The Makings of a Navajo Society
Anthropology 101

The Dineh or "The People" as the Navajo call themselves are a horticultural society that migrated to the Southwest between the fourteenth and fifteenth century. They relied on what little food that they could hunt or gather but because of the lack of water in the region, grew to largely depend on their herds of sheep as both a source of food and wealth in their society. The Navajo are made up of a matrilineal society, where the women took care of the family and the household, while the men go hunt. They are a very spiritual people that believe in the balance and harmony of one’s life, which is obtained through many religious rituals and the help of a medicine man. The Navajo people are a very full and colorful society but due to wars and forced migrations into territories, have slowly faded into today’s society and are still losing the brilliant and peaceful culture that made them so strong, so long ago when just worrying about what pattern they would weave was a burden. The Navajo tribe is not really made up of any social organization, in a sense that there is no rank or political position in their tribe. The hierarchy is more determined by kinship and the family that a person resides with. There is a tribal leader in the Navajo community but he does not really have any coercive power or authority, unlike today’s tribal hierarchy which is similar to our own democracy. It consists of a Tribal Chairman and a Vice Chairman, which is elected by the reservation as a whole, for a four-year term. The Tribal Council which is similar to our senators, is made up of about one hundred local chapters and an executive committee who is elected by the members of the council but this change didn’t come around until the early 1900’s. So the basic social organization of a Navajo tribe fell onto the tribe as a whole or as a collective responsibility, which in turn created everyone in the tribe into one big family. The Navajo as a society “depended on a combination of farming, animal husbandry, and the sale of various products to traders. The cultivation of maize was considered by the Navajo to be the most basic and essential of all their economic pursuits, although it made only a relatively small contribution to the Navajo diet,” (Kluckhohn, 1946) because of this the Navajo turned to a semi-nomadic lifestyle in raising sheep and goats. This change provided a large contribution to the Navajo diet, so much so that it became a symbol of wealth. The sheep and goats brought milk and meat, as well as provided hides and wool. So in this transition to herding caused the Navajo as a society to turn into a traditional farming and livestock economy, living off the fruits of their labors and the products of trade with other bordering tribes. Due to the introduction of wool into their society, the Navajo became quite skilled in the art of weaving rugs. This art form actually become very industrious for the tribe economically wise as the multicolor Navajo tribal patterns became quite famous and was in high demand when it came to trade, as well as their pottery, which still continues to be quite distinctive to this day and as much as the Navajo have grown to rely on pottery, rugs, and jewelry as an income on the reservation, they still use these same items in their religious ceremonies. The Navajo are a very religious society, which believes that the world is divided into two sections, the Holy People (Gods) and the Earth People (Us). Their religion is based off of nature and the harmony between the Earth People and the Holy People, were their gods tend to manifest themselves as animals, birds, reptiles, or natural phenomenon’s like wind, weather, day or night, the sun, moon, and stars, and monsters. All these gods are anthropomorphic deities which can present themselves as a person, an animal, or in a spiritual plane. These deities are constantly attended to through ceremonies, in order to remain in harmony with their gods and with nature. “Ceremonies may last for two, three, five, or nine nights, depending partly on the seriousness of the ceremony,” (Locke, 1976) these ceremonies are controlled by a practitioner called a “singers”, one of the most highly respected people in the tribe. A singer would be considered a priest, who has the ability to perform several of the major Navajo ceremonies by himself. This position takes years to achieve and a very long apprenticeship with the current singer for the tribe. The singer is in charge of making sure that the complexity of these major ceremonies are smooth and maintain the harmony between the Holy People and the Earth People. These ceremonies are extremely intricate, involving a combination “of songs, prayers, magical rituals, the making of prayer-sticks and other paraphernalia, and the making of elaborate dry-painting using colored sands. Masked dancers also play a part in ceremonies” (Ortiz, 1983) in replicating or impersonating a certain god or monster. Another aspect of the Navajo religion comes in the form of medical healing. This practice is lead by a religious practitioner known as a “curer”, these men are not as highly respected as a singer but they are still men of prominence within the tribe. It is a traditional Navajo belief that all illnesses or misfortunes arise from transgressions against the supernatural and that these transgressions can be treated through ceremonial practice. These ceremonies are not as intricate as a singer’s ceremony but are considered to be just as important within their culture. One of the more intricate ceremonies that a curer would conduct is what the Navajo would call a sand painting or a “place where the gods could come and go”. These sand paintings are used to bless or heal a person in a ceremony and can last anywhere from two to nine days to create and destroy. The paintings are constructed out of sand, crushed flowers, crushed stone, and gypsum, and are usually created on the floor of the tepee or hogan, with the sick person placed in the middle. The belief in this practice is that the “sand” will absorb the sickness and the patient then gains the power to heal themselves. When the ritual is completed, the person will leave the center of the sand painting and all the sand will be swept away in reverse order with the knowledge that if they fail to destroy a sand painting could lead to more sickness and possibly death (Orr, 2012) but not all sand painting were constructed for just healing the sick. A large part of sand paintings were completed to for the passage or continuation of life in used for births, marriages, and building homes. In today’s society, the Navajo have used sand paintings for new jobs, promotions, and graduations. It has been stated that because of the Navajo’s obvious faith and strong spirituality, that their tribe will continue to survive and will only grow stronger as a culture and as the Navajo nation.
To know about the Navajo people, how they survive, and their religion is also to know how the respect each other when it comes to gender. The Navajo follow the basic guidelines of a horticulture society so “the sexual division of labor evolved out of the foraging mode of living. Women’s knowledge of plants, of where they grew, of what kinds of soil they liked, what kind of drainage, how much sun or shade, and so on, was greater than men’s knowledge, since women were more regularly involved in gathering plants. Men, on the other hand, had greater knowledge of animal behavior, so they became involved in animal domestication.” (Nowak, 2010) So because of this division of gender, the Navajo society is based upon a matrilineal where the kinship is based on the female line. So as much as the Navajo society relies on the men to be the tribal leaders, singers, and curers, it falls to the woman in respect to the foundation of their society and the passing of inheritance would be receive by the daughter. To maintain this in even an extreme circumstance if a Navajo man did not have a daughter, his property would leave most of his property to his sister’s children, in order to maintain this matrilineal line. As much as a Navajo child is raised with the freedom to roam around and discover who they are, there is more pressure put on the girls to take up the womanly roles of this culture and can be easily seen in the “Kinaalda” or the ceremony for maturity for a Navajo girl. The “kinaalda” begins on the fourth night of a girls first menstrual cycle where she will wait till the following morning to bathe and dress in her finest clothes to she stretches herself face downward on a blanket just outside the hogan, with her head toward the door. A sister or aunt will then proceeds to symbolically remold her. Her arms and legs are straightened, her joints smoothed, and muscles pressed to make her truly shapely. After that the most industrious and energetic of the comely women in the immediate neighborhood is called in to dress the girl’s hair in a particular form of knot and wrap it with deerskin strings, called a tsklolh. Should there be any babies or little tots about the home, the girl must go to them and placing a hand under each ear, lifting them by the neck to make them grow faster. She is to then sprint off toward the east for about a quarter of a mile and back each morning until after the public ceremony. By doing this she is assured of being strong, healthy, and active throughout womanhood and into old age. The four days preceding the night of the ceremony are days of abstinence, where only mush and bread made from corn-meal may be eaten without any salt, this symbolizes that the indulgence of food in a richer nature would be to invite laziness and an ugly form at a comparatively early age. The young woman must also refrain from scratching her head or body, for marks made by her nails during this period would surely become ugly scars or deep wrinkles. All the women folk in the hogan begin grinding corn on the first day and continue at irregular intervals until the night of the third, when the meal is mixed into batter for a large corn-cake, which the mother bakes in a sort of bean-hole outside the hogan. The kinaalda ceremony consists of little more than songs so a singer is called upon to take charge of the ceremony and friends and neighbors being notified, assemble at the girl’s hogan in the evening of the fourth day. When dusk has settled, the singer begins his songs, singing first the twelve “hogan songs” of the Bahozhonchi. After he has finished, anyone present who so desires may sing songs taken from the ritual of the same order. This singing must continue until sunrise, where the mother then brings in a bowl of yucca suds and washes the girl’s hair. Her head and hair are dried with cornmeal and the girl then takes her last run toward the east, this time followed by many young children, symbolically attesting that she will be a kind mother, who’s children will always follow her. The singer, during her absence sings eight songs of racing. On her return the great corn-cake that her mother made is brought in, cut, and divided among the family and friends assembled, when everyone is served, the girl may once again loosen her hair and partake of any food she pleases as a woman among her people. (Leighton, 1948) This focus on the woman just helps to sustain the matrilineal kinship in a Navajo society. The Navajo are a strong people that pull their strength from several different aspects of their culture, society, and family. Their matrilineal society relies on the strength of women to endure and the wisdom of the men to guide them religiously. They are a very spiritual people that believe in the balance and harmony of one’s life, which is obtained through many religious rituals and complex ceremonies. The Navajo people are a very full and colorful society and even though they have had to endure wars with the Spanish, military forced migrations into territories, and all the other problems a society has to face over time, they are still a brilliant and peaceful culture that can easily be seen in their unique pottery, their colorfully woven rugs, and beautiful jewelry. Although their religious beliefs have faded over time with their horticulture skills and been replaced with western medicine and dual wage-earning families, their ceremonies are still passed done from generation to generation from one singer to another, maintaining their culture throughout the centuries and years from now I still believe that the Navajo nation will still be a strong and vibrant culture.

References Iverson, Peter (2002). Diné: A History of the Navahos. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0-8263-2714-1

Kluckhohn, Clyde, and Dorothea Leighton (1946). The Navaho. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nowak, B., & Laird, P. (2010). Cultural anthropology. San Diego, Bridgepoint Education, Inc. https://content.ashford.edu

Leighton, Dorothea, and Clyde Kluckhohn (1948). Children of the People. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Locke, Raymond F. (1976). The Book of the Navajo. Los Angeles: Mankind Publishing Co.
Orr, Delilah. "Navajo Indians." World Book Advanced. World Book, 2012. Web. 26 Feb. 2012.

Orr, Delilah. "Sand painting." World Book Advanced. World Book, 2012. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.
Ortiz, Alfonso, ed. (1983). Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 10, Southwest, 489-683. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.