Culture Event: The Navajo People

Culture Event: The Navajo People

Around the 15th century, the Navajo or rather Dine migrated to northwest Canada and Alaska, where they continued to preserve many of their traditional behaviors. These people have their own culture and arts, including weaving, basket-making, pottery-making, and jewellery-making, which are handed down to daughters and granddaughters today. The Navajo Indian Reservation is situated at the foot of the Rocky Mountains and spread throughout the Southwest of North America. During the cultural event, I realized that Dine people are mostly family-oriented and their culture focuses on family values, events, and their lifestyle. The Navajo Nation spans across Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. The Navajo culture is characterized by many traditions and customs that have been born from the love of the land. Navajo people are known as "The Dine" or "The People". 

Firstly, every aspect of Dine’s daily life, including the planting of crops, harvesting, and birthing of children and the death of an elder, are often considered to be ritualistic in nature as they are tribal ways. From cultural event, I noted that most ceremonies are led by medicine men under the supervision of a medicine man with the intention of healing fears or physical ailments. The Hogan is a sacred home where these ceremonies are conducted.  A medicine man builds this sturdy fortress from mud and wooden poles, where he uses colored sand to draw symbols on afflicted patients. Color has many different symbolic meanings that depend on its context. In Navajo culture and tradition, color can also be used to define direction. 

Secondly, marriage and death ceremonies are cultural universals, which include worship, song, and dancing with different gestures symbolizing the message the dance is trying to convey. There is also worship, song, and festive dancing. In North America, the Athabaskan language is the most spoken Native American language due to its combination of many different indigenous languages. The population of Dine in North America includes a large number of Native Americans speaking Athabaskan as their native language. They have established their formal norms and provide the appropriate sanctions when needed as a result of being isolated from the rest of the country and the government. In comparison to neighboring cities, they too have a modern legal system, schools, churches, and shopping malls. 

Lastly, I discovered that if one were to find themselves on the Navajo Reservation, it might be easy to become ethnocentric from the outside. Even though many of the amenities have been modernized to suit the times, there is still a variety of traditions that have been maintained since they were discovered. On the reservation, technology is not consumed as a commodity and it does not create a dependency on the individual, which is greatly different from the surrounding world.  As such, cultural relativism must be possessed by those who wish to truly understand the Navajo culture and understand their ways may be different, but that does not necessarily mean they are wrong.