Dine Bikeyah: Land and History of The Navajo Tribe
The Navajo lands, which they call, “Dine Bikeyah.” Four Sacred Mountains (San Francisco Peaks, Mount Blanca, Mount Taylor, and La Plata Mountain) approximately delimited the sacred land. The Navajo Tribe live in close proximity to other groups who also came to the southwest and brought with them their ancestral language of the Athabaskan family: the Na-Dené Southern Athabaskan language. The Navajo and Apaches share this language, known as “the people’s language,” or “Diné bizaad.” The word, “Navajo,” came from the Spanish adaptation of the word, “navahu’u.” It means “farm fields in the valley.” (Center, 2011, 2014).
Today’s knowledge of the pre-Columbian Navajo comes from the tribe’s oral traditions and archeological remains.
Linguists and archaeologists have found that a group of people, during the last Ice Age, migrated from Asia, across the Bering Strait, to eastern Alaska and western Canada. From there, some of them continued onward to the Southwestern United States, around 1400 AD. Descendants of the immigrants who settled in the Four-Corners region of the present-day U.S. now call themselves “Dine,” or “The People.” They are the Navajo, and their oral tradition refers to this migration.
The Navajo peoples, though, were not farmers until they met up with the Pueblo Indians, already present in the region. Early Dime families lived as hunters and gatherers, consuming naturally occurring plants and local game. The buffalo, central to their culture, provided many of the raw materials that they used in their daily life.
By 1630, when Fray Alonzo Benavides first mentioned the Navajo by name, in his Memorial to the King of Spain, he already described them as farmers.[1]
Although European invasion and colonization of the Navajo lands by Europeans resulted in centuries of dislocation and tragedies, like Hwéedi Baa Hane (the Long Walk), for the Navajos, a strong oral history tradition preserved much of their cultural identity. For example, even today, they practice many of the traditions of the matrilineal clan identity. Families and individuals identify themselves based upon the maternal clan.
Today the Navajo Indians manage a 27,000-square-mile reservation, and recognize more than 250,000 members, making it the largest Native American Indian Tribe in the United States. The Mesa Verde region, delineated by the sacred mountains, demarks the greater Navajo distribution, with more than 1,000 individuals living off the reservation.
From the Library: Franciscan Fathers, An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language (1910)
1910 primary source. Anything described as current here describes 1910, not today.
These are outside observers' records from 1910; the Diné themselves are the authority on their own history and customs.
Writing in 1910, the Franciscan Fathers dated the first written use of the name:
“The word Navaho, or, originally, Navajo, is first mentioned and applied to this tribe of Indians by Fray Alonzo Benavides, O. F. M., in his Memorial to the King of Spain, written in 1630.”
— Franciscan Fathers (1910), p. 23 [1]
The Franciscan Fathers (1910) quoted Benavides on what the name meant:
“But these of Navajo are very great farmers, for that is what Navajo signifies—great planted fields.”
— Franciscan Fathers (1910), p. 23 [1]
On when the Navajo arrived, the Franciscan Fathers (1910) reported the range of opinion in their day:
“According to some authorities they came in the thirteenth century, while others place their advent in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.”
— Franciscan Fathers (1910), p. 30 [1]
Sources
- Franciscan Fathers. An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language. Saint Michaels, Arizona: The Franciscan Fathers, 1910, pp. 23, 30. Public domain (U.S. publication before 1931). Cited by printed page. Statements describe conditions as of 1910.
