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Show HISTORY use. leat ite cn ne er rar la i er sa ae ae tegen fo jooyay woorwawp ‘hbojomyoupy A vyuvy a ¢ “W "N ja but also of the more populous settlements beyond the great mesa to the north, where tillable land is wanting. The Te-wa Indians assert that the name ‘Na-va-ji’ refers to the large area of cultivated lands. This suggests an identity with Navajo, which Fray Alonzo de Benavides, in his Memorial on New Mexico, published in 1630, applied to that branch of the Apache nation (Apaches de Navajo) then living to the west of the Rio Grande beyond the very section above mentioned. Speaking of these people, Benavides says: ‘But these [Apaches] of Navaj6é are very great farmers (labradores), for that [is what] Navajo signifies . . ‘‘great planted fields’ ’ (sementeras grandes). ‘These facts may admit of two interpretations. So far as we know this author was the first to use the name Navajo in literature, and he would have been almost certain to have derived it from the Pueblos of New Mexico among whom he lived as Father Custodian of the Province from 1622 to 1629, since the Navaj6 never so designated themselves. The expression ‘the Apaches of Navajé’ may have been used to designate an intrusive band that had invaded Te-wa territory and become intrenched in this particular valley. On the other hand, the Navaj6, since the pastoral life of post-Spanish times was not then possible to them, may have been so definitely agriculturists, as Benavides states (although he did not extend his missionary labors to them), and have occupied such areas of cultivated lands that their habitat, wherever it was, would have been known to the Te-wa as Navajé, ‘the place of great planted fields.’ ‘On the next mesa to the south, a potrero several miles in length, are two groups of ruins which I now believe constituted the settlement known in Te-wa tradition as Pi-nin-i-can-gwi. The western group is composed of one quadrangle and four small-house ruins, the group occupying a space of not over a quarter of a mile in length. About half a mile to the east is the other group, consisting of one quadrangle and two small houses. All the buildings of this settlement are within a few rods of the mesa rim, and in - face of the escarpments are many excavated cliff-houses. Of the next settlement south, the last in the Pu-yé district, we fo hsazunog of Na-va- Suryoor; the people Jo yno the fields of not only ‘ in the rock, showing constant, long continued I infer that these were [eruouleta9 MEXICAN ‘aed OF NEW oy worn hip-deep FACTS SOT op LEADING SofOlLIy 16 |
