44 THE GREAT DENE RACE.

tion of other Navajos, or Diné, away to the north, whom they call ‘Déné
nahodloni’, i. e. ‘they who are also Navajos’... They even tell of a party
of Navajos who once set out to look up the Dene Nahodloni, and say that
their hunters found their fellow-tribesmen, stayed with them a short time,
and then returned to their homes in the south, after their northern kin had
refused to go with them”?.

In a private letter to the present writer, he confirms his printed state-
ment by adding: “Most of the old Navajos, at least all the old-timers whom
I have asked, know something about the Déné Nahodloni... They know
that somewhere, at a great distance, there are ‘people who are also Déné’,
who speak their language, and who at one time were one people with them-
selves. They do not mean the Apaches, for the Apaches have time and again
made themselves very clearly and distinctly known to the Navajos. The home
of the Déné Nahodloni is said by some to be in the north, by others in the
northwest; most of them do not know in which direction to place it’. These
declarations, coming from a missionary who, for several years, has been stationed
among the Indians of whom he writes, are important to the ethnologist, and
well worth to be put on record for the benefit of future students of the
American aboriginal races.

When did that fateful split occur in the Déné family? The fact that it
must have taken place at a comparatively early period is made evident by
this passage from A. F. Bandelier’s “Indians of the Southwestern United
States”: “When the Spaniards first met them [the Navahoes] in 1541, they
were tillers of the soil, erected large granaries for their crops, irrigated their
fields by artificial water-courses or acequias, and lived in substantial dwellings,
partly underground’”®. According to Brinton, the Navahoes place the date of
their exodus — or rather of the beginning of their separate national existence
— about seven centuries ago. Father Leopold is inclined to think that com-
putation excessive, and suggests from 500 to 600 years as being a more
probable lapse of time. On the other hand, judging from the morphology of
the Navaho dialect, one would feel warranted in inferring that the scission in
the stock affected especially tribes which had more in common with the
northwestern than the northeastern Dénés, and that it happened before time and
commerce with aliens had resulted in the peculiar social organization among
the former which is avowedly of a comparatively late date, and caused those
complicated conjugations. now proper to the Carrier and Babine dialects.
Our reason for this deduction is that “the Navahoes have more similarity
with the Sékanais sociologically than with any other of the northern Déné
tribes, while the root words of their language approach very closely to those

1 «The Catholic Pioneer’, Oct., 1905.
? Dec., 27, 1905.
3 Quoted in Brinton’s “American Race’, p. 72.