THE ROLE OF THE MOUNTAIN LION IN
NAVAJO MYTHOLOGY AND TRADITIONAL LIFEWAY
Arizona—The practice of traditional Navajo ways is waning and, with it, the knowledge of the honored role of the puma in hunting, ceremony, and daily life.
The Navajos are the largest tribe of American Indians in the United States. Numbering over 200,000 in population, they inhabit a 27,000-square-mile reservation in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, mostly in Arizona with the remainder in northwestern New Mexico and a small section of southeastern Utah.
The land of the Navajos is extremely diverse in its physical makeup. Most of the geography is sparse desert country, Great Basin desert shrub, grasslands accented by red rock sandstone canyons and often spectacular rock formations. Scattered throughout the desert landscape are mountains, petran montane (Rocky Mountain) and subalpine conifer forests thick with piñon, juniper, and pine. Elevations in the mountainous regions can exceed nine thousand feet. This diversity lends itself to an equally diverse variety and abundance of wildlife. Among the wild inhabitants of the Navajo reservation is the mountain lion, Puma concolor. The Navajo name for the mountain lion is nashduitso—a word that generally reflects the hunting nature of this animal. Most Navajos, however, simply use the common western name, cougar.
In modern times perhaps only about 5 percent of the Navajo people can be classified as being what I have termed “orthodox Navajo”—individuals who continue to follow the way of life prescribed to them by their deities, a compilation of supernatural beings called the Holy People. Most contemporary Navajos follow other spiritual paths, most notably the Native American Church (NAC) and various forms of Christianity. Still, many Navajos attempt to incorporate elements of traditionalism into their daily lives. Increasingly, young Navajos are seeking to relate to the natural world in a traditional way.
Unfortunately, much traditional knowledge has been forgotten and can only be found in earlier, hard-to-find anthropological publications. I hope that this piece of writing makes something of a contribution to Navajo people in bringing together a small part of the anthropological literature on the mountain lion, and offers to non-Navajo people an alternative way of looking at and thinking about this species.
NAVAJO MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION
The people we now know as the Navajos are a product of a coming together of two very different cultures, the Southern Athabaskans, or Apacheans, and the Pueblos. The Southern Athabaskans arrived in the American Southwest in a number of separate bands at different times, by different routes, and settled in different locations. In general, they diverged to become two different groups that more or less shared a common language: the Apaches—who further divided into various eastern and western subgroups—and the future Navajos. The date of the Southern Athabaskan arrival into the Four Corners area is unclear but probably occurred in the early 1500s. The exact location of this arrival and early settlement was the upper San Juan River valley of southwestern New Mexico and, specifically, Blanco, Largo, Carrizo, and Gobernador Canyons and their surrounding drainages. Traditional Navajos know this area today as Dinetah and consider it to be their Holy Land.
The Southern Athabaskans lived in the Dinetah region for approximately two hundred years in relative isolation. During this time, they came in contact with a number of other native cultures, most notably the Pueblo tribes of the Rio Grande to the south. Often they raided these Pueblos but traded with them as well. In all probability, Southern Athabaskan culture remained relatively unchanged during this period. They were primarily hunters and gatherers with strong religious and other cultural traditions centering on the practice of hunting game. In time, however, these Athabaskans began to slowly acquire more of an agricultural and pastoral lifestyle from the Pueblos. This included raising sheep and goats initially brought into the Southwest by the Spanish.
In 1680 the Pueblos launched a great revolt against the Spanish and drove the repressive Europeans out of the Rio Grande Valley. Eventually the Spanish reclaimed the area by conquest in 1694. In the interim, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Pueblos sought refuge from Spanish reprisal among their more warlike Southern Athabaskan neighbors to the north. The resulting amalgamation of these two distinct people with distinct ways of life provided the genesis for the tribe we today know as the Navajos.
The Navajo people have retained their Athabaskan language and with it a primarily Athabaskan identity. In most other ways, however, the syncretism leaned heavily toward the co-roots of their Pueblo heritage. From the Pueblos the Navajo acquired agriculture and livestock, the art of weaving and perhaps silversmithing, and the addition of several clans or families. But nowhere is the cultural debt more prevalent than in the area of mythology, religion, and ceremonial practices. Although the Navajos clung to some elements of the early Athabaskan religion, including that which anthropologist Karl W. Luckert calls the “Navajo Hunter Tradition,” much that we now consider as being “traditional” Navajo is actually derived from Pueblo beliefs and practices. This is especially true in regard to the creation, or origin, stories that Navajos have handed down to their children through oral tradition for hundreds of years. In addition, many specific aspects of Navajo ceremonialism are of Pueblo origin, including the belief in certain deities and the use of masked dancers, sandpaintings, prayer sticks, and corn pollen in their religious ceremonies.
The Navajo creation stories form the foundation for Navajo traditionalism. These stories chronicle the mythological journey of the Navajo people through four underground worlds into the fifth, or current, world and to the beginnings of recorded history. These stories are the sacred history of the Navajo people. Moreover, they provide a blueprint for tribal life. They tell the Navajo people who they are, what their place in the world order is, and, most importantly here, how to conduct their personal relationships with the Earth and all other living things.
The Navajo creation stories, as noted earlier, also deal with the Navajo emergence through the underworlds into the present world where they currently live. Throughout these stories the Navajos, beginning with First Man and First Woman, interact with other beings, including their deities, the Holy People. Among the more important of these supernatural holy beings are Sun, Talking God, Calling God, Black God, and the beloved Changing Woman and her two twin hero sons, Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water. The underworlds are also home to a host of Animal People, who are generally envisioned as anthropomorphic beings. They exist as equals to the deities and humans, possess supernatural power, have the ability to communicate with both gods and mankind, and eventually migrate to the Fifth World as well. Some scholars consider the Animal People to be deities, or at least near-deities, superior to mankind in terms of the power they possess. Over time, these Animal People would lose most of their anthropomorphic qualities to assume the forms and roles they now possess. Thus, Mountain Lion became the mountain lion that still inhabits the more remote mountainous regions of the Navajo reservation today. Significantly, traditional Navajos believe that the Animal People did not lose all of their supernatural powers. Bears, for example, are considered to be the most powerful of the Animal People and still retain their ability to transform into other shapes and forms, including that of human beings. Most animals are also believed to possess the ability to transmit sickness to any human who commits a transgression against them. Thus, traditional Navajos define various categories of illness, such as “bear sickness,” “coyote sickness,” and “deer sickness.” The origins of these illnesses, and the means to cure them, are found in the Navajo creation stories.
Sickness, disease, and injuries are treated in traditional ceremonies called “sings.” Generally, these ceremonies are named after some element of the creation story associated with them. Bear sickness, for example, is cured through a ceremony known as the Mountainway ceremony, because the story associated with this sickness occurred in the mountains and mountains remain the home of bears. Other ceremonies include Enemyway, Shootingway, Beautyway, Nightway, Beadway, and Windway. Many of these ceremonies last nine days and nights and cost the host families thousands of dollars to organize. Leland C. Wyman and Clyde Kluckhohn, in their definitive classification of Navajo ceremonies, list fifty-eight distinct rituals not counting the various Huntingway ceremonies. Of these, only nine are considered extinct.
A Navajo who is in need of care for illness or injury will first consult a diagnostician who, through divine ability, will be able to determine the cause of the problem. The inflicted person will next seek out the services of a specialist who is trained to cure his or her problem. These specialists are known as “singers” or, more commonly to outsiders, as medicine men. In administering to his patient, the singer will conduct a ceremony in which he—most singers are men—will re-create through song and prayer the mythological events that explain the illness. He will also employ a number of other techniques and activities that might include giving medicine and utilizing sandpaintings—intricate pictorial representations drawn with colored sand—of the Holy People and other sacred images. The main purpose of the sandpaintings is to attract the Holy People so that they can use their powers to assist in the act of curing the patient. Major ceremonies are usually conducted inside a traditional Navajo structure called a hogan. The final nights of some ceremonies, such as the Mountainway, Shootingway, Beautyway, and Nightway, are public events in which teams of masked dancers called yeibichais perform. Hundreds of spectators may attend this final performance.
Most Navajos today are not strictly traditional. The majority of Navajos—perhaps as many as 75 percent—belong to the Native American Church. The NAC is a pan-Indian religion that incorporates a generic Native American philosophy with elements of traditional religion and Christianity. It is characterized by the use of the psychedelic cactus peyote. The NAC was established on the Navajo reservation in the early 1930s, but it was only after World War II that the religion began to grow in popularity. As NAC membership has grown, traditionalism has declined. Along the way traditional knowledge has also been lost, as well as much of the understanding and respect for the natural world that for so long characterized the Navajo relationship with the land and its wild inhabitants.
NAVAJO MYTHOLOGY AND THE MOUNTAIN LION
Mountain lions have long played an important role in the Native American experience. One group of Native people to whom cougars seemed especially important was the prehistoric Anasazi Indians (A.D. 217–1299) who were the ancestors of the Pueblos—and thus indirectly ancestors to the Navajos. This close relationship is perhaps best illustrated by the many rock art images of mountain lions that were left behind by the Anasazi after these relics of art were discovered centuries later. Frequently the Anasazi depicted the mountain lion ritualistically, often wearing ceremonial items such as feathers, rainbows, and shamanistic hats. The image of the mountain lion as an anthropomorphic being, perhaps as a deity possessing supernatural power, reached its highest measure of expression along the Pecos River in Texas at a site named Panther Cave. Historic Pueblos possess a particularly rich body of mythological beliefs regarding mountain lions. In all probability it was through the Pueblos that the Navajos acquired much of their own cougar mythology.
In the Navajo creation story, Mountain Lion first appears in the Second World, also known as the Blue World. Numerous other Cat People also inhabit this world, including Wild Cat (undoubtedly the first bobcat) and Spotted Lion, a being anthropologist Gladys A. Reichard identifies as a jaguar. In the Upward Moving and Emergence Way myth, as recorded by Father Berard Haile, Mountain Lion is singled out by Changing Woman and assigned to be one of the special “pets” to the Navajo people and, specifically, to one of the four original clans, the Kiyaa’aanii, or “Towering House People.” In this story the four clans embark on a journey in which they are attacked by an enemy whom Haile identifies as Ute Indians. During the attack one of the men pleads to Mountain Lion, “My pet, we are sorely pressed, will you not help us?” In describing what transpired next, Father Berard Haile writes: “In a bound Mountain Lion was through the smoke hole, swept around the enemy, and tore them to pieces or bit off their arms as he circled them four times. After that he returned to his former place without a word.”
Following this incident, Mountain Lion and the other pets—Bear, Big Snake, and Porcupine—who also helped fight off the Utes, presumably because they had now tasted human blood, had become so mean that they were dismissed by the clans into the mountains where they now preside in their present forms. Because of the service Mountain Lion rendered to the people, certain clans will not harm cougars, and traditional members of the Kiyaa’aanii clan continue to keep mountain lion pelts for the protective power they are believed to possess. The special relationship that exists between the Kiyaa’aanii clan and mountain lions provides a background to many other beliefs that Navajos have about cougars. It is also probably no accident that the Kiyaa’aanii clan traces its origins to an outlier settlement of the prehistoric Anasazi stronghold of Chaco Canyon. Polly Schaafsma notes that mountain lions are a particularly common rock art motif throughout the Chaco Canyon region.
Mountain Lion also appears as a protector in a number of other Navajo stories, including that of the Blessingway ceremony. In this story the hero twins—Monster Slayer and Child Born of Water—undertake a journey in search of their father, the Sun. Upon reaching his house in the cosmos they find that Mountain Lion, along with Bear, Big Snake, Thunder, and Wind, serves as a guardian blocking their way. In order to gain entrance, the twins had to first speak Mountain Lion’s “sacred” name, He Who Is Speckled Over With Earth. Upon doing so, Mountain Lion allows them to pass through the gates. When the twins enter the Sun’s house they find his walls to be covered with the skins of mountain lions—a sign of the richness and power of their father. Because of this story, mountain lion skins are considered to be a sign of wealth even today among the Navajos. Such is the case in the Blessingway ceremony, a common ritual known to many traditional Navajos in which certain “wealth songs” are sung to ensure good fortune and prosperity. One song, known to only a few Navajos, includes a passage referring to the Sun’s house being “covered from wall to wall with mountain lion skins.” The father of my principal Navajo mentor knows this wealth song in its entirety and jealously guards its exact words. When he performs the Blessingway ceremony, he never uses this special song in the presence of anyone other than close family members.
The story of the twins’ visit to the Sun ends with the powerful deity acknowledging that he is indeed their father. He then gives them the weapons and knowledge they will need to return to the Earth and battle the monsters that are plaguing the Navajo people. The elder brother—Monster Slayer—becomes the ultimate warrior who slays most of the monsters.
The tale of his exploits continues in the Enemyway story. One of the weapons given to Monster Slayer by his father is a special bow and set of arrows. The arrows are kept in a quiver made of mountain lion skin with the long tail left dangling from the end. Eventually Monster Slayer teaches the Navajo people how to make these quivers; the majority of quivers used later by Navajo warriors and hunters are made of cougar skin. Navajos also wore hunting or war caps made of the caped head skin of the mountain lion—another tradition that traces its origins to Monster Slayer in the creation stories. Presumably, by wearing the skin of the cougar and by keeping their arrows in a cougar-skin quiver, the Navajo hunter or warrior acquired the characteristics of the master feline—stealth, speed, power, and courage.
Mountain Lion also appears in the Beadway myth. In this story he is traveling to actually perform a Beadway ceremony for a patient when he encounters his close friend Wolf, who is on a similar mission. Since neither wants to miss the other’s sing, they agree that Mountain Lion should postpone his for one night. To bind the agreement the two great hunters—who often appear together in Navajo mythology—exchange quivers. A sandpainting used in the Beadway ceremony marks this trade and shows Mountain Lion carrying Wolf’s white quiver and Wolf carrying Mountain Lion’s yellow quiver. Two images of Spotted Lion appear in this sand-painting as well. In another Beadway sandpainting, Mountain Lion, Wolf, and Spotted Lion are joined by fellow hunters Wildcat, Lynx, and Badger and are depicted in a dance formation. What is unusual about this sandpainting is that these great hunters are shown wearing packs of corn on their backs, an unusual agricultural reference to beings that are usually associated with hunting and war.
In the Eagle Way story, a myth closely related to that of Beadway, Monster Slayer encounters White Shell Girl and Turquoise Girl, both daughters of Changing Woman. He tells them of a location where they can find a deer killed by Mountain Lion. “If you go there,” he tells them, “you can see what a deer looks like and even obtain a piece of skin.” The girls locate the dead deer and cut off a piece of hide, which they later scrape and fashion into a sack to carry seed. This is the origin of “sacred buckskin,” deerskin that is not perforated by the holes caused by an arrow or, in modern times, by a bullet. Sacred buckskin, or “unwounded” buckskin as it is also called, is believed to possess special power since it retains the life forces of the deer and thus is absolutely essential in the making of medicine bags, masks, and other ceremonial items.
In another Navajo story—this one associated with the Red Antway ceremony—Mountain Lion and Wolf are attacked by Lightning after they have killed a game animal belonging to that deity. Lightning begins his assault by shattering a tree under which the two hunters were butchering their kill. Angered, Mountain Lion holds up a magical whisker toward the sky. He then sings and prays, and Lightning falls to the ground before him. Mountain Lion then blows away the black cloud of Lightning, thus allowing the Sun to shine through. “I thought I was the only destroyer,” Lightning said to Mountain Lion, “but you are more powerful than I am.” In honor of Mountain Lion, Lightning gives him a song and a prayer to the Ant People.
Many other mountain lion beliefs and practices are scattered throughout Navajo traditional culture, and most of them trace their origins directly or indirectly back to the creation stories. Several additional beliefs and practices deserve at least mention here.
Navajos—even most nontraditional tribal members—possess a strong belief in the existence and danger posed by ghosts and witches. In the Upward-Reaching Way ceremony, or Evil Way ceremony as it is more commonly known, singers wear bandoliers and wristlets decorated with mountain lion claws. This ritual is the fundamental ceremony employed specifically for the treatment or prevention of disease, illness, and misfortune caused by ghosts. Mountain lion claws are used because, as one early Navajo informant explained, “Ghosts are afraid of mountain lions.” Mountain lions are also said to be the only power that is feared by witches.
Mountain lion skin is also used to make hair ties for girls during their puberty ceremony, the kinaalda. This ceremony is a reenactment of the first puberty ceremony that was held in the Navajo stories for Changing Woman. The type of skin used for the hair tie, either cougar, deer, mountain sheep, or otter, is determined by the personality the young girl has demonstrated while growing up, or the type of personality her family wants her to acquire. Mountain lion skin is used to tie the hair of a girl who appears to be tough, forceful, cunning, or athletic, a so-called tomboy. The tie itself is a strip of skin, two fingers wide and cut from the nose to the tail of the cat. These ties are highly prized and are handed down through the family. My friend Will Tsosie’s grandmother, as the matriarch of her family, is the keeper of a six-foot-long mountain lion hair tie that has been used to the point of falling apart, has been repaired, and used again for generations. Most of the women in this family whom I have met certainly seem to possess the strong admirable traits of cougar.
Navajos also possess a large body of traditional hunting knowledge and ritual, much of it focusing on the mountain lion. Anthropologists trace this aspect of Navajo culture not so much to the Pueblo-inspired creation stories but rather to the earlier Athabaskan origins of the tribe. In an earlier prehuman time, Navajos believed there once existed a group of master, or divine, hunters—Mountain Lion, Spotted Lion, Wolf, and Wildcat among them—who had been taught how to hunt by the game animals themselves, most notably by the Deer People. In turn, these divine hunters, each in his own special way, later taught humans how to hunt. Consequently, there is a specific Mountain Lion Way of hunting, also called the “Tiptoe” way of hunting, so named because it emphasizes the stealthy stalking methods used by mountain lions when poignantly hunting deer. This hunt was highly ritualized and was conducted under the direction of a singer familiar with it. During the hunt the hunter became a mountain lion and acted accordingly. Mountain lion fetishes—images of a cougar carved from stone—were used to gain the power of the divine hunter, and special prayers and songs were offered. One of these songs included the following passage and reflects the intimate relationship that existed between the Navajo hunter, the game animal he sought, and the mountain lion whom he sought to emulate:
He goes out hunting
The Mountain lion I am
With mahogany bow he goes out hunting
With the yellow tail-feathered arrow he goes out hunting
The finest of female game
Through the shoulder that I may shoot
In death it obeys me.
A special relationship has long existed between traditional Navajo lifeway and the mountain lion. Sadly, this is a relationship that is fading as traditional Navajo beliefs begin to disappear. As I noted at the start of this essay, few Navajos follow the traditional path. In addition, only a handful of mountain lions continue to live in Navajo Country. The last official cougar to be killed on the reservation was taken in 1978. I have talked to ranchers and sheepherders who continue to graze their livestock in the beautiful Chuska and Lukachukai Mountains of the reservation and several have told me that they occasionally catch a glimpse of the great cat. I have also on occasion seen mountain lion tracks in these mountains. When Chris Boligano, for her excellent book Mountain Lion: An Unnatural History of Pumas and People, interviewed a Navajo Fish and Game official, who was also a tribal member, in the mid-1990s, Chris was told, “We know we have lions, but we don’t know much about lion populations.” The official then added, “I’d like to see a research project to determine whether we could have a sport hunting season which would bring income from licenses.” White or Navajo, the bottom line always seems to be the almighty dollar.
At the present time the Navajo Nation does not have a lion hunting season and lions theoretically are protected. In the past two years, however, four lions that were deemed “documented livestock killers” were killed by officers of the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife (NNDFW), which operates its own predator control program. One of these lions was a female with two cubs that are now being rehabilitated by an outside organization in hope of reintroducing them back into the wild. The body parts of the lions that were killed were given to medicine people to be used in ceremonies. These lions were the first of their species known to be killed—legally or illegally—in at least fifteen years and probably much longer than that. In recent years NNDFW has experienced an increase in complaints about mountain lions, which it attributes to a rise in the lion population. But no one really knows if lion numbers are increasing or if other factors are at play. Again there is talk by NNDFW officials of initiating a study to learn more about this most secretive of predators.
In distant times, when food was scarce and the Navajo people faced starvation, they often turned to the mountain lion for their very survival. In those times of hardship Navajos sought out kills made by cougars and they would then feast upon those kills. The Navajos who utilized this food source believed that the mountain lion purposefully made these kills and left the meat behind for the people to find and consume—a gift from a fellow being that possessed far superior powers, and certainly far superior compassion, than those usually demonstrated by its human counterpart. In such cases it was proper etiquette for the hungry but appreciative Navajos to respect the mountain lion’s generosity by not eating all of this meat—which they referred to appropriately as being a “pity portion”—but rather to leave some behind for their benefactor.
In earlier times the mountain lion protected, provided for, and shared its wisdom and power with the Navajo people. In return, the lion asked for and received only understanding and respect. It was a relationship that worked well for both Navajo and lion. Today throughout its range—including on the Navajo reservation—mountain lions are under siege. There are valuable lessons to be learned from the beliefs and practices of the earliest human inhabitants of this land in terms of how we—all of us—relate to the natural world and our fellow beings like the mountain lion. Hopefully we will one day be wise enough to learn and utilize this traditional knowledge.