Dine Navajo Quotes

They find joy in motion, which transforms their lives into unending odysseys. Their souls are brightly burning streaks of light across the universe—constantly traveling in an endless dance across space and time.

By whiteman’s standards, Leaphorn thought, Bowlegs had a net worth of maybe one hundred dollars. The white world’s measure of his life. And what would the Navajo measure be? The Dinee made a harder demand—that man find his place in the harmony of things.

The Diné are children of the sun. They are rugged and graceful people. They love the radiance of color and silver, the purity of nature, and the speed of horses. They have a gift for adaptation and creativity. They do everything with spontaneity and flair.

The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male—giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan—recognizing the mother’s role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way.

Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Buchanan’s A Shining Season, Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, and Zolbrod’s Dine Bahane, which had seemed to her to be the best translation of the Navajos

Yes,” Mr. Yazzie explains. “There are four—one for each of the cardinal directions: east, south, west, and north. They were set in place by the Diyin Dine’é and equipped with a guardian and a herald to care for the land. They surround the ancestral home of the Diné people, and each represents a powerful part of Navajo history and culture.” “Four mountains bind you

The big man glanced at him, a friendly look. Across the hogan, Leaphorn noticed, two of the women were smiling at him. He was a stranger, a policeman who had arrested one of them, a man from another clan, perhaps even a witch, but he was accepted with the natural hospitality of the Dinee. He felt a fierce pride in his people, and in this celebration of womanhood. The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male — giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan — recognizing the mother’s role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way. Leaphorn remembered what his mother had told him when he had asked how Changing Woman could have prescribed a Kinaalda cake “a shovel handle wide” and garnished with raisins when the Dinee had neither shovels nor grapes. “When you are a man,” she had said, “you will understand that she was teaching us to stay in harmony with time.” Thus, while the Kiowas were crushed, the Utes reduced to hopeless poverty, and the Hopis withdrawn into the secret of their kivas, the eternal Navajo adapted and endured.