Diné Clans and Climate Change: A Historical Lesson for Land Use Today

Abstract

This paper presents the history of the Diné (Navajo) system of kinship and clanship as a response to environmental and political instability. We describe the Diné traditional system of k'éí, kinship and clanship, held together by k'é, the ethic of universal relatedness, and how, after 1930, the system has fared under conquest, settler colonialism, climate change, and replacement with a government-administered grazing-permit system. As long recognized, through the k'é principle, the clan system distributed people on the land flexibly in response to unstable conditions for farming and stock raising. Less understood is that, through kéí—the mutual rights and responsibilities of clan relatives—the system also limited that flexibility to make the distribution more orderly.