Navajo Mountain And Rainbow Bridge Religion

Condition: Very Good.  Very  light fading to spine, light shelf wear, wear to edges of corners of cover. But it is otherwise clean with a strong binding.

This book owes its existence to a local crisis in Navajo religion. In 1971 a number of Navajos in the northwestern region of the Navajo Indian Reservation became concerned about the expanding waters of Lake Powell. The water level continued to rise and eventually intruded beneath Rainbow Bridge, a large natural sandstone arch in southern Utah. The Navajos sought assistance from a legal services office on the Reservation, claiming that important religious interests were being infringed by the flooding.

After some initial hesitations, about whether information and samples of this sacred tradition should ever be entrusted to tape recorders and to paper, all of our informants decided that the serious­ness of the situation demanded that they risk the unprecedented. And even though the limits of conscience varied from one informant to another, their reasoning was generally this: "The gods will not object when we, their people, try to protect their own sacred places and bodies." So we thank Robert Long-Salt, Floyd Laughter, Buck Navajo, Ernest Nelson, Buster Hastiin Nez, Paul Goodman, and Lamar Bed­onie for their contributions.