Navajo Indians

Traditional Navajo try to practice their religion at all times by balanced beautiful thought and speech. The inner and outer forms should be in a dynamic balance of complimentary pairs of polarities. Many people carry corn pollen on them in special bags for prayer. Many people get up before dawn to pray facing east and use it at other times during the day as needed. Some people pray four times a day. Ceremonies are held as needed, like a babies first laugh or a hogan blessing or a girls first menstruation or a healing ceremony. Many ceremonies last several days some up to 9 days.

The Navajo language belongs to the Na-Dene family of languages, which is in turn a part of the Athabaskan language family. The Athabaskan are a large group of distantly linked Native American people. They are located in 2 chief Northern and Southern clusters in North America. They all share a language family, despite the distance between some of the groups. The Northern group of the Athabaskan is more densely numbered, but there are at least 4 languages from this family spoken in the United States Southwest. Navajo is one of the Southern Athatbaskan languages, and language family is the largest in North America in number of languages spoken and number speakers.

TRADITIONS:every year when it did not rain alot they would have a ceremonial event where the Pueblo's would pray for rain.

CEREMONIES:the Pueblos would direct a snake dance that everyone in the Pueblo tribes had to participate in.

The very first Southwest Native Americans hunted mammoths until they became extinct. Then people began to hunt buffalo, also known as bison, as well as collect wild plants for food. They also learned to grow maize, or corn, that was their most common grain, which became domesticated in Mexico.

The did not have chiefs in the way that the English word is usually used, meaning hereditary rulers who could order people around or even speak for everyone. They had two many leaders and in different areas different people were influential. But no one could order people to do things. There is a tradition of 12 peace leaders and 12 war leaders and someone who speaks for each group. This may have happened a few times but mostly leaders were men who had much livestock wealth, good clan and family connections, good and beautiful speaking skills and much ritual knowledge. No one spoke for all Navajo everywhere. This was something the Spanish and later the Americans found very hard to understand. In general Navajo culture is Much more individualistic than American or Spanish culture. Even one family member speaking for someone else or telling someone directly what to do, is rare.

The Navajo (Diné) did raid neighboring tribes such as the Pueblo (Hopi, Zuni, Tewa and others), Ute, Paiute (for slaves), Comanche, Kiowa and sometimes the Apache. They were also known as notorious raiders against the spanish and Mexican settlements in New Mexico.

There were no Navajo code "breakers" . That means someone who tries to figure out and unknown code. Native Americans who worked for the American side in World War II were sometimes called "code talkers". They used a substitution code to encode English orders using a native American language, mostly Navajo but other ones were used too.

The Navajo language, which is called Diné bizaad in Navajo. It is in the larger Athabascan language family and that is part of Na-Dene family. Similar to how Spanish and Italian are Romance languages and English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi are in the Indo-European family.

About 60-70% of the 300,000 Navajo speak it. Most as speak English as well. A few only speak Navajo, mainly older people or very young in remote areas. About a third only speak English.

Navajo comes from Tewa to spanish to english. It means " ones farming in valley fields".

I would say for perpouses of trade.

Most were in their late teens or early twenties, many were 17 or 18. A few were younger and lied to get in. To be in the Marines you had to be 17. Most had been in boarding school which is were they learned English. Most, since they had been 7 or 8. They were punished for speaking Navajo. What was important in selecting the participants was not their age, but, of course, their ability to speak and understand Navajo and English fluently and the ability to learn, memorize and use the code rapidly and accurately. The 1940 census records have just been made public so you could check about most of them if you know their home town.

To my knowledge there isn't really a word that corresponds with destiny or fate in Navajo.

The idea is rather foreign to the traditional culture. In traditional Navajo culture when something happens it is because of a cause. We can be in personal control of these causes. For example, if this year you break your leg, didn't get a raise, haven't been sleeping well and had more colds that is not because of fate or coincidence and they are not separate things. It is because your life is not in hózhǫ́. This is a key concept that means balance, beauty, peace, order, goodness. Perhaps you broke a taboo or perhaps you haven't been careful with your words and feelings. These things might have caused your malaise not destiny. You can go and get a ceremony done for you and get back in hózhǫ́. Hózhǫ́ is a dynamic balancing of multiple moving forces not a static symmetry. The inner and out, active and static, male and female, light and dark all need to be in balance. It is always within our power to work on walking in hózhǫ́

The Navajo word for a caterpillar is ch'osh ditł'ooi.

The 2012 the census reports that 161,686 Native American Indians were veterans. There are 31,155 in active duty. There is not a breakdown by tribe, but Navajo and Cherokee make up a large portion of all American Indians. As a percentage of the population native people serve at a higher rate. The vast majority are in the Navy (47%) and more females serve than from other populations.

Native Americans have served in all the wars of the 20th century. 42,000 were in Vietnam (90% volunteers), 10,000 in Korea, 44,000 in WWII at a time when there were only 350,000 American Indians and 12,000 in WWI.

They stole their candy

Navaho Code Talkers were used to send and receive secret radio comunications that the U.S. didn't want the enemy to intercept and understand. Without the code talkers messages had to be communicated by either by voice -- in English (which the enemy could easily translate) or they had to be sent by code (which took some time to code on the sending end and decode on the receiving end -- TOO much time in heated action.) Since the Navaho spoken language was understood ONLY by a limited number of trained Navahos a Code Talker could send a message in his own language talking to a Code Talker on the receiving end of the communication. Immediately the Code Talker on the receiving end could translate his language into English for American officers or soldiers directing the battle action. Believe me .... made for fast communications and speeded things up considerably. vcs

There were 29 original Navajo code talkers and about 300 who learned and used the code in WWII. There were also Seminole, Meskwaki, Basque, Comanche code talkers in the European theater of combat. In WWI there were Choctaw and Cherokee who used their languages to make a code.

Human language.

The Navajo people, being one race in a species of many intelligent, modern Homosapiens, communicated as we still do today with sophisticated language.

Navajo people exist right now, especially in North America. Most all of them speak English, but many thousands of them also speak the old Navajo tongue.

I have to believe that the Navajo are, and were, very much like the rest of us in the ways that matter most. In love, justice, religion, art, science, culture, and ambition they dominated their world in their own time. They could not have accomplished it without language.

Navajo people eat things like: mutton, fry bread, corn mush, Navajo tacos, sheep, lamb, and goat, kneeldown bread( from fresh corn), roast corn, roast chillies. Roast mutton and roast chillies on fry bread is very good.