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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Arizona
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)
The violence of these encounters is not the only factor that distorts our early picture of Dine history. Spanish soldiers and missionaries perceived Navajos through viewfinders shaped by their own world. And they manipulated their images--exaggerating this, minimizing that--in ways they hoped would bring approval from their superiors or patrons in Mexico City, not to mention increased military and monetary support. Even if they had tried to represent Navajos accurately, the few opportunities they had to observe them would still leave more questions than answers. It would still be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces.
Archaeologists have tried to fill in parts of this puzzle, but here, too, the evidence remains elusive. By its very nature, archaeology--even more than history--can piece together only fragments of the past. Archaeology is essentially the study of rubbish and ruin, and only certain kinds of physical debris survive the ravages of the weather, sun, water, scavengers, insects, and microorganisms that eventually reduce much of the material world to dust. Even when remnants of the past defy the elements, the odds of an archaeologist stumbling onto them are fairly slim. Making matters worse, until only quite recently most Southwestern archaeologists kept their sights fixed on the prehistoric Anasazi, who mysteriously abandoned their dramatic cliff dwellings, pueblos, and ceremonial centers by the fifteenth century. Researchers often walked over the radial pattern of logs that marked the ruins of a Dine hogan without knowing or even caring that they had done so. (4)
Compounding the problem, the growing numbers of archaeologists who do care have found it difficult to identify and interpret the earliest Navajo settlements. Among the many obstacles, the most commonly used techniques for determining when people inhabited a particular place, including radiocarbon and tree-ring dating, are not nearly as precise as is popularly supposed. Both of these methods depend largely on wood specimens, and therein lies the snag. Native people in the arid Southwest commonly used and reused old wood that had been dead for many years--sometimes centuries--before they incorporated it into the framework of a dwelling or burned it in a hearth. Deteriorated wood and various forms of contamination can also dramatically skew the apparent age of a log or piece of charcoal. (5) More problematic still, archaeologists have difficulty distinguishing early Navajo sites from the remarkably similar camps inhabited by Utes. Both of these distinct ethnic groups lived in the San Juan River valley, built log-flamed dwellings, and manufactured plain pottery, making it difficult to tell the two apart in the absence of culturally idiosyncratic evidence. (6) And there is at least one more significant complication: The Dine who migrated to the Southwest as hunters and gatherers likely came with a noticeably different set of cultural markers than those we think of as characteristically Navajo. If, for example, they initially lived in less permanent structures than hogans--such as portable tipis--when they moved on to the Colorado Plateau, and if they began manufacturing pottery only after they more or less settled down as farmers, early sites would be difficult to identify. (7) Archaeologists, then, probably continue to walk blindly over the oldest Navajo sites, even as they try their best to find them.
The fragmentary nature of the evidence, both archaeological and documentary, makes it difficult to know with any certainty just when Dine first entered the Southwest. While Dine oral traditions describe how Changing Woman sent the newly created Earth Surface People to Dine Bikeyah, those stories do not provide any temporal clues to tell us exactly when that migration took place. (8) Turning to the written record, we discover that Spanish sightings of Navajos were exceedingly few and far between until the mid-eighteenth century. Accounts of the initial Spanish entrada do not mention any people that we can clearly identify as Navajo. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to assume, as some scholars have, that the omission of Navajos from these early accounts means that Dine were themselves very recent newcomers whose arrival coincided with or followed that of the Spanish. (9) It should come as no surprise indeed that the Spanish failed to note the presence of Navajos until fairly late. After the initial entrada of 1539-42, nearly two generations passed before any more Spaniards ventured into the area, and more than a half-century had come and gone by the time don Juan de Onate brought the first actual European settlers up the Rio Grande. In 1599, soon after he established his headquarters on that stream, Onate wrote that a large settlement of people dwelled in jacal huts and farmed at the river's source. He may well have been referring to a group of Dine. (10) Or maybe not. Either way, the early historical record tells us nothing concrete about the whereabouts of the Dine before the seventeenth century.
A growing body of archaeological evidence, however, suggests that Dine families lived in the uplands of the San Juan Valley at least by the early 1500s, and they continued to make their homes there for another century or more. The remains of their conical hogans lie scattered along the arroyos draining into the La Plata River, north of its confluence with the San Juan. The people who lived here were not yet pastoralists, nor did they farm this area, apparently, although they may have cultivated corn and beans elsewhere, perhaps on the valley floor. They likely moved seasonally through this gently rolling terrain where sagebrush grasslands grade into juniper woodlands, harvesting the abundance of wild plants and hunting deer, antelope, rabbit, and an occasional bighorn sheep. (11) Moving from one place to another to exploit the land's bounty from one season to the next, Dine learned to value mobility in this arid land, a wisdom that would ultimately take shape as transhumance.
Archaeological evidence of their presence may date to the 1500s (or perhaps earlier), but not until 1627, did the Dine make a clear mark on the written record. That year, Fray Geronimo de Zarate Salmeron, missionary to the Jemez, reported secondhand that the "Apaches de Nabaju" lived somewhere north of his pueblo, along the Chama River. (12) The name "Nabaju" came from the Tewa word "Navahuu," meaning a large arroyo with cultivated fields. This first definite appearance in the historic record revealed two important things about the ways in which outsiders viewed Navajos. First, the Spaniards recognized that Navajos were a branch of the Apaches (Zuni for "enemies"), all of whom spoke some variation of the Dine language that linguists label Athabaskan. And second, the Spaniards distinguished Navajos from other Apaches by virtue of their farming. Fray Alonso de Benavides confirmed this characterization three years later when he wrote that although the Navajos were indeed Apaches, they had a quite different way of life. "The Navajos," he wrote, "are very skillful farmers, for the word Navajo means 'large cultivated fields.'" (13)
According to Benavides, the Navajos lived some fifty leagues northwest of the southernmost pueblos, which would place them in the vicinity of the San Juan River. By the 1660s, Dine families had spread throughout the San Juan Valley between the La Plata and Navajo rivers, spilling into the rugged canyonlands that came to be called Dinetah. Here the land rises hundreds of feet from the narrow canyon floors in a series of benches that step up to the mesatops. Dine continue to remember this place as their ancestral homeland. It was here on Gobernador Knob where Changing Woman herself had been born. And it was here, near the place where the Rio de los Pinos crosses the muddy San Juan, where her sons, the Hero Twins, went to live. For centuries (until the Navajo Reservoir's waters inundated it in the 1960s) an ancient petroglyph of...
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