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Up to this point, the majority of this paper has focused on the Hopi. The origins of the Navajo, and their early history has been discussed in an earlier section, but their early interaction with Europeans has not been covered. The Navajo have had a long history of problems with neighbors, especially with their European neighbors.The Navajo have tended to be a high-profile Nation in recent centuries. They have always been a more warlike group than the Hopi. The Navajo had apparently occupied portions of the Four Corners region well before the arrival of the Spaniards, but they began to become more prominent, and an annoyance in the Southwest around the same time that the Spaniards arrived. They gained notoriety as they exerted pressure on their neighbors during the droughts of the 1600's that created problems for all the native nations in the region. This pressure was to continue into the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and up to the present day.
Archeological evidence concerning the earliest Apache/Navajo moves into the southwestern portion of the Colorado Plateau is sparse, but the first Navajo may have wandered into the western Colorado region as early as 1000 AD, although 1300 AD is a more conservative assessment for their presence as far south as Arizona. The oldest conclusively-documented Navajo settlement in the region is a mid-1500's set of ruins from Gobernador Canyon, New Mexico. The traditional Navajo left little trace of their passage through an area. They were nomadic, building no permanent settlements. They traveled often, and light, leaving little behind during their perambulations. Their housing consisted of round, wooden hogans, built from forked poles, covered with sticks, leaves, and mud. This is not a lifestyle designed to make an archaeologist's life easy.
Whatever the date of their first arrival in northeastern Arizona, the Navajo had apparently been largely invisible, or at least largely non-threatening, to the Hopi during their first few centuries in the region. The Navajo were a highly innovative group, willing to change and adapt, and to take up wise practices that they observed in their neighbors. The Navajo lifestyle was to change repeatedly from the time of their earliest arrival as hunter-gatherers in the southwestern portion of the Colorado Plateau, up to the present day. The Navajo originally split off from the rest of the Apache to take up some of the agricultural practices of their new neighbors. Examples have been found of old settlements where a cluster of Navajo hogans was built right next to a Pueblo village, indicating that the two groups were coexisting, at least somewhat amicably, side-by-side, without any major conflicts, for prolonged periods.
Although the Navajo became "settled" by the standards of most of the Apache peoples, such concepts are relative. The majority of the Navajo still moved frequently, and were nomadic by the standards of the Hopi. The Hopi and Pueblo have continuously occupied Oraibi, in Arizona, and Acoma, New Mexico, since around 1100 AD. For these peoples, 900 years in one place defines the idea of being "settled."
Although the early Navajo farmers were less mobile than their predecessors, they retained many of the ancestral practices of their forefathers. Some of these practices included hunting and gathering. Many close relatives of the early Navajo farmers never did settle down, but continued to roam a now-restricted area of the Southwest. Large groups of extended families would winter together, then, come Spring, the hunters would take off again. Unfortunately, "hunting and gathering" can mean hunting and gathering what one's neighbor thinks he owns and values.
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Contents, including illustrations, copyright © T. K. Reeves, 1997.
on 26 April, 1997.
