The Navajo speak a language whose closest relatives are spoken in Alaska and Canada
Dine bizaad, the People's language, belongs to the Athabaskan family, most of whose speakers live in subarctic Canada and Alaska. Around a thousand years ago the ancestors of the Navajo and Apache travelled south along the Rockies, possibly pushed by a volcanic eruption in Alaska's Saint Elias Mountains around 803 AD.
The people call themselves Dine, 'the people'. 'Navajo' came via the Spanish from a Tewa word, navahu, meaning a large area of cultivated fields. In the 1620s the friar Geronimo de Zarate-Salmeron wrote of the 'Apachu de Nabajo' in the Chama Valley north-west of present-day Santa Fe, and by the 1640s Spaniards were using Navajo on its own. The language has two mutually intelligible dialects and is close kin to the Apache languages; some Navajo also use a sign language descended from Plains Sign Talk.
Newcomers learned quickly from neighbours. Starting as hunters and gatherers, the Dine took up the corn, beans and squash of the Pueblo peoples, with whom they traded bison meat and hides for maize and cotton cloth. From the Spanish they acquired sheep and goats, which became food, currency and a marker of family standing, and women began weaving the wool into prized blankets and clothing.
Relations with Spain and then Mexico cycled between raids, expeditions and peace deals. After the United States took over in 1846, forts spread across Navajo land. In 1863 Colonel Kit Carson, under orders from General James Carleton, destroyed crops, homes and herds. Facing starvation, around 9,000 people were forced from 1864 to walk more than 300 miles to Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner, where scarce food, water and shelter made internment disastrous. The Navajo remember the years of campaigns and captivity as the Fearing Time.
The 1868 Treaty of Bosque Redondo let survivors go home to part of their old territory. The reservation later grew from 3.5 million to 16 million acres, though outsiders long exploited its grazing land and minerals without consulting the tribe. Today the Navajo Nation, with more than 399,494 enrolled citizens in 2021, is the second-largest federally recognised tribe and holds the biggest reservation in the United States, about 27,325 square miles spanning Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, slightly larger than West Virginia.
Source: Navajo
