Navajo

The Navajo, who call themselves Diné, "the people", are an Indigenous nation of the American Southwest whose homeland lies between four sacred mountains in the Four Corners region. Their language, Diné bizaad, is Southern Athabaskan, close to the languages of the Apache. The Navajo Nation, with more than 400,000 enrolled citizens reported in 2026, is the second-largest federally recognised tribe in the United States and holds the country's largest reservation, over 27,000 square miles in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

Like other Athabaskan speakers, the ancestors of the Diné came from the far north-west of the continent. A southward movement of Athabaskan peoples has been dated to around a thousand years ago, partly along the Rocky Mountains; one suggestion links it to a volcanic eruption in Alaska around 803. At first hunters and gatherers, the Diné learned to farm maize, beans and squash from their Pueblo neighbours, with whom they had long trading ties, and later took up sheep and goat herding from the Spanish. Sheep became food, wealth and the raw material for women's weaving.

Navajo society is matrilineal. A person is "born to" the mother's clan and "born for" the father's, and people marry outside the clans of all four grandparents. Tradition holds that Changing Woman gave the first four clans; today there are more than a hundred. Women traditionally owned the herds, homes and fields, and husbands moved to live near the wife's family. The hogan, a log-and-earth house with its door facing the sunrise, is both home and ceremonial space. Navajo religion centres on restoring balance and harmony, hózhǫ́; in the creation narrative the people pass through three earlier worlds before reaching this, the Glittering World, and ceremonies such as the Blessing Way and the Night Chant use song, masks and sandpaintings to heal.

Spanish writers called the Diné "Apaches de Nabajó" in the 1620s, a name drawn from Tewa. For two centuries relations with Spanish and then Mexican New Mexico alternated between trade, raids and short-lived peace treaties. After the United States seized the region in the Mexican–American War, the cycle continued until 1863, when Kit Carson's troops, under General Carleton's orders, burned Navajo crops and seized livestock. From 1864 the army forced around 9,000 Navajo to walk over 300 miles to internment at Bosque Redondo, where hunger, disease and cold took a heavy toll; the Navajo remember it as the Long Walk and "the Fearing Time". The treaty of 1868 let survivors return to part of their homeland.

The reservation was later greatly enlarged, but Navajo life faced new pressures: boarding schools that punished children for speaking Navajo, and the federal livestock reduction from 1933, which destroyed much of the herds that families, especially women, depended on. In World War II up to 400 Navajo code talkers served with the US Marines, using their language for a code that was never broken. Uranium mining from the 1940s left a lasting legacy of illness that Navajo communities attribute to contamination.

Weaving, learned partly from Pueblo neighbours, produced the prized Chief's Blankets and later regional rug styles, while silversmithing, taken up around 1878, gave rise to squash-blossom necklaces and concha belts. The 2020 census counted 315,086 people identifying as Navajo alone. Most Diné live in Arizona and New Mexico, and the language, though under pressure, remains widely spoken at home.

Our 1500 map draws an approximate Navajo territory in the Southwest; the outline is only indicative, especially as Diné presence in the region at that date is not precisely dated. Neighbours on the same map include the Hopi and the Ute.