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The Navajo who retained their nomadic lifestyle would frequently “trespass” and “poach” on lands considered to be sacred sites or traditional grounds by the Anasazi and other local Native nations, like the Ute. The non-agricultural Navajo were rapidly labeled as “thieves” and “bandits” by the older inhabitants of the region. This sort of conflict with prior inhabitants had occurred frequently in the past, all across the mountains and basins through which the Apache had moved as they worked their way toward the south. But, in the past, the Apache had moved into an area, then, relatively quickly moved on. Because of the short duration of the Apache stay in most regions, there was usually little lingering resentment between the Apache and any single local group.
Once the Navajo stopped their steady migration and became partially rooted in a single area, the Four Corners, by a dependence on agriculture, they kept butting up against the same people, the Anasazi, Ute and Paiute, over and over again, leading to great, continuing hostilities and animosities.
Although the Anasazi/Hopi are thought to have done little other than complain about the Navajo, over the centuries, the nearby Utes, to the north, became violent, waging an ongoing, low-level war with the Navajo over a period of many decades. This cultural climate made life difficult for the farming Navajo. The Anasazi, who may have once helped the Navajo now became uncooperative.
Low-level conflict with the Utes had begun years earlier, as the Apache first passed through traditional Ute hunting grounds in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. Now, with continuing, continuous hunting by the Navajo who chose not to settle down and farm on land that the Utes considered their own, and select, obvious targets like the Navajo farms, the Utes began to stage what they called “retaliatory” raids.
The settled Navajo, who lived in fixed locations, on farms, were prime, easy targets for these raids. Under these circumstances, many of the agricultural Navajo were forced back to a nomadic lifestyle. When the Ute were on the attack, the farming Navajo were only able to maintain modest fields in well-concealed and protected sites. Many of the Navajo took to locations well-hidden in back country areas. Once the Navajo population had reached a critical size, beyond the supporting capacities of the northern Arizona soils, side-by-side Anasazi/Hopi-Navajo settlements were no longer viable. Animosities that had grown through the years over infringements on Anasazi/Hopi territory and sacred sites also sealed the fate of the peaceful era between the Navajo and their neighbors.
When the Spaniards arrived, they only noticed only the settled groups in the southern Colorado Plateau, the descendants of the Anasazi. The Conquistadores reported back to Spain on the Pueblo, the New Mexico branch of the family, and the Hopi, the inhabitants of the mesa villages in Arizona. The descendants of the Anasazi who remained in the Black Mesa area are believed to be the ancestors of the Hopi. There were few recognizable permanent Navajo farms or settlements of any significant size at the time of the Spanish arrival. Most of the Navajo had again been forced back on the move or into small, well-hidden home grounds by the 1500's.
Although the Navajo had been in the region for some time, and they probably had a number of permanent settlements in place at the time of the Spanish explorations, they went unnoticed for many years. The earliest official European recognition of the Navajo as a distinct culture was in a description of the group by Fray Zarata Salmeron, from 1626. A 1630 letter to Spain from Fray Alonso de Benavides included an official report, with additional information on the tribe.
Both citations used the Pueblo/Hopi point of view and language to make references to the Navajo. This demonstrates that the friars were not in extended contact with the wandering Navajo. The Spanish practice was to live with large settled groups like the Pueblo (including the Rio Grand Pueblo of northern and central New Mexico, the Hopi of northeastern Arizona, and the Zuni of western New Mexico). As a result, they came to view nomadic groups, like the Navajo, from the point of view of the settled tribes, in this case, the Pueblo and Hopi.
The name Pueblo is purely Spanish. It has no roots in Native tongues. It simply means “town,” or “town's people,” and was applied to the settled communities that the Spaniards found as they entered, successively, the lands of the Zuni, Hopi, and Rio Grande communities. The Spaniards used the term to acknowledge that they were encountering what they assumed was a unified civilization that existed in permanent villages, with substantial edifices and defenses. Anglos have tended to lump these three groups into a single large family, the Pueblo, just as the Spaniards did.
Linguistic roots suggest, however, that these may have originally been three totally different groups, with independent origins, that simply eventually settled near each other. Each of these communities was forced to survive in a similar climate and environment, when they reached the area of Arizona-New Mexico, and developed similar survival strategies and agricultural practices.
The linguistic evidence suggests that the Hopi are much more closely related to the Aztecs, in Mexico, than they are to their geographic neighbors in the Southwestern US. The earliest roots of the Zuni have not been firmly identified. The linguistic evidence suggests that their culture arose, totally independently, along the Arizona-New Mexico border, or that their ancestors migrated at an early date from California to Arizona, thus setting the original pattern for the Pac Eight becoming the Pac Ten. The Rio Grande Pueblo, on the other hand, appear to have still another, totally independent, set of linguistic roots.
The wars and historical conflicts of European history would suggest that diverse peoples of independent origins can not live long, in peace, side by side, when these peoples appear to be competing for similar resources and survival strategies. The survival of the Greater Pueblo nations, including the Rio Grande Pueblo, Hopi and Zuni, through the trials and tribulations of the Great Drought and the prolonged invasion of the Europeans, suggests that this is not universally true.
If the friars had known of any substantial, permanent Navajo villages, they would probably have attempted to move in, so that they could Christianize the inhabitants. Because the Pueblo/Hopi had large, established villages, and acted as hosts to the Spaniards, their point of view was to be a prime reference for the Europeans and to permanently taint the reputation of the Navajo.
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Proceed to A Summary of the History of the
Residents of the Four Corners
Follow scholar Kokopelli to the Suggested
Reading List
Go back to The Crisis of the Thirteenth
Century
Return with Kokopelli to the hogan page, the
Table of Contents
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Black Mesa Highlighted in Sunlight on a Stormy Day
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Contents, including illustrations, copyright T. K. Reeves, 1997.
on 5 April, 1997.