The Navajos* Clyde J. Benally
In beauty (happily) I walk. With beauty before me I walk. With beauty behind me I walk. With beauty below me I walk. With beauty above me I walk. It is finished (again) in beauty. It is finished in beauty. It is generally agreed that the Navajos, the largest Indian tribe in the United States, came into the Southwest sometime after A.D. 1300, even though the Dine' (the "People") themselves do not attest to this. The Dine' mention their strong relationship to the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones, in their mythology and ceremonies. This relationship justifies to them permanent ties and absolute use rights to the native land that is bounded by four sacred mountains: the Blanca Peaks in New Mexico on the east, Mount Taylor in New Mexico on the south, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona on the west, and the Hesperus Peaks in Colorado on the north. The Navajos live "in severely eroded plateau country . . . colorful, beautiful to look at, but hard to make a living from."1 In this red earth country of monoliths, buttes, and bridges of rock made by erosion of time, the Dine' had no concept of real ownership of land but instead one of communal property. Use rights were established by anyone who used and needed the land. The Dine' philosophy embodied 'This chapter was published in The Peoples of Utah, Helen Zeese Papanikolas, ed. (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976).
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