Place names as the traditional Navajo's title-deeds, border-alert system, remote sensing, global positioning system, memory bank, and monitor screen

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

AbstractThe Navajo (Diné) of the US Southwest speak an Apachean, or Southern Athabascan, language. Navajo names for natural landscape features are very largely both fully translatable and physically descriptive. Despite an initially small, scattered population of migrants from western Canada, over a few centuries, Navajos filled their new habitat with a dense network of place names, which served several purposes. One was to declare hegemony over what was perceived as Navajo territory, to state and stake its boundaries, and in some sense to control that territory and its frontiers. This was furthered by the culture's mythic stories—which involved long quest journeys—being set in real geography, with lengthy recitations of the named places that protagonists passed. This allowed the tales to act as way-finding mnemonic devices that facilitated human travel and resource-control and -acquisition. Finally, being points of attachment to the land for mythological, historical, and personal stories, geographic names served to perpetuate and to evoke the memories of these stories and of the Holy People and Navajo individuals who figured in them, as well as the places themselves, and to cause the earth to “come alive.”Keywords: Navajoplace nameswayfindingterritorymyth AcknowledgmentsThis article is expanded from a paper presented in the special session ‘Research Topics on Na-Denean Ethnogeography’ at the 2013 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Los Angeles (see Jett Citation2013). I thank James Kari for organizing the AAG special session that gave rise to my original presentation and for encouraging me to expand the paper for publication.Notes1. Na-Denéan, distantly related to western Siberia's Yeniseian (Vajda Citation2010), consists of Athabascan-Eyak and Tlingit. Athabascan (Athapaskan, Dené) languages are found over much of interior Alaska and western Canada, as well as in northwestern California and adjacent Oregon and in the American Southwest. Eyak, of southeastern Alaska, became extinct in 2008. Although the percentage of Navajos fluent in Diné has greatly declined, tens of thousands are functionally bilingual (and some, monolingual) in the idiom.2. By “myth” is meant herein a narrative that is essentially of a supernatural nature, as contrasted to “legend,” which, although possibly containing supernatural elements, is essentially historical and secular in tone. Contrary to anthropologists’ conclusion for a northern origin of Apacheans, Navajo myth has the first Navajo (water) clans being created, by Changing Woman ('Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé), on California's Pacific Coast (where there are, indeed, Athapaskan groups).3. Unfortunately, systematic comparisons of Navajo and Puebloan mythology are lacking. More has been accomplished connecting Puebloan beliefs and iconography with Mesoamerica's, but much remains to be done. Even more elusive has been agreement that many Mesoamerican concepts and practices go back to those of eastern and southern Asia. In the present context, note the geographer Paul Wheatley's (Citation1971, p. 417) remarks concerning early Chinese settlement: “Before territory could be inhabited, it had to be sacralized, that is cosmicised. Its consecration signified its ‘reality’ and, therefore, sanctioned its habitation.”4. The current Navajo Nation-administered land-use permit system perpetuates many aspects of this land-tenure concept.5. A traditional Navajo might draw a crude map in the sand but then erase it. Today, of course, Navajos working in Navajo Nation government offices and elsewhere do routinely use paper maps, geographic information systems, geographic positioning systems, and so forth. Another long-established (if not “traditional” or very common) commercial exception is pictorial Navajo rugs (Campbell et al. Citation1991), plus, more recently, commercial sandpaintings on boards (Parezo Citation1991), both of which sometimes include depictions of actual, even sacred landmarks (like Ship Rock, in New Mexico, or the four directional boundary mountains) as well as religious-sandpainting elements. Modern conventional paintings also often depict landmarks.