N A V A JO c PEOPLES of NORTH AMERICA c Introduction M ore than 500 years ago the Navajo established their homeland on the vast expanses of the Colorado PLATEAU in southwestern North America The red brown sands stretched hundreds of miles in every direction dotted by spots of green mostly sagebrush and desert grasses Towering MESAS and rock formations sculpted by the wind rose over the land scape In some places the high land of the plateau plunged into deep canyons surrounded by steep walls of red rock Yucca piñon and juniper grew in these canyons which were home to mountain lions rabbits and foxes On the edges of the plateau brown bears wolves and deer ranged over high mountains covered with forests of pine fir and oak The Navajo rode their horses across this land They knew where to farm where to hunt where to graze their sheep and where to disappear into the rocks to hide when necessary The Navajo called their land Dinetah land of the people and they called themselves Diné or The People In the 1600s Spanish explorers referred to the Diné as Navajo That name was likely based on a Spanish interpretation of a name given to the Diné by the local Tewa peoples It meant great planted fields A new name was not all the Spanish introduced to the Navajo They also brought horses and sheep and with these animals came a whole new way of life Although continued encounters with the Spanish and later deal ings with American settlers threatened that way of life it ultimately survived Today many Navajo continue to incorporate aspects of their traditional culture into their daily lives Smaller than mesas buttes in the Colorado Plateau still make a tow ering impression 6
N A V A JO P E O P L E S of N O R T H A M E R I C A Southwestern Arrival A lthough they are today known as a southwestern tribe the Navajo did not arrive in the Southwest until sometime between a d 1000 and 1500 Before that time the ancestors of the Navajo lived far to the north in Alaska western Canada and present-day California and Oregon There they hunted caribou moose and bears gathered wild nuts and berries and caught fish They lived in cone-shaped homes covered with bark or animal hides and traipsed through the snow using snowshoes and dogs pulling sleds ANTHROPOLOGISTS call these ancestral Navajo the Athapaskans because of the language they spoke which belongs to the Athapaskan language family Many Athapaskan-speaking peoples remained in the north But at some point groups of them began to move south from their homeland perhaps because of food shortages or war with neighboring peoples The groups likely made their way through the Rocky Mountains or along the Great Plains stopping for periods of time and then starting again Eventually after traveling more than 2,000 miles 3,219 km they reached southwestern North America Most of the Athapaskans moved onto lands east of the Rio Grande They became known as the Apache But one group settled on the Colorado Plateau The Athapaskans moved away from the Arctic land of Alaska and its caribou to the hotter climate of the Southwest 9
