The Navajo, who in 2007 numbered approximately 290,000 people, the majority of whom occupy a thirteen-million-acre reservation that spans parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, understand themselves to be a chosen people living within a sacred geography. A rich oral tradition documents the travails of their ancestors as they traverse a series of three or four underworlds, each of which is portrayed in some state of chaos and disorder resulting in the need for migration upward into the next world. The oral tradition also documents the preparation of this world and the creation of the Navajo people and establishes tenets for living. In the last underworld, First Man and First Woman—the first beings with humanlike form—were created; they and their progeny flourished until lust led to a conflict between First Man and First Woman, which resulted in an event now referred to as the "separation of the sexes." While men and women lived apart, libidinous desires led women to masturbate with quills, cacti, antlers, stones, and bones. The men relieved their longing with mud or the flesh of freshly slain game animals. Eventually the men and women agreed to rejoin and live as one group.
Shortly after the reunion, circumstances necessitated their escaping upward through a great female reed. Their journey culminated on the earth’s surface at the Hajiinaf, or "the place of emergence." There First Man and First Woman built a sweat house in which to think and sing the Navajo universe into existence. By some accounts, this world was first conceived in thought, after which its form was projected onto primordial substance through the compulsive power of speech and song. The newly created world was said to be in a state of "natural order" in which all living things were in their proper relationships with all other living things. This orderliness was disrupted as a result of the sexual aberrations and excesses of the last underworld. The women who had masturbated with foreign objects gave birth to twelve misshapen creatures that grew into monsters and preyed on healthy children, pushing Navajo ancestors to the brink of extinction. The Holy People resolved this dilemma by arranging for Changing Woman to be found, grow in a miraculous way, and give birth to warrior sons who slew the monsters. It is she who created the original Navajo matrilineal clans and turned the world over to them.
As with Native Americans across North America, complex changes have occurred in Navajo society since their initial contact with Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans. At the time of European contact, the Navajo subsisted on hunting and gathering supplemented by some agriculture. Extended family units, generally centered on matrilocal residence and the strength of their clan system, lived in widely dispersed settlements. Spanish Franciscans first attempted to convert Navajo people when they built a mission along the Rio Grande in 1627; it was soon abandoned. Subsequent efforts over the next two centuries met with little success.
Upon the introduction of livestock into the region, a herding economy based on sheep and goats developed. The Navajo population and their area of settlement gradually expanded as new crops, animals, and technological innovations were added to their subsistence base during the Spanish and American periods. In 1848 the United States defeated Mexico in war and through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo assumed political jurisdiction over most of what is known as the American Southwest. Members of an 1849 American military expedition into Navajo country were impressed by the size of the Navajo sheep and goat herds as well as the well-nourished and healthy condition of tribal members.
Westward expansion resulted in frequent clashes between Navajos and outsiders, leading to American military intervention. The general good health noted in the 1840s was undermined when Kit Carson (1809-1868) and his troops, with scorched-earth tactics, rousted nearly 9,000 Navajos from their homeland and forced them to walk several hundred miles to Hweeldi, "the place of suffering," where they were incarcerated from 1863 to 1868. At Fort Sumner in New Mexico, the Navajo suffered under difficult living conditions, some of which hastened or exacerbated the spread of disease. In addition unfamiliar foods and alkaline water led to gastric upset and other problems.
Since their capture and internment at Hweeldi and the establishment of a reservation on a portion of their homelands in 1868, the Navajo have been in a relationship of constant domination and control by the larger American society. The colonial assault was repeated at different points in time through repression of the native language and traditions, enforcement of boarding school attendance, impediments to religious freedom, and threats to Navajo land and resources by stock reduction in the 1930s and 1940s, timber harvesting, and coal and uranium mining. These concerns developed alongside a gradual shift to wage-work economics among the Navajo, a recession in the 1970s and 1980s, resource depletion, unsuccessful attempts to preserve sacred sites, Navajo job-preference problems, deaths from improperly regulated uranium mining, radioactive waste spills, continuing poverty for many, and land disputes.
In what is known as the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, Navajo individuals were forced to move off land partitioned by the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974. This political drama stems from President Chester A. Arthur’s (1829-1886) executive order of 1882, which granted 2.5 million acres of land around the Hopi mesas to the Hopis and "such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle thereon," ignoring the Navajo families who had lived in this area for centuries. Attempts were made to reconcile boundary conflicts between Navajo and Hopi families by legal means on numerous occasions between 1891 and 1962, when a federal court ruled that 1.8 million acres of the 1882 reservation were jointly owned. This legislation led to mandatory livestock reductions beginning in 1972 and land partition in 1974. The latter mandated the relocation of all members of either tribe living in the area granted to the other, slating over 10,000 Navajos and 100 Hopis for compulsory relocation. Despite the commitment of enormous amounts of time and money toward resolution by all parties, this dispute remains unresolved.
By the last decades of the twentieth century, the Navajo had moved toward political self-determination and cultural renewal. But many Navajo families have been shattered due to complex social and health problems, including economic underdevelopment and chronic unemployment. Thousands of Navajos are gainfully employed in the fields of health care, education, government service, and commercial farming or resource-extraction industries. Yet reservation unemployment rates far exceed national norms, resulting in the need for many Navajos to work off the reservation in construction or other fields to support their families.
Changes in mode of production and diet have had grave consequences on Navajo health. Diabetes mellitus is more prevalent among Navajos than in the general U.S. population, and clinical diagnoses are rising. As a consequence, the Navajo have the highest lower-extremity amputation rate in the world. American Indians and Alaskan Natives have a 3.5 times higher prevalence of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) than white Americans, and due to its skyrocketing rate of diabetes mellitus, the Navajo population has an even higher rate of ESRD. Alcohol abuse contributes to these complex health concerns. It is within this context of rapid cultural change, health crises, and fragmentation that members of the Navajo Nation have searched out new sources of spiritual and curative powers, including those available from bio-medical technologies and Christianity, especially fundamentalist forms and the Native American Church.
