Navajo Quotes

“I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.”

The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song….the shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.

Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order…each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health…Among the various sung ceremonies of this people-Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway- there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).”
― Barry López, Crossing Open Ground

“When you turn around, you'll see something I bet you've never seen before. If it takes your breath away, then you'll fit in nicely. If you don't feel anything, then maybe you don't belong here.”
― Veronica Randolph Batterson, Daniel's Esperanza

“The Navahos could forgive the Rope Thrower for fighting them as a soldier, for making prisoners of them, even for destroying their food supplies, but the one act they never forgave him for was cutting down their beloved peach trees.”
― Dee Brown

“They find joy in motion, which transforms their lives into unending odysseys. Their souls are brightly burning streaks of light across the universe—constantly traveling in an endless dance across space and time.”
― Zita Steele, Dine: A Tribute to the Navajo People

“Stallions," Frank said, "they're fightin' over a girl. - DANIEL'S ESPERANZA”
― Veronica Randolph Batterson, Daniel's Esperanza

“NAVAJO FRY BREAD: Known as sopaipillas or Indian fry bread (or simple fry bread), this traditional fried bread dough that puffs like a pillow.... The dough is made with flour, water, and salt and leavened with baking powder or yeast. When prepared in the traditional way, women use a cutoff broom handle to roll small pieces of dough into circles and punch a hole in the middle of each, and fry the dough in hot oil. (Originally women used a stick to pierce the dough and put into the hot fat.) Once fried, the dough is drained and dusted with powdered sugar. Navajo fry bread may also be served unsweetened as an accompaniment to spicy meals, or it may be stuffed with cheese, beans, or a meat filling and served as a main entree or an appetizer.”
― Martin K. Gay, Encyclopedia of North American Eating & Drinking Traditions, Customs, and Rituals

“George Arthur, a tribal council delegate, spoke on behalf of the tribe. Arthur was a chairman, too, of the Navajo legislature's resources committee. . . ."Uranium mining and milling on and near the reservation has been a disaster for the Navajo people. The Department of the Interior has been in the pocket of the uranium industry, favoring its interest and breaching its trust duties to the Navajo mineral owners. We are still undergoing what appears to be a never-ending federal experiment to see how much devastation can be endured by a people and a society from exposure to radiation in the air, in the water, in mines and on the surface of the land. We are unwilling to be the subjects of that ongoing experiment any longer.”
― Judy Pasternak, Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed

“Navajo heaven is not a solemn gray high refuse heap for humble failures.”
― William Eastlake, New American Story

“With traumatized Navajos watching, government agents shot sheep and goats and left them to rot or cremated them after dousing them with gasoline. At one site alone, thirty-five goats were shot and left to rot. One hundred fifty thousand goats and fifty thousand sheep were killed in this manner. Oral history interviews tell of the pressure tactics on the Navajos, including arrests of those who resisted, and express bitterness over the destruction of their livestock.”
― Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States