Navajo Language Quotes

I like some of the old spaghetti westerns because the Navajo extras they hired spent the entire time talking smack about the actors in the Diné language. With proper translation, it’s incredibly entertaining.

Did he expect to be in a hurry coming down? Maybe, Leaphorn thought. Maybe that was it. Time. But Navajos didn't hurry. In fact, there was no word in the Navajo language for time.

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary. If nothing else, an examination of the past—and of the present, for that matter—can be instructive. It shows us that there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America. With the rest of the bones. No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves—as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit—with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives. More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient. Okay. That was heroic and uncomfortably inspirational, wasn’t it? Poignant, even. You can almost hear the trumpets and the violins. And that kind of romance is not what we need. It serves no one, and the cost to maintain it is too high. So, let’s agree that Indians are not special. We’re not … mystical. I’m fine with that. Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it. The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms.

Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of White America, in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink ever deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting all of the usual and well-known symptoms: squalor, unemployment or irregular and ill-paid employment, broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, lack of education, too many children, apathy and demoralization, and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism.

color is surely the most eye-catching. He noted that we see objects in different hues, depending on the wavelengths of the light they reflect, but that physicists tell us that wavelength is a continuous dimension with nothing delineating red, yellow, green, blue, and so on. Languages differ in their inventory of color words: Latin lacks generic “gray” and “brown”; Navajo collapses blue and green into one word; Russian has distinct words for dark blue and sky blue; Shona speakers use one word for the yellower greens and the greener yellows, and a different one for the bluer greens and the nonpurplish blues

Unequipped to hold their own in the ferociously competitive world of White America, in which even the language is foreign to them, the Navajos sink ever deeper into the culture of poverty, exhibiting all of the usual and well-known symptoms: squalor, unemployment or irregular and ill-paid employment, broken families, disease, prostitution, crime, alcoholism, lack of education, too many children, apathy and demoralization, and various forms of mental illness, including evangelical Protestantism. Whether in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the barrios of Caracas, the ghettos of Newark, the mining towns of West Virginia or the tarpaper villages of Gallup, Flagstaff and Shiprock, it’s the same the world over—one big wretched family sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by the cops and prayed over by the missionaries.

A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an “Oregon Trail” lined with the Mesozoic buttes of the Southwest, where the movies were filmed, or the Indians who were supposed to be northern plains Cheyenne but actually were Navajo extras in costume department Sioux war bonnets saying mischievous, naughty things in Navajo, a language neither filmmaker nor audience understood anyway, but which the interpreter onscreen translated as soberly as his forked tongue could manage, “Well give you three cents an acre.” Never mind the ecologically incorrect arctic loon cries on the soundtrack. I loved that desert.

impenetrability of the Navajo code was all down to the fact that Navajo belongs to the Na-Dene family of languages, which has no link with any Asian or European language.

God is the creator of all nations, tongues and peoples and is spoken of in each language. The Hawaiian people and others like the Navajo did not reveal the knowledge of their Supreme Benevolent Creator God to the white man because their God was too precious to them. They could not stand to see their beloved Creator belittled, ridiculed, laughed at, and called the devil by the white man.

During World War II, while the Americans used Navajo Indians speaking their native language for radio communications, the Japanese used speakers of the Kagoshima dialect to keep communications secret. To me, it sounded like

Of all native peoples in the contiguous United States, the peoples of these arid regions (The Hopi, the Navajo, the Tewa) have remained most admirably resilient, adhering to their lands, their languages, their spirituality, their food ways, and their plant knowledge. Up on the Colorado Plateau the Hopi continue to practice the Hopi Way, a spiritual lifestyle that does not strive for a specific outcome or product but rather is a journey, focused on what is learned along the way about their relationship to place and community.

Time. But Navajos didn’t hurry. In fact, there was no word in the Navajo language for time.

But Navajos didn’t hurry. In fact, there was no word in the Navajo language for time.

The United States Navy, during the war, used Navajos as "code-talkers" who relayed messages from ship to ship, talking in Navajo (a language not studied in Japan).

The Navajo language is too specific and precise to lend itself to effective profanity. Leaphorn cursed in Spanish and then -- at length -- in English.

During World War One, our country had used other Indians, Cherokees and Chickasaws, to send messages in their own language to confuse the enemy.

They called the Navajo language a “weird succession of guttural, nasal, tongue-twisting sounds … we couldn’t even transcribe it, much less crack it.

Sometimes Chris and James spoke to each other in Navajo, a beautiful language that also seemed impossible, at once guttural and punctuated by glottal stops, but at the same time smooth. To me, it sounded like a mix of French, Arabic, and Mandarin. I couldn’t pronounce anything right. We cruised back down

Do you know what that word meant? The one she called me?” She shook her head. “No idea. I don’t even know if it’s Navajo. She may have lived with them, but she’s white. The language is nearly impossible for an outsider to learn.” “Calling me a witch, too.” I shook my head. “At least give me a chance to earn it first.