Place and Identity in the Southwest | Robert S. McPherson, Sacred Land, Sacred View: Navajo Perceptions of the Four Corners Region

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Change is an inevitable though variable process in human societies and natural environments. Each generation perceives changes in their cultural universe, laments what is being lost, and wonders what will persist. They leave behind various records, bits of evidence and wisdom by which future generations will know them and their ways, hoping to justify or perpetuate patterns of behavior and belief which served them well. Each new generation weighs these messages and responds as seems proper. As the pace and scope of change increase, records become cultural signposts of what was and what should be. They provide a link with the past, with tradition. They explain the importance of cultural knowledge and suggest ways to preserve or recapture its meaning. Sacred Land, Sacred View is just such a record for the Dine or Navajo of the Four Corners region. 

Historian Robert McPherson describes the enduring relationships between earth, spiritual forces, and the Navajo people voiced in their stories, ceremonies, and prayers. His purpose is to preserve elements of and inform people about this Dine world view. Since there is already an extensive literature on Navajo culture and cosmology, McPherson has selected, edited, and topically ordered bits of leg end and modern oral testimony, songs and ceremonies, ethnographic and archaeological evidence to form an interpretive, rather than comprehensive, framework. He focuses on two themes: Navajo sacred geography and the Anasazi—land and ruins which, when interpreted through Navajo systems of belief, symbolize and help shape Navajo reality. 

In Part One McPherson describes the Navajo sacred geography of the Four Corners region and the symbiotic relationship of all elements of creation. The Navajo landscape is an animate universe with reciprocal rules and relationships governing humans, nature, and the supernatural. It is a world of oppositions or dichotomies (female/male, good/evil, wild/domestic) which maintain balance and harmony (hozho). Navajos comprehend this universe and need for hozho through traditional stories and a close observation of and appreciation for the land. In seven short chapters, McPherson describes elements of this landscape—mountains, rock formations, weather, water, flora and fauna—as both natural and supernatural phenomenon. 

As McPherson eloquently argues, Navajos are rooted to a physical and spiritual landscape. Land is both place and mnemonic device for the stories and les sons associated with the powers of that place. When people understand and observe the ways of those powers, life becomes the reenactment of the spiritual on a physical plane. Navajos and whites explain the physical world in different ways. Both have rational systems for explaining phenomena in a culturally logical manner. But as Navajo youth are exposed to modern white thinking and values, they have to juggle these competing world views. Increasingly, according to McPherson’s informants, young Navajos are forgetting their past. They are responsible for the loss of sacred ritual knowledge, the corresponding loss of sacred places, and the lessened protection and cultural power of the Dine. 

Navajos see this as the lesson of the Anasazi; they view the “past” as potential “prologue.” In Part Two, McPherson dis cusses the Anasazi as a negative cultural example, a warning of what could hap pen, an allegory to teach obedience to the Navajo way. According to Navajos, the ‘anaasdzi (“ancestral aliens or enemies”) disappeared because their knowledge and extensive possessions led them into pride, greed, and competition. They abused sacred designs, articles, and actions. They became evil and broke incest taboos. They forgot the powers of place and fell out of harmony with the spiritual universe. According to McPherson’s informants, the Anasazi experience parallels Anglo-American and nontraditional Navajo thought and action today, placing them on the same path to destruction. While Navajos consider Anasazi ruins dangerous and best avoided, they also believe they are powerful places for curing and a source of potent artifacts. When used properly by a medicine person, the oppositions of sacred and profane in Anasazi places and objects are extremely useful. According to McPherson, white excavation and preservation of Anasazi sites denies Navajos access to places and arti facts needed to carry on healing ceremonies; by “preserving a ‘dead’ culture,” we are “inadvertently helping to deny a ‘living’ one” (p. 126). 

McPherson’s book raises a number of important issues for those interested in native peoples and the environment. While doing a fine job with Navajo cultural geography, McPherson sidesteps the historic and modern reality that numerous groups maintain the Four Corners region as a culturally defined landscape, each with their own stories, values, and claims to the physical and supernatural of the region. Nor does he detail the active human alteration of this landscape over time. While this is a nice summary of Navajo explanations for the natural world and proper human behavior, the two parts of this book remain weakly connected. At times the narrative is monotonously descriptive, reading like a basic piece of salvage ethnography. At other times it is lively and interpretive, elegantly tracing a holistic world view. Specialists will find little new in the material aside from the organization and the oral testimony McPherson collected. Perhaps these are its greatest strengths—the compilation of a limited and structured overview and the modern commentary which connects present events, places, and behaviors with oral tradition—the continuity of cultural explanation and analysis. 

Given the current fascination with things Indian, especially environmental and spiritual elements of native thought, Sacred Land, Sacred View should and undoubtedly will attract a popular audience: perhaps New Agers looking for some sort of karmic road map for meaning and authenticity they find lacking in their own lives; probably non-Indians who simply want to understand the complex inter relationships of Indian peoples, cosmologies, and environments; and maybe—as McPherson and the Navajo elders he talked with hope—maybe even Utah Navajo youth looking for a reason and a way to reconsider and perpetuate Dine cultural traditions in an increasingly mod ern and technological world. 

Sacred Land, Sacred View: Navajo Perceptions of the Four Corners Region by Robert S. McPherson. Charles Redd Monographs in Western History, no. 19 (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 1992), 152 pp., $8.95.