The origins of Navajo pastoralism.

Long ago, when the Holy People still roamed the earth, Changing Woman created livestock to reward the Hero Twins for ridding the world of evil. She then traveled to her permanent home, an island in the Pacific on the edge of the earth and sky. And it was there that she created the Earth Surface People, including the Dine, whom their neighbors would later call Navajo. As the people multiplied, they grew too numerous for the tiny island, so Changing Woman sent them on a long migration to the land between the four sacred mountains. But she did not send them empty-handed; she gave them sheep and horses to take back with them so that they might prosper. (1)

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Navajo pastoralism arose early in the eighteenth century from the semiarid canyons of the Dine homeland--Dinetah--where women and men incorporated Spanish livestock into their world and gave them indigenous meanings. Before long, burgeoning flocks spurred families to spread out across the region and promoted the adoption of an ancient pastoral pattern known as transhumance, the seasonal migrations from one ecological zone to another that made herding in this arid land possible. They called their expansive landscape Dine Bikeyah.

Scholars over the years have attempted to explain the origins of the Navajos and their pastoral life, producing a largely speculative narrative that, through repetition, has resounded as truth. Some have offered suggestive, even inspired interpretations of events, but their evidence has been shadowy at best. Those seeking to substantiate even the existence of the Dine before the eighteenth century have faced formidable challenges, and traces of early pastoralism have proved elusive. Over the last two decades, however, archaeologists have unearthed new evidence of early Dine history and reexamined the old, allowing us to create a more nuanced understanding of a poorly illuminated era from the beginnings of the Dine pastoral economy in Dinetah, located in the Four Corners region, to its spread south and west, eventually encompassing all of present-day Navajo country.

To trace the history of pastoralism and transhumance in this landscape, we must first step back to what we might call for lack of a better phrase the beginning of Dine time, when "the people" first appeared on the Colorado Plateau. This task is trickier than it might seem. Historians increasingly acknowledge that our picture of the past is only partial, and that observation is particularly true of Dine history. Written documents such as diaries, letters, government reports, and the like are the materials that most historians use to create their narratives, but this near fetish for ink on paper presents real problems when we try to uncover the beginnings of Dine pastoralism. Navajos first enter the written record in early Spanish documents, and yet these provide only fleeting glimpses. In fact, much of the earliest record consists of second- or third-hand accounts--rumors as it were--of settlements of farmers or bands of raiders who lived somewhere to the west beyond the pueblos.

Until the early seventeenth century, Spanish chroniclers wrote only vaguely about those living in the mountains or on the plains outside the familiar realm of the Rio Grande Valley, often referring to populations in terms that are unrecognizable today. Names such as "Querechos" or "Cocoyes" probably designated specific groups in some instances; at other times, they signified something more generic like "wild Indians," much as "Chichimecas" came to mean "nomadic barbarians" in northern Mexico. (2) Some historians have speculated that the Querechos or Cocoyes were the same people who later came to be called Navajo, but we really have no way of knowing whether those terms indeed referred to Dine or to other groups living in or traversing the cultural crossroads of the Colorado Plateau.

Even after the Spaniards clearly recognized the Navajos, only fuzzy snapshots emerged from the pages of their reports. Dine moved on the margins of the Spanish Empire in a rugged terrain that the Europeans found difficult to penetrate. Encounters were few, unwelcome, and often marked by violence. On those rare occasions before the mid-eighteenth century when the two peoples actually saw each other with their own eyes--particularly on Dine turf--they met, more often than not, in the heat of battle. As Dine fled or fought off Spanish military expeditions and the slave raiders who captured women and children, or as they made their own forays against villages or herds, neither side saw the other quite clearly. The Spanish who recorded these events likely viewed Navajos during the adrenaline rush of a guerrilla skirmish or glimpsed them from behind as they sped away. They developed blurry impressions of the Navajos in the fury and confusion of some sneak attack. (3)