A Brief Summary of the Navajo Creation Myth And other Stuff

Act II or What happened after everything had been created

The Third World (we so didn't see this coming)

World War II

During World War II, the Navajo were denied welfare assistance because they lived on reservations. Despite this, the Navajo Code Talkers were vital to the war effort, translating messages into their own language and passing them along, making them unbreakable code to the enemy. After the war, they began to receive assistance.

Until they had contact with the Spanish, the Navajo were mainly hunters and gatherers. Once the Spanish made contact, the Navajo began raising livestock.

The fiber of the sheep and goats was woven into blankets and clothing. This became an art form.

Weaving

The Second World

Quite a bit goes on here, but I'll cut it to five central points. (Otherwise we'd need popcorn and parental permission to stay the rest of the day.) The five points consist of: The discovery of The Gods, The creation of some more people, The teaching of weaving, The gender schism, and The Great Flood.

The Weaving

After being unceremoniously given the boot, they arrived in the Second World. (This needs some stupid instrumental music to add some kind of excitement, this crap goes on for a while.)

Who ya gonna call?

The Schism (sweet mother of anything remotely flammable, what is it with relationships and pointless arguments?

Spider Man (not that one, this one was a lot more creepy, and had about two braincells) and Spider Woman taught the people the art of weaving. Yay them. This goes on to talk about essentially how the two spider retards went on to argue back and forth about the name, literally just changing the title the other cooks up with two or three repeated words in every name they argue over. They just need to hiss and make up. Guessing that relationship ended with a black widow. Ooh, guess he won't be....hanging around in any corners anytime soon.

The women decided they could do without the men, the men agreed, and these geniuses end up on opposite sides of a river, making happy happy with whatever was around. LITERALLY. The men prospered, because they took the tools they made and grew crops, and the women just pretty much scraped by. After four years of deer antlers, bird feathers, rocks, sour cacti, and in one particularly disturbing incident with a deer liver, they got back together.

The Gods (and two genderless lackeys)

The Third World

Glow In The Dark

The Creation

The Great Flood

The Navajo refer to themselves as the Diné. The Spanish were the ones to give them the Navajo moniker (Apachu de Nabajo).

In the mid 1800s, the Navajo were killed off in large numbers by the U.S. Military. The remaining Navajo surrendered rather than starve to death and were taken to Fort Defiance for internment.

Do you have a reservation?

Traditions

They discovered that on the six mountains (White Shell Mountain, Turquoise Mountain, Abalone Shell Mountain, Big Mountain Sheep, Great Spruce Mountain, and Banded Rock Mountain) there were four Gods, and two chumps. The Gods were Talking God, House God, Black God (fire), and Water Sprinkler (somehow he just didn't get his gods diploma). There was also the two sexless weirdos, Turquoise Boy and White Shell Girl, who get those names despite being genderless.

Two children turned up missing. Wonderful. They looked for days, and found nothing until the Gods opened the ocean into Big Water Creature's home. First Man and Woman stole their kids back, but then First Angry screws everything in royal fashion. Again. He steals Notorious B.I.G Water Creature's kids. Idiot. They watch for three days as everything runs for it's life past them, and finally send some locust to scope it out. The whole thing is flooding. They book it out up a magical reed into the fourth world. Then First Angry coughs up the kids so they don't all die. How charming of the mangy punk.

After World War II a massive uranium deposit was found on Navajo land. For the next thirty years, the uranium was mined with local help. High rates of cancer and lung disease were the result.

In the 1970s laws were made to protect the natives, but no compensation was ever offered to those families whose members had died and suffered already.

Uranium

The next chapter in the story of the Navajo people is known as The Reservation Era. Forced to live on reservations the Navajo people were persecuted for following their own laws. While the majority of them were harassed and couldn’t use their own language or religion, there was a small but growing amount of support for traditional ways amongst whites.

Traditional housing consisted of hogans.

Male hogans were square or conical, female hogans were octagonal.

Silversmithing and Weaving are important traditional art forms

Navajo religion is about balance and harmony in the lives of its people. Healing is an important part of their ceremonies.

First Man and First Woman finally had kids, and they came out hermaphroditic. Lovely. The second batch had actual genders though. They went on, reproduced, grew crops, learned new things from the Gods, etc.

Navajo Code Talkers

Silversmithing, a Hogan, and Navajo people at the Treaty of 1868

Was it an African or European Swallow?

The Inhabitants

One of the Air Spirit gang decided to try and sleep with the Swallow Chief's wife. (Because magical humanoids or coyotes just naturally sleep with a blue, two pound talking bird.) Anywho, Chief Swallow inevitably heard about this the next morning, and told the three friends and one sociopath to hit the pike, and never return. Surprise, Surprise, this leads to......

Second World

The Second World was already lived in when the Air Spirit people showed up. It was a kingdom of blue (no kidding, BLUE) animals, who lived in some weird truce-ish harmony. The Swallow Chieftan welcomed the Build-a-Air Spirit group, and told them to enjoy themselves. One of them enjoyed themselves a bit too much....

The Main Point: Humans Enter the picture aka When Did the Humans Actually Show Up?

The Fourth World (Told you this took forever.)

Well, I'm really going to cut this one short. Basically, whenever the schism happened, the magic of the Third World impregnated every woman who “found pleasure.” Because inanimate objects will just up and impregnate you. The kids came out monsters. Not disabled, not mentally incapable, actual freaky, headless, human devouring monsters. This is why you don't put random things in places they don't belong. Shoulda-coulda-woulda, but now you're dead.

Humans were created after three of four worlds had been abandoned by the four air-spirit people, who were: First Man, First Woman, Great-Coyote-Formed-In-The-Water, and First Angry.

The First World

The Monsters

Those Idiots

The Sun Does It Again

They kill all the big monsters, and then let Hunger, Cold, Poverty, and Age still kill people.

• Deer Antlers: The Horned Monster
• Bird Feathers: Monster Eagle
• Rocks: The Monster Who Kicks People Down The Cliff
• Sour Cactus: The Monsters That Kill With Their Eyes
• An accidental wiping with a pebble, which looked different to The Sun: Big Giant.

The Sun sleeps around a lot, because he gets Changing Woman (who was originally a turquoise statue) pregnant, with twins. Then he jets, no child support at all. What a loser. They become: The Monster Slayer Twins: Monster Slayer and Child-Born-of-Water. They go through hell getting trained to fight monsters, and then even getting admittance of The Sun being their father. They kill the monsters, and make friends with ground squirrels and groundhogs through offering the corpses up.

The First World was ruled over by the four seas: Frog (west sea), Blue Heron (south sea), White Thunder (north sea), and Big Water Creature (east sea). The White and Black clouds came together and created First Man, and all the way across the island, the Blue and Yellow clouds came together to create First Woman.

This is a seriously involved myth, they really went to insane lengths.

Even More Involved…

After the trio had been talking for a while, the evil coyote, First Angry showed up. He began lying like a cheap rug, saying that they weren't the first to be formed. The group argued so loud and for so long, that the four seas kicked them out.

The First World

First Man and First Woman somehow both figured out how to make a fire, and each saw the other's fire. First Woman tried many times to get to First Man's fire, and finally succeeded. Once she arrived, so did Great-Coyote-Formed-In-The-Water, who was friendly enough to not be murdered.

A Brief Summary of the Navajo Creation Myth And other Stuff (because we don't have hours to waste on the unabridged version).