The Way of Beauty

• Four is the most important number in Navajo thought, storytelling, and ritual

  • There are four colors (white, blue, yellow, black) and four sacred plants (corn, beans, squash, and tobacco)

  • There are also four sacred mountains, each associated with one of the four cardinal directions: East, South, West, and North)

• Charles Long defined religion as “orientation.” He meant that metaphorically: religion helps one come to terms with “one’s place in the world”

  • To cut the ties of Navajos to their sacred places is to disorient them, as surely as cutting the ties of Muslims to Mecca would disorient every Muslim who bends down to pray

• It’s common in the modern West to think of religion as preoccupied with some otherwordly price

  • Christian see themselves as wandering through this world on a journey toward their true home in heaven

  • However, Daoism and Confucianism’s practitioners are thoroughly at home in this world

  • Navajo religion is similar. Dine traditionalists are indifferent to speculation about the afterlife. Instead of salvation in the next world, they focus on healing and harmony in this world

    • For them, this world is Dine Bikeyah (the Navajo homeland; set amid the four sacred mountains, also known as Navajoland, and it located by looking up at a sacred mountain and finding oneself at home)

Our Story

• The term Navajo originated with Spanish settler-colonialists, who derived it from Tewa-speaking Pueblo peoples, members of  the Navajo Nation are increasingly referring to themselves in public as Dine

  • They refer to their creation story as Dine Bahane, which means “story of the people”

• These Dine creation stories can be divided into 2 categories:

  • Emergence stories about the journey of the Holy People up from four lower worlds to the earth world the Dine inhabit today

  • Origin stories describing how the things that matter to the Dine - Navajoland, the Blessingway and other ceremonies, Earth Surface People, medicine bundles, Changing Woman, the Pueblo, the hogan, clans, sacred mountains - came to be

Navajo Religion in Today’s World

• The Dine is one of 572 federally recognized tribal nations

• The Dine are the largest Native American nation in terms of territory and the second largest (after the Cherokee) in terms of population

Navajo Religion 101

• Good and evil are present throughout this world and in almost everything. Evil is not an independent power or force, however. It is part of a good-to-bad spectrum. The goal is not to eradicate evil, but to balance it so that original harmony of the universe (itself a mix of positive and negative forces) can be restored

• The central problem of human life is hocho, which refers to disease, disharmony, ugliness, chaps, misfortune, conflict, and evil

  • Produced by some action or inaction that causes an individual or the community (or both) to fall ill or otherwise depart from original beauty

• Hocho can also be brought on by Holy People, Earth Surface People(the Dine), or other human beings

• The solution to hocho is to revert to hozho by restoring the individual and the community to beauty, harmony, and balance

  • Hozho is often rendered in English as beauty or harmony, but it also refers to “good, happiness, and everything positive”

• When asked to describe the goal of Navajo life, Navajos don’t respond with hozho alone. They respond with a saying that include the term: Sa’a Naghai Bik’e Hozho (SNBH). Translates to “in old age walking, his trail beautiful.” It has been describes as the master key to unlocking the mysteries of the Dine way of life

Navajo Religion at a Glance

• Problem: hocho, or ugliness, chaos, disequilibrium, and all that is bad

• Solution: hozho, or harmony, beauty, balance, and all that is good

• Techniques: prayers, offerings, and ceremonies meant to restore individuals and the community to health and harmony

• Exemplars: Changing Woman and other creation story heroes who turn ugliness into beauty and sickness into health

In short, Navajo religion is a way of beauty in which medicine people and their patients work together to cultivate health and harmony through various ceremonies

Ceremonies and Holy People

• Navajo ceremonies occur whenever someone needs protection or healing

• They take place in a home, which Navajos call a hogan (place home)

• Singing is central to these ceremonies that they are often called chant ways. The medicine person who performs them is called a singer (hataalii)

  • Some of these ceremonies are curative and aim to restore hozho; others are preventive and aim to maintain hozho

• The most beloved Holy Person is Changing Woman

  • The epitome of goodness in the Navajo Way, she brought the Dine into being and embodies the cycle from birth to puberty to maturity to happy old age

Coyote, another major character in the emergency story. A creature of chaos, his lying, lust, and gluttony lead him to disrupt whatever harmony he might encounter. Coyote is a homeless wanderer who can rapidly change his appearance