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Show THE SEARCH FOR DINETAH 61 decorated as pottery on the Plains was. In some ways, it is much like older Navajo pottery. So perhaps the Athabascan peoples brought this way of making pots to the Fremont peoples they met on their journey. And there are other changes that could have come about as a result of contact between the two groups. Such things as barbed bone points and arrow heads, ground slate knives and pendants, and a Mexican type of corn also suggest a northern or Plains influence on local Fremont groups. Navajo stories contain some clues that also tend to support this idea of an early arrival. In the 1890s, Hataalii Nez said that the Navajos reached the Southwest when Kin Nteel was being built. One of the clans, he added, joined the People later, when Kin Nteel was in ruins. Kin Nteel has been identified as Chetro Ketl, a ruin in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. It was built about A.D. 1000 and abandoned by A.D. 1300. Other Navajos have identified the Home of the Flints as the Sun Temple at Mesa Verde, Colorado. This was built about the same time as Chetro Ketl. These clan and chantway stories suggest that the People came to the Southwest early, perhaps as early as A.D. 1000. Out of the North We can imagine the first of the Athabascan speakers walking down from the north. They may have started to leave Canada by about A.D. 400. They came in small family bands. They did not think of themselves as Navajos or Apaches. They were simply families of Dine, or the People. Several hundred years before, their distant kinsmen had migrated south through the Columbia Plateau into California. Others had gone east to the edge of Hudson Bay. The direct ancestors of the Navajos and the Apaches were the last to move. No one knows why they left Canada, except that the People loved to travel and to explore, even then. Some early trailblazers may have come down the Snake River and reached the northern end of the Great Salt Lake by A.D. 500. The main group worked its way down the east slope of the Montana Rockies to the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers. Here some of the People left the main group and moved out onto the Plains north and east of the Colorado Rockies. They would become the Apaches. In the mountains, they hunted deer. On the Plains, they surrounded buffalo as they had surrounded herds of caribou in the Far North. The northern Plains peoples had taught them about different types of corn and pottery. Some of these things |