Wed. 6/8 at 830am: On this episode of Watersheds as Commons, we'll visit an exquisitely beautiful and deeply sacred part of the world known as Dinet?h, or Navajoland which extends through parts of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, covering an expansive 26,000 square miles.
The Navajo nation is surrounded by four sacred mountains: Blanca Peak in south central Colorado, Mount Taylor in West central New Mexico, the San Francisco Peaks in North Central Arizona, and Hesperous Peak in southwestern Colorado.
We'll explore the lifeways of the Navajo people, the culture and traditions of whom have been threatened since their creation. The Navajos were faced with potential genocide during the mid 19th century when Kit Carson was ordered by James Henry Carlton to round up the Navajos and remove them from their homeland. They were forced to march hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo, and upon returning to their homeland in 1868, their population had dwindled to less than 10,000. Today the Navajo people number over 300,000.
Slideshow photo: Pre-historic petroglyph representation of a Navajo deity at an archaeological site in Din?tah. Largo Canyon area, New Mexico. (Wikipedia.org)