Navajo Nation Quotes

Charlie cursed in English as there are no really good Navajo curse words.

The boy was called from his work of teaching the dog to retrieve a stick. Secretly, the dog thought he was teaching the boy to throw it. They both came to the call rather reluctantly as each felt himself just on the verge of success.

Lucy showed her the tiny imperfection purposely woven into the warp of one corner. Sue knew this almost imperceptible thread at the lower corner of the blanket was done to allow the weavers spirit to escape the piece, insuring she could detach her spirit from it and let it go. It was thought the weaver became part of the piece during the creation. It was a tradition common in most Navajo art.

More than a million of our public schoolchildren are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters, and abandoned buildings. After arriving in prison, many incarcerated Americans suddenly find that their health improves because the conditions they faced as free (but impoverished) citizens were worse. More than 2 million Americans don’t have running water or a flushing toilet at home. West Virginians drink from polluted streams, while families on the Navajo Nation drive hours to fill water barrels. Tropical diseases long considered eradicated, like hookworm, have reemerged in rural America’s poorest communities, often the result of broken sanitation systems that expose children to raw sewage.

The Navajos were another matter. Theirs was a sprawling nation, wealthy in stock, obdurate in its ways, open to change but only on its terms.

We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!” A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home. June 18 was set as the departure date. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp—they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves. The next morning the trek began. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins. When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.” They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. And as they marched, they chanted—

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

my uncle said no, that was not the case, and

made aware of Aida’s ranch. Now,

the soul of the animal, as I’ve read that Native Americans do. It strikes me as a form of grace. Saying grace. Or just being grace. I am still on the Navajo Nation, wishing Navajo grace traveled with me on this land, or that Everett had packed some with my dried beef. But I don’t go so far as to complete the ritual. I say a word or two of apology out loud,

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.

As of 2015 only a dozen of the then 567 federally recognized tribal nations recognize same-sex marriage...Other tribes, however, have explicitly restricted same-sex marriage (all following the passage of DOMA), including the Navajo Nation, Cherokee Nation, Muscogee Nation, Chickasaw Nation, and Iowa Tribe. Although Congress could pass a statute that affects Indian Country Lindsay Roberson...considers it highly unlikely, given the federal government's relatively hands-off support for tribal governance. Within the Navajo context, this issue has brought about deep debate about the nature of tradition. Joanne Barker has written about the battles over same-sex marriage in Navajo Nation (as well as Cherokee Nation). She documents how the tribal legislation bans and defense of them affirm the discourses of U.S. nationalism, especially in their Christian and right-wing conservative forms. IN these cases, the tribal nation's exercise of sovereignty and self-determination replicates the relations of domination and dispossession that resemble the U.S. treatment of Native Peoples.

Name’s Clay Tahoma, originally from Flagstaff and the Navajo Nation. Lately from L.A. I’m up here to work with an old friend, Nathaniel Jensen.” Jack’s face took light at that. “Nate’s a friend of mine, too! Pleasure to meet you.” Jack introduced Clay to some other men who were standing around—a guy named John, who they called Preacher; Paul, who owned the flatbed and forklift; Dan Brady, who was Paul’s foreman; and Noah, the minister whose truck slipped off the road. Noah smiled sheepishly as he shook Clay’s hand. No one seemed to react to the sight of a Native American with a ponytail that reached past his waist and an eagle feather in his hat. And right at that moment

structure, and the

By honest effort, as opposed to the current dishonest effort with its emphasis on phoney social services which benefit no one but the professional social workers, I mean a direct confrontation with the two actual basic causes of poverty: (1) too many children and—(here I reveal the secret, the elusive and mysterious key to the whole problem)—(2) too little money. Though simple in formula, the solution will seem drastic and painful in practice. To solve the first part of the problem we may soon have to make birth control compulsory; to solve the second part we will have to borrow from Navajo tradition and begin a more equitable sharing of national income. Politically unpalatable? No doubt. Social justice in this country means social surgery—carving some of the fat off the wide bottom of the American middle class.

to escape the piece, insuring she could detach her spirit from it and let it go. It was thought the weaver became part of the piece during the creation. It was a tradition common in most Navajo art.

The river has other, older names. Hualapai refer to the Colorado as a lifegiving spine, Paiute call it Water Deep in the Earth, and Navajo speak of the River of Never-Ending Life. The 246,000-square-mile watershed touches seven U.S. states, two Mexican provinces, and at least thirty Native nations. It encompasses 8 percent of the contiguous U.S. and glances through a dozen different ecosystems on its journey from mountains to sea, including pine forest, oak woodland, chaparral, and three types of desert: Great Basin, Sonoran, and Mojave.

The boys walked into the gym, where hundreds of Navajo filled the stands, even three hours before their game. Players spotted mothers and grandparents, uncles and aunties and cousins, brothers and sisters and neighbors, folks who’d piled into old pickup trucks and vans and Chevy sedans to make that three-hour drive. There were Chinle stars who graduated last year and the year before that and the decade before that, young men who bathed still in past glory. There was Cecil Henry, a nearly sixty-year-old silversmith with a rakish mustache and an easy smile and a mighty thirst for the bottle, who crafted and sold beautiful jewelry to tourists on the floor of Canyon de Chelly. He once played high school basketball and ran like a deer and was related to a few of the Wildcats. He’d stuck out his thumb and hitchhiked here from Chinle.

A degree from UC Berkeley will never change the fact that I cannot understand my grandfather when he asks for more coffee.” —Esther G. Belin (Navajo) from In the Cycle of the Whirl. L

Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge.

Sage. The sage in the pot had the same name as the wild plant that grew prolifically in New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation and throughout the Southwest. She knew the culinary sage in the kitchen was cousin to peppermint, catnip, and oregano—all characterized by square stems and aromatic leaves. The sagebrush outside had daisies, asters, and ragweed in its close family ties. Same name, but different genetics. Then she thought of the new FBI person, Sage Johnson. Were her parents thinking of sagebrush or cooking when they named her? Or did they expect that she’d be a wise woman, a different sort of sage. The name made her curious.

I thought about how grim I felt since leaving the Navajo Nation, and I tried to imagine my perfect life. Surely it wasn't this. How could perfection include loneliness and longing, filth and exhaustion, whispers of despair? It seemed there were countless other potential versions of this life that'd be so much better. I could spend hours fantasizing about them, wondering what that perfection might look like someday, wishing it would come soon. I could spend my entire life that way wondering, wishing. It'd be so easy. It was in fact, the inevitable result of believing that perfection was anything other than what already was. 'This minute that comes to me over the past decillions," Whitman wrote, "There is no better than it and now."If I couldn't find perfection in this, then what made me think I'd be able to find it tomorrow, next month or two decades from now? Peace had to be an inner perspective, not a specific and temperamental set of external conditions. The fire cackled, lighting up Jean-Sébastien and Cristelle in hues of yellow and orange, and I realized that this was my perfect life. It had to be.

She saw his fierce sense of brotherhood with his fellow officers and his dedication to the people they all served. Some policemen grew cynical with the exposure to so much evil, but Chee became more determined to make things right. To save the good citizens of the Navajo Nation from those who had lost sight of the Beauty Way. He took the responsibility to help restore the land and its people to harmony seriously.

There is a well-worn joke about every Navajo family consisting of a mother, father, two children, and an anthropologist, and the fascination with the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona for anthropologists and ethnomusicologists extends back into the nineteenth century.