. The Diné Bahaneʼ, the Story of the People, tells of the emergence: a climbing up through the earlier worlds, out of the First or Dark World, Niʼ Hodiłhił, small and black, and up through the worlds above it, each left behind when it could no longer hold the beings who lived there. In this present world, First Man, Áłtsé Hastiin, and First Woman, Áłtsé Asdzą́ą́, took their places — the two of them formed with an ear of white corn and an ear of yellow corn, life quickened out of the seed grain of the land. And on a mountain the People call Chʼóolʼį́ʼí an infant was found, the child who grew to be Changing Woman, Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé; and from her own body she made the first Diné, rubbing the skin from herself to shape the founding clans and setting them down inside the four mountains as their country. The homeland was bounded then as it is bounded now — Sisnaajiní in the east, Tsoodził in the south, Dookʼoʼoosłííd in the west, Dibé Nitsaa in the north — a room with a sacred summit at each corner.

Both of those histories reach the outside record, and they reach it kept apart. One is the living tradition, carried by the People themselves and by the singers, the hatáálii, who hold the songs and the order of the ceremonies in trained memory. The other is the outsider ethnography — Washington Matthews’s Navaho Legends of 1897, Gladys Reichard’s Navaho Religion of 1950, the long labors of the Franciscan Father Berard Haile — recorded through a foreign lens by men and women who were not of the People, and some of it ceremonial knowledge that was shared only under specific conditions and never meant to travel as far as it did. That written record is indispensable and it is also to be read critically, with the hand of the outsider marked where it lies on the page. The Diné are a living people, present in every sentence here; the religion is a living faith; and where the record rests on the ethnographers rather than on the singers, it is worth saying so plainly.

Hózhó and the Diyin Diné’é

Everything the People do turns on hózhó. It is the state of beauty and balance and right order that the ceremonies exist to establish and, when sickness or grief or the touch of the alien has broken it, to restore. The order itself was set in place at the beginning by the Holy People, the Diyin Diné’é, the beings who emerged into this world, arranged its mountains and its weather and its living kinds, and gave the People the ceremonies by which the balance is kept. They are not remote. They are named, and their deeds are the frame of the world.

Changing Woman stands at the center of it — the renewing mother who grows old with the turning year and young again with the spring, so that the land itself is read as her aging and her return, and who made the People from her body. Her twin sons, begotten on her by the Sun, Jóhonaaʼéí, are the Hero Twins: Naayééʼ Neizghání, Monster Slayer, and his brother Tóbájíshchíní, Born for Water. In the time before people could safely live here, the world was ranged over by the naayééʼ, the monsters that devoured the earth-surface beings; the Twins went to the house of their father the Sun, were tested and armed, and came back to clear the land of them one by one, so that the killed monsters lie across the country now as its landforms — lava beds, dark ridges, standing rocks — the danger turned to stone. Talking God, Haashchʼééłtiʼí, is the caller of the dawn and the leader of the ye’ii, the Holy People who appear masked in the great ceremonies. And Spider Woman, Naʼashjéʼii Asdzą́ą́, is the one who taught the People the loom: by the tradition she showed them how to build the first loom from the stuff of the world itself — its crosspoles the sky and the earth, its cords the sunrays and the lightning and the rock crystal — and then taught them to weave upon it. The documented history sets weaving beside this: the People likely learned the craft from their Pueblo neighbors, worked first in cotton and then in wool once the Spanish sheep arrived, and after the upheavals of the late seventeenth century became, within a few generations, among the finest weavers on the continent. The two accounts sit side by side without cancelling each other.

A classic-period Navajo wool blanket, about 1850. Denver Art Museum, via the Google Art Project and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The land is not a backdrop to this teaching; it is part of it, and it instructs. The four mountains are the outer boundary, each a sacred marker of a direction — Tsoodził the turquoise mountain of the south, Dookʼoʼoosłííd the abalone-shell mountain of the west — and within the circle the country is full of named holy places, the ancestral canyon and the winged rock among them, each fixed in the sacred history. The society that lives on this land is matrilineal, and it is ordered by k’é — the system of clan and kinship through which every person is placed and obligated. Descent runs in the mother’s line; a person is born to their mother’s clan and for their father’s, and introduces themselves by those clans before their own name, so that two strangers who meet can at once find how they are related and what they owe each other. K’é is not merely genealogy. It is the web of right relation among people, the human face of hózhó.

The instruments that keep and restore the balance are the ceremonies, and they are chanted by the hatáálii, the singers, who train for years to hold a single one of them correctly. The foundation of them all is the Blessingway, Hózhǫ́ǫ́jí — the ceremony of hózhó itself, sung to bless a hogan, a marriage, a girl coming into womanhood, a pregnancy, the whole ongoing work of keeping a life in beauty rather than mending it once broken. Against the harm that comes of contact with outsiders and the dead there is the Enemyway, which cleanses that particular pollution. For certain grave sicknesses there is the Nightway, sung across nine winter nights, in which the masked ye’ii come to heal. Inside each of these lie things the tradition holds within itself and does not put on display: the inner songs, the hatáál, learned word-perfect because a word out of place unmakes the rite; the sandpaintings, iikaah, laid down in colored earth for a patient to sit upon and swept away before nightfall; the masks and the songs of the ye’ii. These are named here, and their public shape is described, and no more — they are closed and sacred knowledge, kept by the People and their singers, and the account stops where the tradition draws its own line.

Hwéeldi and the return

The endurance of the People is bound to a catastrophe and a homecoming that they still mark. In 1863 and 1864 the United States Army, with Colonel Kit Carson at the head of the campaign, set out to break the Diné by hunger: a scorched-earth war that burned the cornfields and the peach orchards of the ancestral canyon, killed the livestock, and razed the hogans, so that by the winter thousands of the People, starving, came in to surrender. What followed was the Long Walk. Beginning in the spring of 1864 the Army force-marched roughly ten thousand Diné in all, together with some five hundred Mescalero Apache, between 250 and 450 miles eastward across New Mexico — in a long series of separate marches, some fifty-three of them over the following two years — to a bleak reservation on the Pecos called Bosque Redondo, at Fort Sumner. The People remember it by one name: Hwéeldi, the place of suffering. The old and the sick who fell behind on the road did not always survive it. And at Hwéeldi four years of brackish water, failed crops, disease, and exposure killed a great many of the interned — by the estimates carried in the record, on the order of one in four of those held there died and lie in unmarked graves.

It did not end in extinction. It ended in a reversal almost without parallel in the history of the removals. In the late spring of 1868 General William Tecumseh Sherman came to Fort Sumner proposing that the People be sent still farther, to the Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma, and the Diné headman Barboncito refused it to his face, telling the commissioners, in words the record preserves, that he hoped to God they would not ask him to go to any country except his own. On June 1, 1868, the Diné leaders and the United States signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo, and its terms let the People go home — back to a reservation carved from their own country, inside the four mountains. They walked west again, and this time toward Dinétah. That treaty reservation is the seed of the modern Navajo Nation, which today holds the largest reservation land base in the United States, some 27,325 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah — larger than West Virginia — with about 399,494 enrolled citizens as of 2021, second in number among the tribal nations only to the Cherokee, though its land base is by far the greatest of any.

The 1864 campaign fell hardest on the ancestral canyon, and the fuller telling of that scorched season belongs to Canyon de Chelly, where the orchards were cut down and the People took refuge in the cliffs; the canyon farms are worked again now, within the walls that saw the burning. That is the pattern of the whole reception: not a museum but a continuing life. The ceremonies are still sung; the Blessingway still blesses the coming-of-age of girls each season; the churro are still herded through the sage; the weaving and the silverwork are carried on and sold and worn. And the sacred mountains are still defended. On Dookʼoʼoosłííd, the abalone-shell peaks of the west, the Diné and the Hopi and other nations fought for years against the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort’s plan to make artificial snow on the mountain from reclaimed municipal wastewater — a defilement, in the People’s understanding, of a living holy place. They largely lost the fight in the federal courts: in Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, sitting en banc, ruled on August 8, 2008, that spraying treated sewage effluent on the mountain imposed no “substantial burden” on the tribes’ religion within the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal. The uranium under Tsoodził and the coal of the reservation’s interior have their own long, contested histories in the same key — sacred ground and extraction pressing against each other, unresolved on the land to this day.

The written tradition of this religion still rests, heavily, on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnography — Matthews, Reichard, Haile, and those who followed them — men who came from outside and set down what the singers were willing to tell them, sometimes more than the singers had leave to give. Diné scholars, writers, and hatáálii read that record now from within, correct where it is wrong or overreaching, restore what the outsiders missed, and carry the tradition forward in their own voices and their own language. The four mountains still stand at the four directions, exactly where Changing Woman set them. Inside them, at the pale end of a winter night, a singer finishes the last of a Blessingway and the one it was sung over walks out into the coming light — placed again, by the songs and the sandpainting and the names of the Holy People, back within the beauty the whole world is meant to hold.

→ Related: Changing Woman · The Holy People · Spider Woman · The Hero Twins · Talking God · Canyon De Chelly · Shiprock · Mount Taylor · The San Francisco Peaks · The Hopi · The Apache