Navajo Omens And Taboos

Navajo Taboos is not some scholarly work by an anthropologist, but an insider's look at a body of folk beliefs shared by many Navajos, illuminating their cultural priorities. The taboos were collected by Navajo students for their own information and previously published in pamphlet form by the Navajo Tribe as the first volume in their Cultural Series of publications. The taboos have been organized and interpreted by Ernie Bulow, who has spent his entire life around Navajos and other tribes of the Southwest as a teacher, writer and Indian trader. The book is a respectful compilation of Navajo beliefs that set them apart from all other groups while at the same time illustrating the universal fears and concerns found in all cultures.

Navajo Taboos is not some scholarly work by an anthropologist, but an insider's look at a body of folk beliefs shared by many Navajos, illuminating their cultural priorities. The taboos were collected by Navajo students for their own information and previously published in pamphlet form by the Navajo Tribe as the first volume in their Cultural Series of publications. The taboos have been organized and interpreted by Ernie Bulow, who has spent his entire life around Navajos and other tribes of the Southwest as a teacher, writer and Indian trader. The book is a respectful compilation of Navajo beliefs that set them apart from all other groups while at the same time illustrating the universal fears and concerns found in all cultures.

"I think what is always really amazing to me is that Navajo are never amazed by anything that happens. Because it is like in a lot of our stories they are already there."--Sunny Dooley, Navajo Storyteller During the final decade of the twentieth century, Navajo people had to confront a number of challenges, from unexplained illness, the effects of uranium mining, and problem drinking to threats to their land rights and spirituality. Yet no matter how alarming these issues, Navajo people made sense of them by drawing guidance from what they regarded as their charter for life, their origin stories. Through extensive interviews, Maureen Trudelle Schwarz allows Navajo to speak for themselves on the ways they find to respond to crises and chronic issues. In capturing what Navajo say and think about themselves, Schwarz presents this southwestern people's perceptions, values, and sense of place in the world.

Here are four men, representing the dominant cultures of the American Southwest, who set their feet upon trails which follow the physical and metaphysical journeys of their forefathers--the Pueblos' Cornmeal Path, the Navajo Beautyway, the Spanish Way of the Cross, and the Yankee Trail of Destiny. All lead to the great fact of the past century, World War II, in which each man blazes his own trail in his country's greatest crisis. Each carries to war his people's pride and his father's faith. Through the jungles of Bataan, the bloody battles of Tarawa and Iwo Jima, across the deserts of North Africa, and the formidable Italian mountain chain, each carries his bits of home--medicine bundle or crucifix, sacred cornmeal or pocket Bible--and each clings to the mystic thread that will bring him home. At journey's end the circle closes as each man, each race, each reader, must speculate on the untrodden paths ahead, leaving them, and us, with profound--perhaps painful--questions and a deeper understanding of man's relation to man, and to the trinity of Earth, Sky and Water.

A comprehensive guide to the historic and contemporary indigenous cultures of the American Southwest, intended for college courses and the general reader.

The most complete and current history of the largest American Indian nation in the U.S., based on extensive new archival research, traditional histories, interviews, and personal observation.