Hajíínáí- Navajo EventEvent"The Emergence"

The Black World

The Diné Bahane', the Story of the People, begins in darkness. The First World was black and small, a space surrounded by water on all sides. Four clouds hovered at its corners: black, white, blue, and yellow. From the meeting of the white and yellow clouds, First Man and First Woman took shape. They lived among the Insect People, beings without fixed form who moved through mist and dim light.

The Holy Wind stirred through the darkness, giving the inhabitants breath and awareness. But the Insect People could not keep peace among themselves. They quarreled, committed adultery, practiced witchcraft. The world grew too cramped for their disorder, and the beings found an opening in the sky above them and climbed through.

The Blue World

The Second World was blue and larger. Here the ascending people found the Swallow People and Blue Bird People already settled in their own communities. The newcomers asked to stay, and for a time the two groups lived together. Then the Insect People did what they had done before: they quarreled with their hosts and took their partners. The avian peoples ordered them out.

The people found another opening in the sky and passed through into the Third World.

The Yellow World

The Third World was yellow and wide, with rivers and mountains. Here the most consequential episode of the lower worlds took place.

First Man and First Woman quarreled over whether men or women were more necessary to survival. In anger, the men crossed the river and the women stayed on the far bank. Each group tried to live alone. For four years they held out. The women's fields failed. The men grew lonely. Some, driven by desperation, committed unnatural acts, and from these transgressions the naayéé' were conceived: the alien monsters who would later terrorize the Glittering World.

After four years, both sides acknowledged what the separation had proved. They reunited. But the monsters had already been made.

The Flood and the Reed

While the people camped near a great body of water in the Yellow World, Coyote found the children of Tééhoołtsódii, the Water Monster, and stole them. He hid them under his robe and said nothing.

The Water Monster sent a flood from all four directions. The waters climbed the walls of the world. First Man planted a reed, and it grew so fast it pierced the ceiling of the Third World. The people climbed inside the hollow stem as the water rose behind them. Turkey entered last. The rising water stained the tips of his tail feathers white, a mark he still carries. At the top, Locust crawled through the opening to scout the world above, negotiating passage with the beings already dwelling there.

Only when Coyote finally returned Water Monster's children did the flood begin to recede.

The Glittering World

The people emerged through a body of water in the mountains, the place called Hajíínáí. In Paul Zolbrod's rendering, this is identified with a small lake in the La Plata range of Colorado. They stepped into a world vast and filled with light, but without order.

First Man and First Woman set the four sacred mountains at the boundaries of Dinétah. Sisnaajiní stood in the east, dressed in white shell; Dibé Nitsaa held the north, dressed in jet. Each mountain was fastened to the earth and given an inner form as guardian.

They created the Sun and Moon and set them on their daily paths. They laid out the stars on a buckskin, placing each constellation with care. Coyote grew impatient with the slow work, grabbed the remaining stars, and flung them across the sky in a bright, disordered scatter. The Milky Way is his handiwork. The sky would never be as neat as First Man had planned.

The monsters born during the Separation of the Sexes now roamed the land. The world was beautiful but not yet safe. That reckoning would fall to the Twins, Naayéé' Neizghání and Tóbájíshchíní, in the Monster Slaying cycle that followed.