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[forwarded by LH. Thanks...]

>Tue, 1 Feb 2000
>http://www.azcentral.com/news/navahopi/side3.shtml
>
>Navajos: Bound to the land
>
>Excerpts from a 1993 legal report show why these Navajos believe they are
>dutybound to remain on their homelands.
>
>Our families and our ancestors have been born and raised in our
>homelands. We hope our future generations will be born here as
>well. These are the lands where our umbilical cords are buried which
>help tie us to our Mother, the Earth.
>
>There are prayers and songs like the Beauty Way and other traditional
>Dine ceremonies which have been performed on the land. These
>prayers and ceremonies anchor us to our Mother.
>
>We believe that the places where we are born and where we are
>buried are sacred places. When we pass on, we are returned to the
>lands we know and love. We are returned to our Mother.
>
>. . . The places were handed down from my mother and father. They
>told me to use it. They told me to live on that land.
>
>If we don't pray there, if that prayer is not offered and we relocate and
>are no longer there, the Holy People might think humans are no longer
>in existence and that may bring the end of the future at that time.
>
>I don't want the end to occur that soon. I want my children to live and my
>grandchildren to live.
>
>. . . We are not familiar with many places, we are not familiar with many
>areas. Because we have never been there, there might be a place
>where people are not supposed to go. . . .
>
>Or maybe we might go to a spring where our people were forbidden.
>And here we thought it was a good place and we would go there and
>we would conflict with the Holy People that protect those areas.
>
>This we could not know because our grandfathers and our mothers
>and fathers did not tell us, because we never knew that things like
>this relocation would ever take place.
>
>Source: Navajos quoted in 1993 report to U.S. Magistrate Judge Harry McCue.
>
 

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