Even though there are some two hundred Native American tribes in the United States, they share the same basic beliefs. Their traditions are similar–their lessons the same. Because the Native American lived and lives close to the earth, different environments and climates have had their effect on the stories.

Adam Woolfitt/Woodfin Camp & Associates

Each environment produces a different kind and type of character. The Alaskan Eskimo birds take the roles that Navajo animals take in our oral history. Navajo clan systems developed geographically, and the clans are place names. Each clan has a family story that concerns the relations the family had in prehistory with the Holy People.

Though geographically in a similar environment to ours today, the Hopi clans are animal and astronomic, i.e., the bear clan, the moon clan, while ours are place names, perhaps to emphasize the locations of the Navajo families during a time of nomadic travel from place to place (and from world to world).

The traditional truth and history of the Navajo people is woven through our daily life as the design in one of our rugs. The colors and the patterns of the stories are inseparable from the fabric of life itself. And the stories were and are transmitted as part of the daily life. The conversations and stories that go on during the daily process define our way of life, even as we live it.

The stories and traditions were developed and were repeated, with no thought that someday it would all be history. As today, there is no thought that as such, we are living history, but there is an awareness that this is the way things are done—the way things have always been done. There is one right way—the way of harmony and beauty.

A culture that relies predominately on oral history to continue its tradition finds that whenever stories are told, they are changed by the personality of the storyteller.