Navajo Woman Quotes

was not a Navajo concept, this idea of adjusting nature to human needs. The Navajo adjusted himself to remain in harmony with the universe. When nature withheld the rain, the Navajo sought the pattern of this phenomenon—as he sought the pattern of all things-to find its beauty and live in harmony with it.

The best surgeons didn't operate on gallbladders or spleens or hearts, they operated on the people who owned them. People with children, jobs, interests, and beliefs. They operated on lives.

Navajo Police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn, retired, paused for effect, pushing away the plate of toast crumbs and empty packets of grape jelly so he could rest his forearms on the table. “Wouldn’t you think she’d be offering to do me a favor?

Her upbringing conditioned her to avoid negative thoughts, even as questions. Her Navajo name was Laughing Girl, but she didn’t feel like laughing now. She noticed the start of a headache. She thought of how the Holy People advised the Diné not to focus on conflict or sorrow.

Navajos believe in hozho or hozhoni – “Walking in Beauty” – a worldview in which everything in life is connected and influences everything else…So Navajos make every effort to live in harmony and balance with everyone and everything else. Their belief system sees sickness as a result of things falling out of balance, of losing one’s way on the path of beauty. In this belief system, religion and medicine are one and the same.

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

The belief in magic trickery for conceiving sons is also illustrated by the legend of the rainbow in Afghanistan. The rainbow, a favorite element in every mythology from the Norse to the Navajo people, often symbolizes wish fulfillment. In Afghanistan, finding a rainbow promises a very special reward: It holds magical powers to turn an unborn child into a boy when a pregnant woman walks under it. Afghan girls are also told that they can become boys by walking under a rainbow, and many little girls have tried. As a child, Setareh did it too, she confesses when I probe her on it. All her girlfriends tried to find the rainbow so they could become boys. The name for the rainbow, Kaman-e-Rostam, is a reference to the mythical hero Rostam from the Persian epic Shahnameh, which tells the history of greater Persia from that time when Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion and Afghanistan was part of the empire. The Persian epic even has its own bacha posh: the warrior woman Gordafarid, an Amazon who disguises herself as a man to intervene in battle and defend her land. Interestingly, the same rainbow myth of gender-changing is told in parts of Eastern Europe, including Albania and Montenegro.

Odd things occurred almost daily. I decided simply to relax and be open.

In the Western world…disease is very compartmentalized by organs or medical specialties, and in some ways this does not benefit the patient. Specialists often don’t look outside their own parameters to see what else might be influencing an illness. A Navajo healer…will look at the person’s whole life and the lives of those around him or her…The Navajo view is a macro view, whereas Western medicine often takes a micro view.

New technologies, like biofeedback, were helping us understand that the mind can indeed control the body. New research has even shown that the mind is able to positively or negatively influence the immune system, and our body’s ability to fight against cancers and infections. Medicine men were capable of working through channels that we in Western medicine did not yet understand.

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.

As I memorized the name of every bone and tendon and blood vessel they seemed like the names of animals or trees. There is great power in know the name of something. pg. 39

As a minority physician, you will be constantly challenged, " He said. "your decisions will be questioned, your authority doubted. To be successful, you will ahve to have highter standards than everyone lse. You will have to study harder, train longer, and know your materials backward and forward. In the operating room , you will need to know the anatomy, how to do the operation, and what alternative operations might also work. You will have to be prepared to handle any emergency that might arise.

As a minority physician, you will be constantly challenged, " He said. "your decisions will be questioned, your authority doubted. To be successful, you will have to have higher standards than everyone else. You will have to study harder, train longer, and know your materials backward and forward. In the operating room, you will need to know the anatomy, how to do the operation, and what alternative operations might also work. You will have to be prepared to handle any emergency that might arise.” Pg. 50

With beauty before me, there may I walk. With beauty behind me, there may I walk. With beauty above me, there may I walk. With beauty below me, there may I walk. With beauty all around me, there may I walk. In beauty it is finished. - Blessing Way pg. 157

As I stepped down into the dirt yard, I thought I heard him say one last thing, almost under his breath: "Be humble." I wondered when I would see him again. pg. 168

Usually, the healer has lived in the same community with the person for decades; he knows a great deal about the person and what might be happening in his or her life. The Navajo view is a macro view, whereas Western medicine often takes a micro view. pg. 187

Why should he worry himself about this woman? And why should he worry about anything else as long as he had this woman?

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.

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.

Believe me, this woman has grit.

The old woman said I was “really lucky” the lion came to me. He was my spirit guide, she said. He came to give me his courage, strength, and intense focus because I would need those for what lay ahead. She said I would face many obstacles, some big and life-threatening—and, if I lived through them, I would have “a strong heart and powerful medicine to give to the people.

Did you know her side of the family goes way back in Navajo history? All the way back to the goddess Changing Woman? She’s—” “I know about Changing Woman. But we call her a Holy Person, not a goddess,

So, in Spanish I call her Río Abajo Río, the river beneath the river; La Mujer Grande, the Great Woman; Luz del abismo, the light from the abyss; La Loba, the wolf woman; or La Huesera, the bone woman. She is called in Hungarian, Ö, Erdöben, She of the Woods, and Rozsomák, The Wolverine. In Navajo, she is Na’ashjé'ii Asdzáá, The Spider Woman, who weaves the fate of humans and animals and plants and rocks. In Guatemala, among many other names, she is Humana del Niebla, The Mist Being, the woman who has lived forever. In Japanese, she is Amaterasu Omikami, The Numina, who brings all light, all consciousness. In Tibet she is called Dakini, the dancing force which produces clear-seeing within women. And it goes on. She goes on.

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.