Really a series of essays, Dinéjí Na’Nitin: Navajo Traditional Teachings and History, represents another sensitive and acute study of the Navajo people by historian Robert McPherson. As in his previous works, McPherson builds this study on extensive interviews conducted over a period of some thirty years, primarily with Navajo elders in the Four Corners area. A major part of the book, then, discusses “traditional” Navajo culture and history, which McPherson situates in the pre-1930s period, a delineation based partly on the age and memory span of his informants, partly on the traditional horticultural and grazing practices that characterized Navajo subsistence at that time, and partly on their reaction to the contemporary world, an age when too many youth have been “captured” by white society. Later chapters do look at culture change in more depth, but still through a lens of loss and foreboding, again reflecting the beliefs and feelings of the elders themselves.
The first three chapters of the book examine divination, the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, and witchcraft. Divination provides an introduction to the religious worldview of the Navajos, a world filled with invisible holy people who can be invoked in seeking guidance and answers to important life questions as well as protection from illness and other vicissitudes. Unfortunately the influenza epidemic of the early twentieth century confounded both Navajos and the holy people with lethal consequences. McPherson highlights this jolt to Navajo traditional healing practices by juxtaposing Navajo ceremonial responses to those of Anglos and Ute-Paiutes. Witchcraft, too, can upset the Navajo world when a practitioner uses power for evil or selfish ends. Located in intent and behavior, evil is revealed to be the deliberate and destructive use of power. Chapter 4 builds on these earlier insights to present a case study of a powerful medicine man, Ba’álílee, using witchcraft to deal with “progressive” changes ushered in by a new reservation agent as well as to consolidate his power among his Navajo neighbors.
The next four chapters examine the interplay of thought and language. Chapter 5 examines Navajo use of metaphors, encapsulated both in oral and in material culture (hogans, the body, and wedding baskets), to impart important values. Chapter 6 discusses the life and work of Father H. Baxter Liebler who ran the Episcopalian mission near Bluff, Utah. Initially inspired by a romanticized conception of American Indian life and lore, Father Liebler came to have a deeper understanding of indigenous peoples as a result of his forty-years residence among the Navajos. Subsequently, he built on Navajo traditional teachings and practices to translate, as it were, his Christian message. The next chapter, an extended discussion of a repatriation issue concerning the artifacts known as the Pectol Shields, shows how Navajo oral tradition as transmitted by medicine man John Holiday provides a source of historical validation distinct from a Western reliance on scientific or archaeological evidence. In one of the most fascinating chapters, McPherson demonstrates how the contemporary reservation experience has generated new and often humorous metaphorical observations on life.
The book’s last chapter most explicitly takes up the issue of loss—the anxiety of Navajo elders that the current generation, enmeshed as it is in a competing Western world view, will no longer be able to call upon the deep wells of traditional knowledge and thought that have preserved the Navajos for millennia. Their fear is that the Navajos may disappear as did the Anasazi people, corrupted by overweening self-pride, abusing the gifts of the holy people. For these Navajo elders, the world is moving towards destruction, as previous worlds have done. Gaming, language loss, wildfires, and climate change—all point to this dread conclusion. To avoid this fate, a younger generation of Navajos needs to return to their language, their ceremonies, to a balanced and harmonious way of life.
In presenting his material, McPherson largely allows his informants to speak for themselves so that specialized vocabulary from disciplines like folklore, linguistics, and anthropology is kept to a minimum. This extends even to word choice, with McPherson using the actual term used by the informant, such as “medicine man” or “medicine women,” rather than hataali. The result, interestingly enough, but probably with intent, is a book that can easily be picked up by the general reader, who yet needs a gracious, obliging guide to an unfamiliar cultural landscape.
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[Review length: 718 words • Review posted on January 14, 2015]