Dinetah- Navajo LocationLocation · Realm"Land Between the Sacred Mountains"

The Emergence

The people climbed into the Glittering World through a hollow reed that pierced the sky of the fourth world. Below them, floodwater was still rising. Above them, an empty landscape waited. First Man and First Woman set about ordering it.

They had carried soil and sacred materials from the lower worlds, and with these they built the mountains that would mark the boundaries of Dinétah. Each mountain was fastened to the earth: one with a bolt of white lightning, one with a great stone knife, one with a sunbeam, one with a rainbow. Each was covered with its sacred stone and given its own guardian Holy People to dwell inside. Between these four pillars, Dinétah became the consecrated homeland the Diyin Dine'é had intended. First Man and First Woman arranged the sky, set the sun and moon in their courses, laid out the stars on a buckskin, and established the cycle of seasons that would govern life within the mountains.

The Sacred Mountains

In the east stands Tsisnaasjini', Blanca Peak, fastened with white lightning and covered in white shell. Rock Crystal Boy and Rock Crystal Girl dwell there in the light of dawn. It is the mountain of first awareness, the direction where thought begins.

In the north, Dibé Nitsaa, Mount Hesperus, was fastened with a rainbow and covered in jet. It is the mountain of darkness and completion, the direction of old age. Between these two peaks, south and west hold their own mountains: Tsoodzil covered in turquoise, Dook'o'oosłííd covered in abalone shell. Together the four define the boundaries of the world the Holy People made.

Blessingway singers invoke all four mountains in sunwise order, east to south to west to north. The procession corresponds to moving through thinking, planning, action, and completion. It is the pattern of a balanced life. The Navajo word for that balance is hózhǫ, and hózhǫ is inseparable from the land between the mountains.

Blood and Stone

The interior of Dinétah bears the marks of the battles that followed the Emergence. The Naayééʼ, the alien monsters conceived during the separation of the sexes, had grown to threaten every living being. Monster Slayer and Born for Water, the Hero Twins, hunted them across the homeland.

The lava flows that spread across the Dinétah region are the dried blood of Ye'iitsoh, the greatest of the monsters, slain by Monster Slayer near Mount Taylor. Shiprock, the volcanic neck the Navajo call Tsé Bitʼaʼí, "rock with wings," is the petrified form of the great bird that once carried people to its nest and fed them to its young. The Twins killed it too. Every lava field and volcanic neck in the landscape tells a piece of the same story: the world had to be cleaned of monsters before it was safe to live in.

Two inner peaks carry particular weight. On Gobernador Knob, the summit the Navajo call Ch'óol'í'í, First Man found the infant who would become Changing Woman. Huerfano Mesa, Dzil Ná'oodil̨ii, was First Man and First Woman's home and the geographical anchor of the Blessingway narratives.

The Long Walk

In 1864, Colonel Kit Carson and the United States military forced the Diné from their homeland. Soldiers burned hogans, slaughtered livestock, and destroyed cornfields. Approximately eight to nine thousand Navajo were marched three hundred miles to Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The imprisonment lasted four years.

The Diné call it Hwéeldi. The water was alkaline, the food inadequate, the plain barren and far from the sacred mountains. To be removed from Dinétah was to be removed from the cosmological order the Holy People had established. The land between the mountains was where hózhǫ was possible. Outside it, the world was out of balance.

In 1868, Navajo leaders signed the Treaty of Bosque Redondo and secured the right to return. The journey home was a re-entry into the sacred space the four mountains defined. Today the Navajo Nation occupies only a portion of the original Dinétah, but the people still live within the compass of the sacred mountains, and the Blessingway still names the peaks that hold the world in place.