LITMIR.BIZ

      Navaho Women

      Footnotes

1. The agave or maguey plant, locally called mescal, for which reason the latter term is here employed.

2. This medicine skin was owned by Háshkĕ Ní̆lntĕ and was considered one of the most potent belonging to any of the medicine-men. During the lifetime of Háshkĕ Ní̆lntĕ it was impossible for any white man even to look upon this wonderful "medicine." After reaching extreme age he was killed, presumably by his wife, from whom this valuable and sacred object was procured.

3. Possibly a legendary reminiscence of a home in the far north and the subsequent migration to the south.

4. The myth and ritual of this ceremony are given on pages 111-116.

5. Versions differ as to the number of worlds through which the progenitors of the Navaho passed. Some give three before this one, others but one. The version adopted by the Bahozhonchí, a religious order or medicine society whose rites and ceremonies are the oldest and most widely known of any in the tribe, treats of two worlds only: the one below, from which the Dĭgí̆n, or Holy People, migrated in the form of insects, birds, and beasts, and to which the dead return; and the present, into which was born man in his present image, created of pollen, corn, white shell, turquoise, and rain by the Dĭgí̆n. These Dĭgí̆n were the animals which never assumed absolute material form on this earth, and the gods who perfected the creation. The creation of the world below, together with all food products, plant life, and animals known to the Navaho, is credited to First Man and First Woman, Ástsĕ Hástĭn and Ástsĕ Ĕstsán; but the myth does not go back to that creation, nor, save for the plant and animal life and a little earth used in making mountains, does it assume the use of any part of the underworld in the making or completion of this. So far as the inhabitants now found in the image of man are concerned, they were made, and first existed, on this earth, and did not develop from a lower order.

6. The Navaho sometimes vary the assignment of their directional colors by relating, like the Apache of Arizona, black to the east and white to the north.

7. These four names still survive among the Navaho, applied to as many clans.

8. Our months, of course, only approximate the moons of the Indians.