Part 2
19. The language of the Navaho undoubtedly belongs in the main to the Athapascan family. Hubert Howe Bancroft, in his "Native Races of the Pacific States" (vol. iii. p. 583),[292] tells us that the Athapascans or "Tinneh" are "a people whose diffusion is only equalled by that of the Aryan or Semitic nations of the Old World. The dialects of the Tinneh language are by no means confined within the limits of the hyperborean division. Stretching from the northern interior of Alaska down into Sonora and Chihuahua, we have here a linguistic line of more than four thousand miles in length, extending diagonally over forty-two degrees of latitude, like a great tree whose trunk is the Rocky Mountain range, whose roots encompass the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, and whose branches touch the borders of Hudson Bay and of the Arctic and Pacific Oceans." But the Origin Legend declares it is a mixed language (par. 395), and it is but reasonable to suppose that such a composite race cannot possess a very pure language. The various accessions to the tribe from other stocks have probably added many words of alien origin. What these additions are is not now known, and will not be known until all the languages of the Southwest have been thoroughly studied.
HOUSES.
20. The habitations of the Navahoes are usually of a very simple character. The most common form consists of a conical frame, made by setting up a number of sticks at an angle of about forty-five degrees. An opening is left on one side of the cone to answer as a doorway. The frame is covered with weeds, bark, or grass, and earth, except at the apex, where the smoke from the fire in the centre of the floor is allowed to escape. In the doorway an old blanket hangs, like a curtain, in place of a door. But the opening of the door is not a simple hiatus, as many descriptions would lead one to suppose. A cross-piece, forming a lintel, connects the jambs at a convenient height, and the triangular space between the lintel and the smoke-hole is filled in as shown in fig. 10. A picture in Schoolcraft's extensive work[327] (vol. iii. plate 17) is intended to represent a Navaho lodge; but it appears to have been drawn by Captain Eastman from an imperfect description. In this picture the doorway is shown as extended up and continuous with the smoke-hole.
21. Some lodges are made of logs in a polygonal form, as shown in fig. 11. Again they are occasionally built partly of stone, as shown in fig. 12. In cold weather a small storm-door or portico is often erected in front of the door (fig. 10), and an outer and an inner curtain may be hung to more effectually keep out the wind.
22. Shelters.--Contiguous to the hut, the Navaho usually constructs a rude shelter of branches. Here, in fair weather, the family often cook and spend most of the day. Here, too, the women erect their looms and weave or set out their metates and grind corn, and some even choose to sleep here. Such a "corral" is shown in fig. 12.
23. Summer Houses.--In summer they often occupy structures more simple than even the hut described above. Fig. 13 represents a couple of summer houses in the Zuñi Mountains. A structure of this kind is built in a few hours. A couple of forked sticks are set upright in the ground; slanting poles are laid against this in the direction of the prevailing winds, so as to form a windbreak, half wall and half roof, and this is covered with grass, weeds, and earth. The ends may be similarly enclosed, or may be merely covered in with evergreen branches. One side of the house is completely open. In fig. 13 a loom is shown set up for work in one of these rude structures, the aboriginal appearance of which is somewhat marred by having a piece of old canvas lying on top.
24. Medicine-lodges.--The medicine-lodges, when erected in regions where long poles may be cut, are usually built in the form of the ordinary hogáns (huts), though of much greater size (fig. 14). When these large lodges are constructed at low altitudes, where only stunted trees grow, they are built on a rude frame with walls and roof separate, somewhat on the same plan as the lodges formerly used by the Arickarees, Mandans, and other tribes on the Missouri, and seeming a connecting link between the Navaho hogán and the Mandan earth-lodge.[184]
25. Sweat-houses.--The sweat-house or sudatory is a diminutive form of the ordinary hogán or hut as described in par. 20, except that it has no smoke-hole (for fire is never kindled in it), neither has it a storm-door. It is sometimes sunk partly underground and is always thickly covered with earth. Stones are heated in a fire outside and carried, with an extemporized tongs of sticks, into the sudatory. Fig. 15 poorly represents one of these structures. When ceremonially used, the frame is constructed of different materials for different ceremonies, and the house is sometimes decorated with dry-paintings.[82]
26. Modern Houses.--During the past ten years, a few of the more progressive Navahoes have built themselves rectangular stone houses, with flat roofs, glazed windows, wooden doors, and regular chimneys, such as their neighbors, the Mexicans and Pueblo Indians, build. They have had before them, for centuries, examples of such houses, and they are an imitative and docile people. The reason they have not copied at an earlier date is probably a superstitious reason. They believe a house haunted or accursed in which a human being dies.[91] They abandon it, never enter it again, and usually destroy it. With such a superstition prevailing, they hesitate to build permanent dwellings. Perhaps of late years the superstition is becoming weakened, or they have found some mystic way of averting the supposed evil.
ARTS.
27. The arts of the Navahoes are not numerous. They make a very rude and inartistic pottery,--vastly inferior to that of the neighboring Pueblo tribes,--and they make but little of it. Their bows and arrows are not equal to those of the northern Indians, and, since they have both money and opportunity to purchase modern firearms, bows and arrows are falling into disuse. They do not consider themselves very expert dressers of deerskin, and purchase their best buckskins from other tribes. The women do very little embroidery, either with beads or porcupine-quills, and this little is unskilfully done. The legends indicate that in former days they stole or purchased embroideries from the Utes.
28. Basketry.--They make excellent baskets, but very few of them, and have a very limited range of forms and patterns. In developing their blanket-making to the highest point of Indian art, the women of this tribe have neglected other labors. The much ruder but allied Apaches, who know nothing of weaving woollen fabrics, make more baskets than the Navahoes, and make them in much greater variety of form, color, and quality. The Navahoes buy most of their baskets and wicker water-jars from other tribes. They would possibly lose the art of basketry altogether if they did not require certain kinds to be used in the rites, and only women of the tribe understand the special requirements of the rites. Figs. 16 and 17 show the patterns of baskets almost exclusively made. These are used in ceremonies, and are called by the author sacred baskets. A further description of them is given in a note.[5]
29. Silver-work.--There are a few silversmiths in the tribe, whose work, considering the rudeness of their tools and processes, is very artistic. It is much sought after by white people, who admire its rude beauty. Probably the art of the smith has not existed long among the Navahoes. In a treatise entitled "Navajo Silversmiths,"[307] the author described the art as it existed in 1881; but the work has improved since that time with the introduction of better tools. Then the smith built his forge on the ground and squatted to do his work; now he builds it on an elevated frame (fig. 10), and sits on a stool or chair to work. Fig. 18 represents silver ornaments made by Jake in 1881.
30. Weaving.--It is in the art of weaving that the Navahoes excel all other Indians within the borders of the United States. In durability, fineness of finish, beauty of design, and variety of pattern, the Navaho blanket has no equal among the works of our aborigines. The author has written a treatise on "Navajo Weavers,"[309] in which he describes their art as it existed some thirteen years ago. But since that treatise was written the art has changed. It has improved in one respect: an important new invention has been made or introduced,--a way of weaving blankets with different designs on opposite sides. It has deteriorated in another respect: fugitive aniline dyes, purchased from the traders, have taken the place of the permanent native dyes formerly used. In the finer blankets, yarn obtained from white traders has supplanted the yarn laboriously twilled on the old distaff. Navaho blankets are represented in figs. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 12.
31. The Navahoes weave diagonal cloth and diamond-shaped diagonals, and to do this a change is made in the mechanism of their simple looms. They weave belts or sashes, garters and saddle-girths, and these articles, too, require changes in the arrangement of the looms and in the methods of weaving. Fig. 20 represents an ordinary loom, with one set of healds. Fig. 21 represents a loom arranged for weaving diagonal cloth with two sets of healds. Fig. 4 shows a woman wearing a belt of native manufacture. The women depicted in figs. 5 and 21 wear dresses of Navaho cloth.
32. It is not only for gain that the Navaho woman weaves her blanket. Having worn it for a time, until it has lost its novelty, she may sell it for a price that scarcely pays her for the yarn. One who possesses large herds, and is wealthy for an Indian, will weave as assiduously as her poorest neighbor. At best, the labor brings low wages. The work is done, to no small extent, for artistic recreation, just as the females of our own race embroider and do "fancy work" for mere pastime.
33. Knitting.--They knit stockings with four needles, but these stockings are devoid of heels and toes. As the needles now used are of wire and obtained from the whites, it might be thought that the art of knitting was learned from our people; but knitted leggings, made of human hair, and wooden knitting-needles, have been found in the Navaho land, in cliff-dwellings which, there is reason to believe, were abandoned before the arrival of the Spaniards.
INDUSTRY.
34. It cannot be said of the Navaho men, as it is often said of the men of other Indian tribes, that they are either too proud or too lazy to perform manual labor. They are, and apparently always have been, willing to do any remunerative work. When the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad was constructed near their reservation, in 1881, much of the grading was done by Navaho laborers. The white men who worked with them, and who had the strongest antipathy to Chinese laborers, said that they liked the Indians because they were good comrades on the work and kept up prices. A stalwart man is not ashamed to wash and iron clothes for wages, which he may want only to spend in gambling. They have been employed at Fort Wingate to dig cellars and make adobes, and at the latter work proved themselves more expert than the more experienced men of Zuñi.
35. Begging, which among other tribes is so often annoying to the white man, is little practised by the Navahoes. The few who have ever begged from the author persuaded themselves that they had some claim on him. On the whole, they are a self-supporting people, and add to the wealth of the community at large. But little government aid has been given them since they were released from captivity and supplied with stock in return for that slaughtered by our troops when their land was invaded.
POETRY AND MUSIC.
36. For many years the most trusted account of the Navaho Indians of New Mexico and Arizona was to be found in a letter written by Dr. Jonathan Letherman,[303] of the army, and published in the Smithsonian report for 1855. Dr. Letherman had lived three years at Fort Defiance, in the heart of the Navaho country, when he wrote this letter, and he acknowledges his indebtedness, for assistance in preparing it, to Major Kendrick, who long commanded Fort Defiance. Both the doctor and the major were men of unusual ability. The former (having changed the spelling of his name to Letterman) afterwards distinguished himself as medical director of the Army of the Potomac, and the latter was, for many years, professor of chemistry at the National Military Academy.
37. From this letter the following statement concerning the Navahoes is extracted: "Of their religion little or nothing is known, as, indeed, all inquiries tend to show that they have none." "The lack of tradition is a source of surprise. They have no knowledge of their origin or of the history of the tribe." "They have frequent gatherings for dancing." "Their singing is but a succession of grunts, and is anything but agreeable."
38. The evidence of these gentlemen, one would think, might be taken as conclusive. Yet, fifteen years ago, when the author first found himself among the Navahoes, he was not influenced in the least by the authority of this letter. Previous experience with the Indians had taught him of how little value such negative evidence might be, and he began at once to investigate the religion, traditions, and poetic literature, of which, he was assured, the Navahoes were devoid.
39. He had not been many weeks in New Mexico when he discovered that the dances to which Dr. Letherman refers were religious ceremonials, and later he found that these ceremonials might vie in allegory, symbolism, and intricacy of ritual with the ceremonies of any people, ancient or modern. He found, erelong, that these heathens, pronounced godless and legendless, possessed lengthy myths and traditions--so numerous that one can never hope to collect them all, a pantheon as well stocked with gods and heroes as that of the ancient Greeks, and prayers which, for length and vain repetition, might put a Pharisee to the blush.
40. But what did the study of appalling "succession of grunts" reveal? It revealed that besides improvised songs, in which the Navahoes are adepts, they have knowledge of thousands of significant songs--or poems, as they might be called--which have been composed with care and handed down, for centuries perhaps, from teacher to pupil, from father to son, as a precious heritage, throughout the wide Navaho nation. They have songs of travelling, appropriate to every stage of the journey, from the time the wanderer leaves his home until he returns. They have farming songs, which refer to every stage of their simple agriculture, from the first view of the planting ground in the spring to the "harvest home." They have building songs,[6] which celebrate every act in the structure of the hut, from "thinking about it" to moving into it and lighting the first fire. They have songs for hunting, for war, for gambling, in short for every important occasion in life, from birth to death, not to speak of prenatal and post-mortem songs. And these songs are composed according to established (often rigid) rules, and abound in poetic figures of speech.
41. Sacred Songs.--Perhaps the most interesting of their metrical compositions are those connected with their sacred rites,--their religious songs. These rites are very numerous, many of them of nine days' duration, and with each is associated a number of appropriate songs. Sometimes, pertaining to a single rite, there are two hundred songs or more which may not be sung at other rites.
42. The songs must be known to the priest of the rite and his assistants in a most exact manner, for an error made in singing a song may be fatal to the efficacy of a ceremony. In no case is an important mistake tolerated, and in some cases the error of a single syllable works an irreparable injury. A noteworthy instance of this rule is a song sung at the beginning of work on the last night of the great ceremony of the night chant. The rite is one which may cost the patron from two hundred to three hundred dollars. It has lasted eight days and nights, when four singers, after long and careful instruction by the priest, come forth painted, adorned, and masked as gods to sing this song of the atsá`lei. Several hundred people--many from the farthest confines of the Navaho land--have come to sit up all night and witness the public ceremonies. The song is long, and is mostly made up of meaningless or obsolete expressions which convey no idea to the mind of the singer, yet not a single vocable may be omitted, mispronounced, or misplaced. A score or more of critics who know the song by heart are listening with strained attention. If the slightest error is made it is at once proclaimed, the fruitless ceremony terminates abruptly, and the disappointed multitude disperses.
43. The songs all contain significant words; but these, for poetic requirements, are often greatly distorted, and the distortions must be kept in mind. In speaking thus, scant justice is done to the Navaho poets. Similar distortions found in an Aryan tongue with a written literature are spoken of as figures of orthography and etymology, and, although there is yet no standard of spelling for the Navaho language, we would perhaps do well to apply the same terms in speaking of the Navaho compositions. The distortions are not always left to the whim of the composer. They are made systematically, as a rule. If the language were reduced to a standard spelling, we should find that the Navaho poets have as many figures of these classes as the English poets have, and perhaps more.
44. Some of the words, too, are archaic,--they mean nothing in modern Navaho; but the priests assign traditional meanings to them, and this adds to the task of memorizing. But, in addition to the significant words, there are (as instanced above) numerous meaningless vocables in all songs, and these must be recited with a care at least equal to that bestowed on the rest of the composition. These meaningless sounds are commonly introduced in the preludes and refrains of the stanzas and in the verse endings, but they may occur anywhere in the song.
45. The preludes and refrains here referred to are found, with rare exceptions, in every stanza and in every song. Although they are all either totally meaningless or only partly significant, they are the most characteristic parts of the poems, and the singer cons the preludes over when he wishes to call to mind any particular composition, just as we often remember a poem or song by means of the first line. They are rarely or never quite alike in any two songs, and great ingenuity is often displayed in giving them variety.
46. There is yet another burden laid on the memory of the singer of sacred songs, and this is the order of their arrangement. The songs of each ceremony are divided into groups which must follow one another in an established order, and each song has, in the group to which it belongs, a place that must not be changed under penalty of divine displeasure. To sing, during the progress of a rite, the sixth Song of the Whirling Sticks before the fifth song is sung, would be a sacrilege as great as to chant the syllables óhohohó, in place of éhehehé. To remember this exact order of sequence in a set of two hundred or three hundred songs is no easy task.[322]
47. But it may be said: "Perhaps things were different with the Navahoes in Dr. Letherman's day. May they not have learned from other tribes, or have themselves invented all this ceremony and song since he knew them?" The reply to this is, that it is absurd to suppose that such an elaborate system of rites and songs could have grown up among an illiterate people in the twenty-five years that elapsed between Dr. Letherman's departure from the Navaho country and the author's arrival there. Besides, the latter obtained his information from men of advanced age--from sixty to eighty years old--who practised these rites and sang these songs in their youth, and who in turn learned them from men of a departed generation. The shamans who conduct these ceremonies, tell these tales, and sing these songs are scattered widely over the Navaho country. Men who are scarcely acquainted with one another, and who learned from different preceptors, will sing the same sacred songs and to exactly the same tune. All the lore of the Navaho priesthood was undoubtedly extant in Dr. Letherman's time and for ages before.
48. Songless Women.--It is remarkable that, while the Navaho men are such fruitful composers of song and such ardent singers, the women, as a rule, do not sing. Among the wild hunting tribes of the North, as the author knew them thirty years ago, the women not only had songs of their own, but they took part in the ceremonial songs of the men. The Pueblo Indian women of New Mexico, neighbors of the Navahoes, have many fine songs, the song of the corn-grinders, often heard in Zuñi, being especially wild and musical. But usually the Navaho woman is songless. The writer tried a long time to find a woman who could sing, and offered good pecuniary inducements before he got one. She came from a distance of thirty miles. She knew no songs peculiar to her sex, but her father was a medicine-man, who frequently repeated his songs at home in order to familiarize himself with them, and she gradually picked up several of them. She sang in a musical soprano with much spirit, and was one of the most pleasing singers heard in the tribe.
49. Figures of Speech.--It is probable that all rhetorical figures of speech known to our poets may be found in these simple compositions of the Navahoes. But in many cases the allusions are to such recondite matters of symbolism, or incidents in their myths, that they could be made plain, if at all, only by a tedious recital. Thus it would not be easy to make clear in a few words why, when the goddess Estsánatlehi, in one of the songs to her honor, is spoken of as climbing a wand of turquoise, we know the poet means to say she is ascending San Mateo Mountain, in New Mexico, or why, when he speaks of her as climbing a wand of haliotis shell, he is endeavoring to tell us that she is ascending the peak of San Francisco in Arizona. Yet we may gain some idea of the meaning by referring to the myth (par. 193).
50. But some of the metaphors and similes are not so hard to understand. Here is a translation of the Dove Song, one of the gambling songs sung in the game of kesitsé:--
Wos Wos picks them up (seeds), Wos Wos picks them up, Glossy Locks picks them up, Red Moccasin picks them up, Wos Wos picks them up.[273] [316]
Here Wos Wos (Wosh Wosh) is an onomatope for the dove, equivalent to our "coo coo"; but it is used as a noun. Glossy Locks and Red Moccasin are figurative expressions for the dove, of obvious significance. Metaphor and synecdoche are here combined.
51. Antithesis is not an uncommon figure with the Navaho poet. Here is an instance of it in a song belonging to the mountain chant, one of the great nine-day ceremonies of the shamans:--
The voice that beautifies the land! The voice above, The voice of the thunder, Among the dark clouds Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land.
The voice that beautifies the land! The voice below, The voice of the grasshopper, Among the flowers and grasses Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land.
Here the great voice of the thunder above is contrasted with the feeble voice of the grasshopper below, yet both are voices that make the world beautiful.
52. Many instances of climax have been noted. One here presented is from the mountain chant. It has but two steps to the ladder:--