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Begun in Beauty, Finished in Beauty
| Article
# : |
14876 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1988 |
5,679 Words |
| Author
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Ronald McCoy
Ronald McCoy is a professor of history at Emporia State
Univeristy in Emporia, Kansas. He has wrtten for The World &
I about such topics as Navajo sand painting, Hopi culture,
Plains Indian warrior art, and most recently on the sacred
clowns of the Puebloan Southwest. |
The Four Corners region in the American Southwest is a high desert country of geographic and meteorological extremes: towering mesas and twisting canyons, hell-hot summers and frozen winters. Here, also, lies the heart of the Navajo tribe's ancestral homeland.
Hogans-eight-sided, cribbed-log, mud-daubed dwellings--are scattered across the nearly lunar landscape of the 25,000-square-mile Navajo Reservation, the largest in the United States. Taking up practically all of northeastern Arizona, part of northwestern New Mexico, and some of southeastern Utah, this reservation is home for a Navajo population of 165,000, which calls itself Dine, The people.
Hogans are such a traditional part of life for the Navajos that someone versed in tribal esoterica beholds a good deal more than a simple dwelling when gazing at one. As observed by the late Joseph Campbell, erudite student of universal myth, a hogan replicates the Navajo view of the cosmos. "The entrance faces east [toward the rising sun]," wrote Campbell. "The eight sides represent the four directions and the points between. Every beam and joist corresponds to an element in the great hogan of the all-embracing earth and sky. And since the soul of man itself is regarded as identical in form with the universe, the mud hut is a representation of the basic harmony of man and world, and a reminder of he hidden lifeway of perfection.
Onetime hunter-gatherers, the Navajo and their Apache relatives are seen by most archeologists and anthropologists as having moved into the Southwest out of the Athapaskan north anywhere from five hundred to a thousand years ago. The Navajo version of events tells a different story.
Long ago, the Holy People--First Man and First Woman, First Boy and First Girl, Spider Woman, Corn People, Snake People, and many others--lived beneath this world. Guided by First Man, the Holy People moved through the Black, Blue, and Yellow worlds. When a flood inundated the Yellow World, First Man planted a reed and the Holy People ascended it to this, the Glittering, or Fourth, World now inhabited by us Earth Surface People. This place of Emergence, the point of entry into the Fourth World, is believed to be a mountain lake in southwestern Colorado.
Eventually, Changing Woman created the first Dine. Something of a patron saint for Navajos, she alone among the Holy People always does good things for their tribe. Changing Woman also bore twin boys, fathered by Sun.
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