Two

Religion on the Rez

While conditions are unique for each person, as a group the Navajo people practice a common, though eclectic, set of religious traditions. Three forms of religious practice predominate in the Navajo Nation today: “traditional” Navajo religion, the Native American Church, and myriad versions of Christianity.

Cuba, New Mexico

A Pentecostal family

The rich variety of religious practices that characterize life on the rez can be seen in the story of Tom Martinez, who was one of the first men I interviewed. It was a beautiful June day in Cuba, New Mexico, when I spoke to Tom. The sky was a radiant blue and the air was crisp and clean. Tom began working with the Union Pacific Railroad when he was twenty-two years old. His local trading post owner recruited him and drove him to Shiprock, New Mexico, to meet his railroad bosses. On the railroad gangs on which Tom worked, all the workers were Navajo and all the bosses were Anglo.

Although his mother and brothers are involved with the Native American Church and traditional religion, Tom became a Christian in 1984. He attended a Navajo Pentecostal tent service after suffering a back injury. During the ceremony the minister chose Tom out of the crowd to give him special help. The minister, who led the service along with a man who later became Tom’s son-in-law, put her hands on Tom and prayed along with the entire congregation. Tom felt better; this “laying on of hands” healed his back injury, Tom believes.

Today, Tom’s son-in-law continues to lead Pentecostal activities. The pastor often provides personal prayer services for people, as when those with certain needs write prayer requests on pieces of paper and give them to him. He takes these messages up to a mountain near Durango, Colorado, outside Navajo land, and prays over them.

Christianity remains a major force in Tom’s family. In addition to his Pentecostal son-in-law, Tom has a second son-in-law who is a Baptist minister at a large church near Shiprock.

Religious practices on the Navajo Nation

On Navajo land, participation in traditional Navajo practices exists side by side with activity in the Native American Church, Catholic parishes, and all kinds of mainstream, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Protestant churches. The railroad men with whom I am acquainted often serially participated in such varied traditions, especially when facing the need for assistance.¹ These individual practices confirm the recent findings of anthropologist Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, who wrote that within Navajo thought and practice, “parallel theories and bodies of knowledge coexist that can appear contradictory when compared by an outside observer . . . [yet] these various bodies of knowledge present no conflict to Navajo people.”²

The concurrent use of traditional and modern ceremonies is quite common, as men and women make serial attempts to deal with the difficulties confronting them. One of my well-educated Navajo friends in Albuquerque contracted Bell’s palsy. She went to local doctors, but the treatments they prescribed as part of their modern medicine seemed ineffective. Her mother, a Navajo woman who lives on Navajo land, suggested to my friend that she visit a well-known medicine man in whom the mother had confidence. After my friend participated in the recommended traditional religious ceremony, the Bell’s palsy abated. The women are not too sure, or too concerned, as to why this improvement happened; they are just glad that it did.

Varied forms of religious practice were and are used before Navajos leave their homeland to work on the railroad, while they are at work, and upon their return. Most, if not all, participated in such ceremonies. Though their terminology is dated, Kluckhohn and Leighton noticed that for the Navajo, “a sense of crisis in their economy and their consequent irritability with both whites and their fellow tribesmen also lead them to spend more time in ceremonials.”³ Certainly, Navajo men who participated in railroad work felt these feelings.

Traditional Navajo religion

Traditional Navajo religion, the type one reads about in the popular Tony Hillerman crime novels that feature Navajo detectives Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, contains ritual practices such as sings, healing ceremonies, crystal gazing, and divination, all of which are usually led by medicine men. Vine Deloria Jr. notes that “tribal religions are actually complexes of attitudes, beliefs, and practices fine-tuned to harmonize with the lands on which the people live.”⁴ These attributes and activities of traditional Navajo religion are a marvel for the uninitiated.

Much has been written about the genesis of traditional Navajo religious practices. Sam Gill, a scholar of Navajo religions, found that the coalescence of Navajo religion as practiced today can be traced to the middle of the eighteenth century, coming partially in reaction to events at the time.⁵ After the Spanish conquest of the American Southwest, the Navajos hosted many indigenous people who fled Spanish rule. The Spanish occupation had been harsh on the Pueblo people of the area, as highlighted by the famous episode in which Spanish troops invaded the Acoma Pueblo and, in retaliation for the death of a Spanish officer, cut off the right foot of every Acoma male over the age of twenty-five.⁶

In 1680, after years of frustration, Pueblo communities up and down the Rio Grande River rose up against atrocities committed by Spanish troops and religious figures.⁷ Nearly 300 Spanish were killed. In their horrific military response, the reconquista, the Spanish worked to teach those who revolted an unforgettable, bloody lesson. Many Pueblos fled to safety in Navajo areas. Each migration, before and after the reconquista, resulted in much intermarriage and many cultural additions to the life of the Navajos, who seemingly welcomed them, or at least did not oppose them.

In the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Navajos were faced with drought and increasing friction with and attacks from neighboring groups of Comanches and Utes. Gill opines that these stresses encouraged “the acceptance of a widespread movement to give identity and coherence to the Navajo people and to their religious beliefs.”⁸ Gill theorizes that this movement brought a rejection of the traditions of their Pueblo neighbors, which were replaced by a core Navajo tradition, the Blessingway ceremony, as well as a unique Navajo creation story.⁹

The Blessingway ritual ceremony, which will be discussed in more detail shortly, is the heart of traditional Navajo religious practice and is based on the creation story of the Navajo universe as well as the notion of healing here and now.¹⁰ Through the Blessingway, “the Navajo gained a sense of themselves as a unified people with a distinct religion and way of life tied directly to the area bounded by the sacred mountains that border Navajoland.”¹¹

The Navajo creation story

Like trying to read the Bible literally and prove the relation of Christian ritual and liturgy to biblical text, attempting to precisely map traditional Navajo ceremonies and their creation story is difficult. The Navajos are a storytelling people, and, in studying the creation stories, Sam Gill argues, “it is very difficult to obtain an overall picture of how these many stories are related to one another and how the whole body somehow coheres.”¹² According to Paul G. Zolbrod, who has written the full creation story in his book Diné bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story, “the Navajo creation story was not, strictly speaking, a single story any more than the Bible is.” It is “a kind of boundless, sprawling narrative with a life of its own, so to speak, fixed in its actual limits only by what might be recited during a particular performance.”¹³ Zolbrod continues:

The story tells of the emergence of the insect-like Nilch’i Diné’e or “air-spirit people” from a primal domain deep within the earth. It describes how they gradually make their way to the surface of the world, where they evolve into Nihookáá’ Diné’e or “earth surface people” and then into an aggregate of human clans ready to form an intricate society. . . . The story resembles the Old Testament in that its origins reach deep into the inscrutable loam of a primeval past. Also, it articulates a distinct sense of the sacred for those who share a familiarity with it.¹⁴

Looking at the breadth of Native American religion, however, Deloria sees things differently. He finds fundamental differences in Native American creation stories when compared with those of the Abrahamic faiths. “At no point, however, does any tribal religion insist that its particular version of the creation is an absolute historical recording of the creation event or that the story necessarily leads to conclusions about humankind’s good or evil nature. At best the tribal stories recount how the people experience the creative process which continues today.”¹⁵

What is clear is that the basic creation story tells of the emergence of life through a number of eras or levels, moving from lower spaces to higher. The final level is the present location of the Navajo Nation. This upward journey of creation is caused when heroes “inadvertently introduce disorder and ugliness” that have the potential to destroy the world. Each new world “offers the promise of happiness and a good life to its inhabitants, but they are unable to maintain the proper relationships with each other.”¹⁶ Zolbrod is correct that parallels to early biblical stories are many, as floods are often featured as a way to cleanse the misdeeds of the people, those in gardenlike conditions unintentionally introduce disruptions even while marveling at the beauty around them, and sexual misdeeds are common. Given the constant spoiling of each level through relational misdeeds, “a theme which emerges with increasing urgency as the emergence journey proceeds is the need for the establishment of dependable relationships so as to bring about an orderly world.”¹⁷

The Blessingway—the most important traditional ritual

A window into the world of traditional Navajo ritual can be gained with a deeper understanding of the Blessingway ceremony.¹⁸ While as with familiar Christian rituals, much variation exists in the actual practices, Blessingway ceremonies usually begin at sunset with the consecration of the ceremonial hogan, the traditional Navajo abode and sacred space.¹⁹ Each ceremony begins with songs that dedicate the hogan for the religious purpose which is to come. Father Berard Haile, its most authoritative early cataloger, observed that the Blessingway is “vastly concerned” with the hogan, for it is the “center of every blessing in life: happy births, the home of one’s children, the center of weddings, the center where good health, property, increase and crops and livestock originate, where old age, the goal in life, will visit regularly.”²⁰

One’s family is often an integral part of the ceremony. The person for whom the ceremony is being performed is often called the “one-sung-over.” This person, along with the medicine man and his assistants who conduct the ceremony, spends time from sundown to sunup, often over two days, singing, praying, and chanting. This ceremonial contains within it a guide to the Navajo way of life.²¹ These sings reenact the creation of the world by placing the one-sung-over in a world recreated by ritual and by closely tying her to the goodness and power of those deities who have come before.

Ritual purification includes the use of the sacred medicine bundle and copious amounts of corn pollen, both of which are associated with the First Man and First Woman from the creation story. Wyman writes that “the pure, immaculate product of the corn tassel is food eaten by gods and man. Pollen, the beautiful, is a fit gift for the gods. Their paths should be strewn with it.”²² The ceremony ends at dawn when the one-sung-over exits the hogan, faces east, and deeply breathes in, to “become one” with the dawn.²³

In addition to the Blessingway, anthropologists have grouped traditional Navajo ceremonies into a number of divisions, though no formal classification system exists. Each is used for particular reasons in particular situations.²⁴ Gill notes two special commonalities among these ceremonies. First, “no two ceremonials are ever performed exactly the same,” and second, “the ritual process permits extensive combinations of these constituent elements allowing great freedom in responding creatively and meaningfully to almost any conceivable circumstance.”²⁵ The number of Navajo people who participate in healing ceremonies is quite high but often variable. Kluckhohn and Leighton write of a woman who “spent nearly 500 days in curing rites,” yet they also found when they wrote in the 1940s that “fully half of those under thirty had never been ‘sung over.’”²⁶

Today, for those who participate in it, the Blessingway ceremony and other similar rituals “serve to reveal the power and knowledge of a way of life to the Navajo people.”²⁷ Gill defines the object of such practices:

The pragmatic goal, toward which the ceremonials are aimed, as stated by Navajos, is the acquisition of hózhǫ́. The very meaning of the word hózhǫ́, an environment of beauty and pleasantness, suggests that the ceremonials are primarily interested in establishing the proper relationships of the individual to his environment, and this will consequently be reflected in a health condition regained by his physical body.²⁸

Given the importance of these ceremonies in gaining and keeping bodily health, it is no surprise that these were seen by Navajo railroad workers as being especially important in their dangerous industry.

Importantly, in addition to the curative rituals, traditional Navajo religion includes a predictive component. Apprentice diviners are trained by master diviners and are part of a lineage that stretches back to the inception of these practices. Diviners use crystals and hand trembling to discern the nature of an illness or problem and direct the individual to the best ceremony or medicine man to perform the ceremony. As one traditional medicine man told me, for diviners, crystals serve the same purpose as the white man’s computers.²⁹

The Native American Church

The second form of practice comes from the Native American Church, a major force on the Navajo Nation today.³⁰ This church, known as the “Peyote Church,” focuses on special ceremonies to heal and to quiet or influence the unseen forces operating in the life world of Native Americans from several tribes. The Native American Church probably began in an Oklahoma Indian tribe in the early twentieth century and is important for a number of Native American peoples. Over one hundred small chapters exist on the Navajo Nation today. To perform the ceremonies, a medicine man for the Native American Church may get a certificate to be able to buy and possess peyote. He works with a group of other medicine men who have very specific roles. Only recently has the possession of peyote for ceremonial use become legal under American law.³¹

The liturgy and ceremony of this church, featuring the use of peyote and eagle feathers, combines aspects of traditional Navajo religion as well as Christian traditions. Meetings are held for the most sacred events of Christianity—Christmas and Easter. Omer Stewart, who wrote of the “peyote religions,” quotes a practitioner from the Winnebago people, Albert Hensley, as believing that peyote is both a holy medicine and a Christian sacrament. “To us it is a portion of the body of Christ,” Hensley said, “even as the communion bread is believed to be a portion of Christ’s body by other Christian denominations. Christ spoke of a Comforter who was to come. It never came to Indians until it was sent by God in the form of this Holy Medicine.”³²

The most common Native American Church ceremonies generally involve a number of related people who are praying for one of their group. The purposes of these prayers include healing, as in the case of injury, or legal or family problems. Prayers and ceremonies are also performed to procure good luck, as in finding work, winning a lawsuit, or having a good school year. Several of those whom I interviewed felt that attending these meetings always “helped them out.” As with other Navajo religious practices, faith in the efficaciousness of the activities seems crucial to their success.

Judge Juan Burciaga, a federal judge in New Mexico, in ruling for the right of a member of the Native American Church to use peyote, described the ceremony in a lawsuit concerning the use of peyote in the religion. His description is worth quoting in detail.

The peyote ceremony is unique and the very cornerstone of the Peyote Religion. It is always conducted by individuals who hold honored posts which have specially assigned duties. The leader of the ceremony is called a “roadman.” The roadman is responsible for initiating the participants, although worshipers who are not personally invited are usually welcomed as well. Other officials present at a peyote meeting include the chief drummer, who sits on the right of the roadman; the cedarman, who sits on the left of the roadman and sprinkles sagebrush “incense” on the fire; and the fireman or doorman, who tends the fire and sits near the opening of the teepee. Each meeting also has a sponsor who is responsible for securing a site, the roadman, the teepee and other materials necessary for the service. Although not all ceremonies of the Native American Church are identical, the general concepts have been so well defined, so established in traditional practice, that they have not changed significantly for nearly a hundred years. . . . At these peyote meetings, the worshipers usually gather in a teepee at dusk and the ceremony passes through a series of ritualistic stages. During these rituals, a staff and a rattle are passed around and the person who receives them leads in singing peyote hymns and prayer. Around midnight, peyote is ingested by the worshipers and the singing, praying and drumming continues throughout the night until dawn. When the “buttons” of the plant are eaten, or brewed into tea and imbibed, the user experiences hallucinations. The peyote plant produces “a warm and pleasant euphoria, an agreeable point of view, relaxation, colorful visual distortions, and a sense of timelessness that are conducive to the all-night ceremony of the Native American Church.” Finally, at noon of the following day, all worshipers share in a ceremonial feast.³³

The Navajo scholar David Aberle argues that “the peyote cult is the most popular, and one of the most durable of all the religious movements created by American Indian groups suffering from the effects of domination by American society.”³⁴ For the initial observer of this syncretistic church, some of its practices seem quite startling—taking mind-alerting peyote as part of the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, for example. But as part of the efforts of native peoples to place themselves in the world and to deal with the issues that surround them, creative uses of the culture of the colonizing peoples is an understandable and perhaps effective strategy. Aberle argues with some justification that “the experience of hierarchical power, the inability to control events on the Navajo reservation, and, perhaps, fears for the future of traditional Navajo ceremonial practice may have shaken faith in the old, immanentist supernatural power of Navajo religion and given some appeal to belief in transcendent power. Peyotism was available to offer access to such a power.”³⁵ Taking advantage of what is available in order to make one’s way through the world is a deeply human characteristic.

Christianity on the rez

The third form of common religious practice is Christianity.³⁶ Catholicism has a long history of attempts to convert the Navajos, beginning with encounters between the Spanish and the “Apaches of Navajo” as early as 1627, and continuing to this day with established Catholic parishes. In the 1980s David Aberle estimated that there were fifteen Franciscan missions on or near the Navajo Nation that were serving Navajo parishioners.³⁷

A Christian church in the checkerboard area of the Navajo Nation.

The most famous Catholic missionary, the Franciscan priest Father Berard Haile, moved to Navajo country in 1900 in order to “convert the Indians of the Southwest.”³⁸ Interestingly, the activities of Catholics in Navajo country consisted of more than conversions. Much of the painstaking work of recording and cataloging traditional Navajo ceremonies was performed by Father Haile. Haile and his fellow Franciscans produced the Ethnologic Dictionary in 1910 and A Manual of Navajo Grammar in 1926. Haile’s relation to the Navajo people, like the general relation between Navajo ways and Christian religions, can be seen in two competing quotations from the middle of the twentieth century. Father Haile was much respected by the Navajo Nation, and in 1953, the Navajo Tribal Council honored him by saying, “You came to make Christians of the Navaho, but the Navahos have made a Navaho out of you.”³⁹ Yet, in his remarks at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of St. Michael’s Mission, quoted in Time magazine, a stark reminder of the difference between the pluralistic and syncretic approach of the Navajos and the rigidity and claimed omnipotence of those who came to minister to them is evident. In the article, Father Haile referenced Navajo ideas of the upward march through the levels of creation and their fear of disorder in the world when he said to the Navajo congregation, “There is much for you to learn. . . .You say you have a religion just for the Navajo, but the priests have a religion for all men, white or red or black. . . . The Ten Commandments are a ladder which you climb in this life to live with God in heaven. If you don’t, you won’t find anything except a mess in the hereafter.”⁴⁰ In spite of their mutual respect, neither the Navajos nor Father Haile would back away from their fundamental viewpoints.

Protestant missionaries have been a consistent presence on the reservation. They were spurred in 1868, when, in order to address the graft and corruption that characterized governmental Indian policy and practice, President Ulysses S. Grant initiated a “Peace Policy.” Thereafter, Christian churches were put in charge of various governmental functions relating to American Indians. The Navajo Reservation was “allotted” to the Presbyterian Church, at least in part because of the attitude of its missionaries that “tradition is the enemy of progress.” While Presbyterian efforts were not successful and the Peace Policy was terminated, before the turn of the century their missionaries were followed by Methodists and Episcopalians. Such missionary efforts were supported by government officials, and around this same time the Board of Heathen Missions of the Holland Christian Reformed Church of America was given a reservation land grant. In Rehoboth, New Mexico, in 1896, the first Christian Reformed Mission Board school for Indian children was founded. After the turn of the century other denominations began missionary work, including the Mennonites, the Baptists, the Gospel Missionary Union, and the Faith Mission. In 1950, Aberle recounts, there were thirty-five mainstream Protestant missions.⁴¹

Probably the most successful missionary efforts were those of the Mormon Church, also called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).⁴² The Mormon program included language training for their missionaries, successful attempts to establish trading posts to serve the commercial needs of the Navajo and Mormon traders, and the placement of Navajo children in Mormon boarding schools. Mormon belief includes a special relationship between members of the church and Native Americans: Mormons consider the Navajos and others to be “Lamanites,” descendants of Israelites who fell from grace and sought the “wilderness for beasts of prey.” Mormon efforts to bring salvation to the Navajos and other native peoples continue today so that the Navajos will again be a “pure and delightsome people.”⁴³ Aberle estimated that LDS members on the rez slightly outnumbered Catholics.⁴⁴ By 1978, Steve Pavlik reported that there were nearly fifty LDS congregations on Navajo land and over one hundred missionaries.

While they claimed a vision of the proper respect for the Navajo, most Christian missionaries would have agreed with the words of George Warren Hinman, of the American Missionary Association, that “Christianity, with all its social implications, has more in store for the Navajos than even the most beautiful of their traditions and their arts and their patient industry.”⁴⁵ At the time of Hinman’s statement, the mid-1930s, Christianity was competing with the peyote religion, especially for those Navajos who felt the old ways did not have the power necessary to cope with the forces to which they were being subjected. David Aberle compared the two at this time.

Christianity, too, offered access to transcendent power, but primarily through alien ministers and priests and not always in the Navajo language. Faith healing was not characteristic of the missions of the 1930’s. Peyote road men, on the other hand, were always Indians, Navajo road men were soon trained, and Peyotism was a curing religion.”⁴⁶

To their credit, and like the Franciscans, a number of Protestants worked on a written Navajo language in order to translate their sacred Christian works.⁴⁷ A Christian Reformed Church missionary, L. P. Brink, translated hymns as well as the books of Genesis and Mark into the Navajo language in 1910.⁴⁸ Later, Presbyterians, Mennonites, and other Protestant missionaries translated religious tracts into the Navajo language. The effect was to speed the production of a written Navajo language.

The 1950s brought an explosion of evangelical and charismatic Protestant missions, many of which were independent and pastored by Navajo preachers. The growth of this movement continued at least through the 1980s. Today, with the coming of the hot summer months, multihued evangelical revival tents pop up like colorful desert flowers throughout Navajo land. For many, attendance at these revivals has displaced Squaw Dances as a social location for young Navajos to meet.⁴⁹ Of course, there are many reasons people attend ceremonies. In Laughing Boy, the novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930, Oliver La Farge writes the story of a young Navajo man, Laughing Boy, who meets two braves headed to a dance at Chilbito. They race their horses on a bet and then stop to talk. The dance is being performed for a man name Twice Brave, who is ill. In describing Twice Brave, the men speak of one attitude toward the missionaries. “When the missionary at Tse Tlchi used to serve beans, a lot of us went to hear him. He held a sing every seven days, and afterwards there were beans, but there was no dancing. We followed the Jesus Road until he stopped giving us beans.”⁵⁰

Grand claims for the state of evangelical efforts are made by some evangelical preachers. Freddy Hall, founder of the Dineh Christian Church, claims that the Navajo Nation is “perhaps the most evangelized native American tribe of North America” and that “40–50 percent of the Navajo people are born again Christians.” Hall and his congregation are working “to equip and send Navajo ministers to the 900 North American tribes by establishing a strong local church on the reservation, with a radio and TV outreach, and by building a Bible training center to equip Native American ministers.”⁵¹ It is unlikely that Hall’s claims are well grounded or that his intentions will be realized in the near future.

In the summer revival tents are erected throughout the reservation. They stimulate spiritual and social pursuits for those who attend the evangelical Christian ceremonies held in them.

My translator, Julie, observes generational issues in the relationship of the Navajos with Christianity. In certain Christian ceremonies in which Navajo people participate, she says, older parishioners are reluctant to “confess their sins.” Younger people, however, Julie has observed, do not seem to mind this entreaty.

A short discussion with Harry Walters

Any discussion of religious practices among Navajo workers must include the observation that for most Navajo, spirituality is not a concept separate from daily life or cordoned off into a special sacred place.⁵² To learn more about the meaning of the holistic Navajo view of spirituality and religion, I went to the Navajo Nation to visit Diné College and to speak to Harry Walters. Now recently retired, Walters served for many years as the director of the Hatathli Museum at the Diné College and taught Navajo history, Navajo oral history, and culture there. Walters is a man who has performed expertly in both the Anglo and Navajo worlds and is highly respected in each.

The night before meeting Walters, I stayed in Chinle, Arizona, the gateway to Canyon de Chelly, the extraordinary canyon that was the location of some of Kit Carson’s most dastardly deeds against the Navajo. I left for the college in the early morning. My only human companions were those waiting for the yellow school buses that ply the quiet roadways every school day. As the sky began to lighten, a sole hogan could be seen in the distance, standing starkly on a small hill, its door facing east. This beautiful Highway 12 features somber and imposing volcanic dikes and plugs set against the brown dyes of the sandstone bluffs. The ecology of this section of the vast nation is more alpine in nature than the southern side, with which I am more familiar. As I approached the college, hawks and bluebirds swooped and twittered among the ponderosa pines.

“Your belief is your pride,” Walters told me.⁵³ Religion cannot be separated from the fabric of life, he believes; it does not stand alone. The strands of religious ritual and practice are woven through all there is.⁵⁴ Kluckhohn and Leighton had come to the same conclusion. “Precisely because the Navaho world is still a whole,” they wrote, “we would not expect to find some separate entity denoted by a word equivalent to ‘religion.’”⁵⁵ Certainly that is the case for Navajo people. Scholar Deborah House points out that while there is no Navajo word for religion, those Navajo who speak some English do have a word for religion; it is the English word religion.⁵⁶

Walters stresses the importance of harmony and order for the Navajo people. There is a certain order in the universe, of which human beings are a part in a unique way, as are birds and insects. Personal harmony, so important to the Navajo people, comes from acting in accord with the structure of the natural world. Mental order comes from alignment with the order of the universe. Religious ceremonies, Walters believes, are a way to approach and participate in that order. To gain access to such order gives one the good life, with healing and protection. It allows the Navajos to “walk in beauty.”

Such philosophical stress on beauty is consistent with the Navajo approach to personal physical beauty, as seen in the extraordinary silverwork and turquoise that adorn many Navajo women and men. In this vein, N. Scott Momaday, in the Pulitzer Prize–winning book House Made of Dawn, described what his protagonist saw when encountering Navajo families at a celebration:

The Diné, of all people, knew how to be beautiful. Here and there in the late golden light which bled upon the walls, he saw the bright blankets and the gleaming silverwork of their wealth: the shining weight of their buckles and belts, bracelets and bow guards, squash blossoms and pale blue stones.⁵⁷

Thus, the importance of beauty and its relation to the balance sought by Navajos permeates all facets of Navajo life.

The centrality of hózhǫ́

Within these multiple approaches, varied religious practices, and holistic religious attitudes, a common core exists that emanates from traditional Navajo religion: the concept of hózhǫ́. The Navajo word hózhǫ́ refers to a harmonious and ideal environment.⁵⁸ “It is beauty, harmony, goodness, happiness, and everything that is positive, and it refers to an environment which is all-inclusive.”⁵⁹ The centrality of hózhǫ́, even given its genesis in traditional Navajo religion, is today a part of nearly all religious and spiritual practices among Navajo people.⁶⁰

Hózhǫ́ anchors a worldview, and it is this foundational belief that grounds what is often called the “Navajo Way.”⁶¹ Hózhǫ́ functions as an anchoring force in Navajo life, infusing all practices. In addition to defining the condition in which one aspires to live, hózhǫ́ incorporates “the goal of Navajo life in this world [which] is to live to maturity in [this] condition . . . and to die of old age, the end result of which incorporates one into . . . universal beauty, harmony and happiness.”⁶² Hózhǫ́ often appears in the phrase sa’ah naaghaii bik’eh hózhǫ́, which Gary Witherspoon defines as a description of the “electricity,” or life-giving force, that moves all life to beauty. For a human, sa’ah naaghaii bik’eh hózhǫ́, a constituent of all blessing rituals in traditional Navajo religion, powers the “movement toward inner and outer human harmony that leads to beauty.”⁶³ Rituals in traditional Navajo religion are often dedicated to the reimposition of hózhǫ́, as “the desirable conditions of sa’ah naaghaii bik’eh hózhǫ́ are disturbed and disrupted by improper, inadvertent, or inastute contact with things that are defined as dangerous (báhádzid), and by the malevolent deeds (witchcraft) of others.”⁶⁴ This essential core is combined with an openness and willingness to engage in flexibility in facing “the given potentialities” of their environment, expressed here in religious practices around work.⁶⁵

Holbrook, Arizona

David Sangster—A conversation about the interplay of religious traditions

I met David Sangster, the uncle-in-law of a former client of mine, at the Holiday Inn in Holbrook, Arizona, one windy, dusty day. Small dust devils swirled in the distance. David, a Navajo man who lives on the Arizona side of the Navajo Nation, near the New Mexico state line, has done a great job of navigating the two worlds. He has been able to understand and internalize a sufficient amount of the outside culture to be successful in it. At the same time, he is involved with Navajo religion in a way common to those featured in this story. Our discussion helped me understand how the three traditions interact.

David completed high school at the Indian School in Phoenix, served in the Navy, and retired from a maintenance job at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school. He worked as a track laborer for the Santa Fe Railroad in the summer before he entered the ninth grade, traveling with a track gang that was sent to Illinois to work.⁶⁶ Management saw that he had skills in both English and Navajo and had him do the “paperwork” for the gang.

Along with his ability to be successful in both worlds, David has given much thought to the role of faith and the practical use of religion among the Navajos, and Navajo railroad workers more particularly. I told him of my interest and was honored when he agreed to share his thoughts in great detail. David is a man of faith and sees the three Navajo religious paths as various ways to get to the same place. There is “only one God,” he told me. “I don’t care if there are over a hundred different religions, including the Indian religions. It all goes to the man up there. If I want to I can go to a church, there is no restriction or law or whatever. I am a Presbyterian. I can go to any church.”

Today David is active in the Native American Church (NAC), serving as a robeman, an important position in NAC meetings.⁶⁷ He participated in his first ceremony when he was a young man and became a robeman in 1979. A perceptive observer, he is very aware of the history of the church and the many controversies that surround it. Every year NAC members hold a conference between the Arizona communities of Many Farms and Chinle, attended by people from their many chapters; fifteen to twenty tepees are set up for ceremonies.

David’s NAC ceremonies are performed for marriage problems, family problems, and sickness. David recognizes that some sickness is incurable, like arthritis and cancer. But he believes that NAC ceremonies are very useful for those in need. “If you are a perfect person, no sickness or nothing, you are a good person or a perfect one, you don’t belong in there,” he told me. “What is the use going there? This is the place where a sick person gets well. That is the place where you eat peyote and sing and pray and all that. You have no business in there. So, it is for sickness.”

Given the Christian influence on the NAC, there is a holiday meeting for Christmas and New Year’s Day. “There is an Easter meeting where they pray for resurrection of Christ, and on Christmas it is for when Jesus was born.” The NAC also holds educational meetings for students so that they will learn well. They encourage the young to pray throughout their educational career, even when they are in college. Young people today are really out of hand, David believes. Some can get straightened up, but some don’t. The NAC meetings can cure some wayward kids through the singing and the ceremony. The same basic ceremony is done for each issue or concern and the same fire pit can be used. However, the prayer changes based on the purpose of the meeting, he tells me.

I ask David about the Christian revivals. “It is all up to the individual,” he tells me. “If you believe in our old ways, you go to the traditional singing medicine man. If you believe in that, you have faith in that [and] you get well with that, why go to another one? . . . Some people for some reason, I don’t know why, maybe they get tired, they can’t seem to get help from that, they go to revival or they go back to Catholic or some other church. Then they come to find out that revival did not agree with, I don’t know, whatever. They come back. Some people jump around to different relations. . . . Some people say they get cured at the revival and they stay with them. . . . It is all up to the individual. You have to have faith in something. It is the only way.”

We talk about traditional religion. David tells me that the Long Walk experience is the genesis of Navajo religious practices. I ask him how he understands the way one becomes a medicine man. “It is all God’s, the creation that creates this, the spiritual way,” David says. “It involves the Holy People, somehow. I guess you sort of get picked. Then they let you have it. If you just want to become a hand trembler or a crystal gazer, I don’t care who authorizes you; it is never going to come to you. It is never going to happen.” But just having the desire and being picked is not enough, David says. An aspiring healer or medicine man must work as a kind of apprentice for three years or so, to be sure that the proper introduction into the world of such leaders is fully realized.

1 In this regard, the Navajo anthropologist Charlotte Frisbie wrote of “the eclecticism of the People, and, in the area of religion, their pragmatic interest in multiple affiliations and syncretic combinations, anything that may yield a wider range of options and offer solutions, explanation, or at least relief from personal, tribal, and cultural problems.” Charlotte Frisbie, Navajo Medicine Bundles or Jish (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 197.

2 Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, Molded in the Image of Changing Woman: Navajo Views on the Human Body and Personhood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 13.

3 Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navajo, 224. Such reactions are common. For example, numerous reports of similar reactions to disruptions were seen in Haiti after the devastating earthquake of 2010. Brian MacQuarrie, “Haiti Calls on Voodoo Priests to Help Battered Nation Heal,” Boston Globe, February 10, 2010, http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2010/02/10/haiti_calls_upon_voodoo_priests_for_help/, accessed April 2, 2011.

4 Deloria, God is Red, 69.

5 A similar view is held by David Brugge. See Brugge, Navajo Pottery and Ethnohistory (Window Rock, AZ: Navajo Tribal Museum, 1963), 22–23.

6 For a recent review of the story of this period, see Seymour H. Koenig and Harriet Koenig, Acculturation in the Navajo Eden (New York: YBK Publishers, 2005). This incident remains a contentious one between Hispanic and Pueblo people in New Mexico to this day.

7 This Pueblo revolt against Spanish domination has been called the most successful indigenous rebellion in the Americas. For more on this historic event and the Spanish reconquista, see Michael V. Wilcox, The Pueblo Revolt and the Mythology of Conquest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

8 Sam D. Gill, Songs of Life: An Introduction to Navajo Religious Culture (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1979), 1. David Aberle concludes that the variety and number of contemporary religious practices spring from these dislocations. “The Future of Navajo Religion,” in Brugge and Frisbie, Navajo Religion and Culture, 220.

9 That is not to say that no “outside” influences can be seen in Navajo ceremonials. Peter Iverson argues the Enemyway ceremony, an important cleansing ritual, “may be linked to contact with people who have ties to the southern Plains, especially the Plains Apaches, and the Comanches.” Iverson, Diné, 12.

10 Gill, Songs of Life, 3. Some of Gill’s work has been contested by fellow academics. See Christopher Jocks, “Response: American Indian Religious Traditions and the Academic Study of Religion: A Response to Sam Gill,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, no. 1 (1997), 169–76. In fact, some harbor a ferocious antipathy to him. See Andrea Smith, “Dismantling the Master’s Tools with the Master’s House: Native Feminist Liberation Theologies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22, no. 2 (2006). Gill’s observations referenced in this book, however, have been consistent with my experience and understanding or are seconded by scholars whose work seems substantial and well grounded to me.

11 Gill, Songs of Life, 2. David Brugge goes so far as to argue that, consistent with the importance of adaptability, the Blessingway ceremony itself was a mechanism “to allow for the symbolic Navajo-ization of foreign traits.” Brugge, Navajo Pottery and Ethnohistory, 22–23.

12 Gill, Songs of Life, 3.

13 Paul G. Zolbrod, Diné bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), 5. For more on this story, see Aileen O’Bryan, Navajo Indian Myths (New York: Dover, 1993).

14 Zolbrod, Diné bahane’, 5.

15 Deloria, God is Red, 87.

16 Gill, Songs of Life, 3. “They quarrel constantly and, though they try, they are unable to avoid committing acts of adultery and incest.”

17 Gill, Songs of Life, 4.

18 Many versions of the Blessingway exist. The most respected are those of Father Berard Haile, transcribed by Professor Leland Wyman. Leland C. Wyman, Blessingway (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970).

19 The initial instructions for how to build a hogan are contained in the Navajo creation story. The exact construction varies according to the available material. Initial hogans were made completely from mud, straw, and sticks. Used wooden railroad ties were often employed for construction after the entry of the railroad to New Mexico and Arizona. Today, more-modern materials are usually used. Hogans are used as dwellings and for other normal day-to-day purposes as well.

20 Wyman, Blessingway, 10.

21 See Katherine Spencer, Reflection of Social Life in the Navajo Origin Myth, University of New Mexico Publications in Anthropology 3 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1947); and Mythology and Values: An Analysis of Navajo Chantway Myths, American Folklore Society Memoirs 48 (Boston: American Folklore Society, 1957).

22 Wyman, Blessingway, 30.

23 Gill, Songs of Life, 13–14. Of course, like most traditions without hard and fast liturgical rules, significant variation exists in practice.

24 In addition to the Blessingway, some find the major classifications of rituals to be Holyways, Lifeways, Evilways, War Ceremonials, and Gameways.

25 Gill, Songs of Life, 11.

26 Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navajo, 224–25.

27 Gill, Songs of Life, 9.

28 Gill, Songs of Life, 10. See also Gladys A. Reichard, Navajo Religion: A Study of Symbolism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950).

29 Interview with Kee Spencer; see chapter 7.

30 The definitive works on the church are David F. Aberle, The Peyote Religion among the Navajo (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982); and Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987).

31 The Code of Federal Regulations specifically allows use of peyote in the ceremonies of the Native American Church. 21 CFR 1307.31 reads, “The listing of peyote as a controlled substance in Schedule I does not apply to the nondrug use of peyote in bona fide religious ceremonies of the Native American Church, and members of the Native American Church so using peyote are exempt from registration. Any person who manufactures peyote for or distributes peyote to the Native American Church, however, is required to obtain registration annually and to comply with all other requirements of law.” See, e.g., U.S. v. Boyll, 774 F. Supp. 1353 (D.N.M. 1991).

32 Stewart, Peyote Religion, 157.

33 U.S. v. Boyll, 774 F. Supp. at 1335, citing Peyote Religion: A History by Omer Stewart.

34 Aberle, The Peyote Religion, 3.

35 Aberle, The Peyote Religion, xxv.

36 Much of the material in this section is based on the excellent overview of the historical relationship of Christianity and the Navajos by Steve Pavlik. See “Navajo Christianity: Historical Origins and Modern Trends,” Wicazo Sa Review 12, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 43–58.

37 Aberle, The Peyote Religion, xliii.

38 Father Murray Bodo, ed., Tales of an Endishodi: Father Berard Haile and the Navajos, 1900–1961 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998).

39 Pavlik, “Navajo Christianity,” 46.

40 “Religion: St. Michael’s 50th,” Time, October 24, 1949, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,805166,00.html, accessed April 2, 2011.

41 Aberle, The Peyote Religion, xliii.

42 Pavlik estimates that 20 percent of Navajos alive today have been baptized as Mormons. Pavlik, “Navajo Christianity,” 49.

43 See, e.g., Steve Pavlik, “Of Saints and Lamanites: An Analysis of Navajo Mormonism,” Wicazo Sa Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 21–30.

44 Aberle, The Peyote Religion, xliii.

45 George Warren Hinman, The American Indian and Christian Missions (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1933), 147.

46 Aberle, The Peyote Religion, xxv.

47 There is no question that efforts like this have been an aid to the continuation of the Navajo language. However, there is much to say about the ramifications for an oral culture when their books and even their language are transcribed by outsiders. But I must leave the description of this fascinating, yet thoroughly contested, terrain to others more skilled on this ground than I.

48 William H. Lyon, “Gladys Reichard at the Frontiers of Navajo Culture,” American Indian Quarterly 13, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 150.

49 The Squaw Dance is an often large ceremony attended by Navajo people who live in a particular area. It is both a ceremonial and social occasion in which the Enemyway ceremony is performed. It is an opportunity for young people from the scattered and separate small communities to meet and sometimes find a mate. When I was searching as an early teenager, similar events in a number of religious traditions, including Methodist, Unitarian, and Quaker, served a comparable purpose for me.

50 Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 87–88.

51 “Freddy Hall Navajo Outreach,” www.freddyhall.org, accessed January 21, 2010.

52 The Navajo Healing Project, a collaboration led from Case Western Reserve University by a group of Navajo and non-Navajo researchers, worked to understand the nature of the therapeutic process in contemporary Navajo religious healing. Like my observations in this book of existential survival strategies in Navajo railroad life, this health care study revealed that religion and spirituality are “intimately entwined” with medical healing. Thomas J. Csordas, ed., “Ritual Healing in Navajo Society,” Theme issue, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14, no. 4 (December 2000), 463. Similar observations and conclusions can be found in Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, “I Choose Life.” Further, a similar view of the concept of nature and the human being can be found in an interview with N. Scott Momaday. Speaking of the Navajo, he said, “In his mind, nature is not something apart from him. He conceives of it, rather, as an element in which he exists. He has existence within that element, much in the same way we think of having existence within the element of air. It would be unimaginable for him to think of it in the way of nineteenth century ‘nature poets’ thought of looking at nature and writing about it. They employed a kind of ‘esthetic distance,’ as it is sometimes called. This idea would be alien to the Indian.” Walter Holden Capps, ed., Seeing with a Native Eye (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 84.

53 For more on Harry Walters and his views, see “Navajo Oral History: Harry Walters,” Winona360, http://edutech.tlt.winona.edu/winona360/article/navajo-oral-history-harry-walters, accessed January 27, 2010.

54 Reinforcing the holistic life and understanding of the Navajo, Paul Zolbrod makes the same point about art and the Navajo in Diné bahane’.

55 Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navajo, 179.

56 Deborah House, Language Shift among the Navajos: Identity Politics and Cultural Continuity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), xxvi. In this book, as I try to explain the “Navajo way” of religion as a part of all life, I use the word and concept of religion in its conventional application. The definitional issues of the true meaning of the word religion will be left for another day, though I hope that the living religious practices that this book highlights can be a useful factual and sociological addition to this area of study and debate.

57 Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 76.

58 All anthropologists and ethnographers writing on Navajo life have struggled with the exact meaning of this word and concept. See, e.g., Farella, The Main Stalk. Present efforts continue. As to the multiple attempts at translation of this word, Clyde Kluckhohn wrote, “The difficulty with translation primarily reflects the poverty of English in terms that simultaneously have moral and esthetic meanings.” Clyde Kluckhohn, “The Philosophy of the Navajo Indians,” in Ideological Differences and World Order, F. S. C. Northrop, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1949), 368–69.

59 Witherspoon, Language and Art, 24.

60 I heard of recurring attempts by certain Christian preachers to take any reference to Navajo traditional ideas and practices out of their liturgy and ritual, including ideas of harmony and balance contained within hózhǫ́.

61 I will talk about the complex issue of the “Navajo Way” at the conclusion of the book.

62 Witherspoon, Language and Art, 25.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Witherspoon argues that “all cultures are constructed from and based on a single metaphysical premise which is axiomatic, unexplainable, and unprovable,” though such premises are often different from culture to culture. Witherspoon, Language and Art, 5.

66 On a track gang certain discrete skills are often required. Some workers become skilled at operating certain kinds of machines, or in a certain craft like welding. This often allows them to be assigned to do this work, as opposed to simple manual labor.

67 As in many Christian ceremonies, a number of well-specified positions can be found in each ritual, each with its own important duties.