Well good evening everyone and welcome to the 2021 Virtual Grand Canyon Star Party. I'm Ranger Rader
Lane, the National Park Service coordinator for the event, and for 31 years running Grand Canyon
has been celebrating our pristine night skies through this annual event we call the Grand Canyon
Star Party. Now ordinarily we invite hundreds of astronomers and thousands upon thousands of
visitors to the park to enjoy eight nights of some of the darkest night skies in the United States.
Each evening is kicked off with a special guest speaker in our theater followed by
telescope viewing, constellation tours, night sky photography workshops and much much more.
Now, this year we are celebrating Grand Canyon Star Party in the virtual realm,
and we're really excited! We have a whole host of incredible speakers for you this year.
Next year's Grand Canyon Star Party is going to be June 18th through the 25th 2022,
so mark your calendars and hopefully we'll be able to celebrate that on site next year. Now
before we introduce our special guest speakers this evening, I just have a few entities I'd
like to thank from the National Park Service for help for helping to put on this special event.
First I'd like to thank the Grand Canyon Conservancy. Now they're the park's official
non-profit partner, and they do tremendous work protecting and preserving the night skies
in and around Grand Canyon National Park. I'd like to thank the International Dark Sky Association,
they're the entity that certified Grand Canyon National Park as an International Dark Sky
Park back in June of 2019. I'd like to thank the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association, they're the
group that has been coming up to the park for decades to volunteer their time and expertise
to share the wonders of the universe with park visitors. They're also conducting the virtual
telescope viewing sessions after this program, so thank you so much for their continued support.
And finally, for the Society for Cultural Astronomy in the American Southwest.
They're an entity who
helped organize many of the special guest speakers this year so thank you so much to them. With that,
I want to introduce tonight's special guest speakers. Tonight we are excited and honored to
have David Begay and Nancy Maryboy. Now David Begay, Ph.D., is currently Associate Research
Professor with the University of New Mexico Albuquerque, in the College of Pharmacy Community
Environmental Health program, working with several federally funded health research projects.
David is a former Adjunct Faculty at Northern Arizona University Flagstaff
in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He's also a former Professor and Academic Dean for Dine
or the Navajo Nation College. He is currently VP for the Indigenous
Education Institute in Friday Harbor, Washington,
and he has worked with the NSF and other federal projects including NASA for 20 years
JPL, Goddard Space Flight Center on heliophysics, educational outreach, I mean just a ton of stuff.
David is considered a tribal elder and provides cultural consultant services to many organizations
and corporations both in the United States and Internationally. He is raised with a deep
cultural knowledge, tradition, and language of the dine people. He is a member of the Dine Hataalii
Spiritual and Herbal Healers Association. David is a disabled combat Vietnam Veteran,
and he's also currently a member of the Navajo Nation Human Research Review Board appointed by
the Navajo Nation Council. Dr. Nancy C. Maryboy is the President and Executive Director of the
Indigenous Education Institute located in the San Juan Islands in Washington and on
the Navajo Nation. IEI is an all-indigenous institution with a mission to preserve, protect,
and apply traditional indigenous knowledge in contemporary settings. She is an affiliate
professor at the University of Washington in the School of Environmental Sciences and Forestry.
She has been the principal investigator for National Science Foundation funded
projects, including the Cosmic Serpent, Native Universe, and Co-PI for
additional NSF projects. Dr. Maryboy is a PI for NASA's Space Science Education Consortium,
and has worked with both Goddard Space Flight Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She
works with the University of New Mexico Superfund program. She's written several books and numerous
articles on collaboration between indigenous communities and science centers with a focus on
Navajo astronomy. She works with the indigenous schools around the world and she was awarded
a lifetime achievement award for the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums.
Dr. Maryboy is a Navajo and Cherokee. She comes from a family of traditional and medical healers
on the Navajo nation and in the pacific northwest. Dr. Nancy Maryboy, David Begay thank you so much
for coming, it is a great honor to have you both with us tonight. I want to start off by
greeting everybody by my traditional greeting words I want to say yáʼátʼééh to everybody.
The word refers to the universe, the cosmos, and it refers to the existence of the universe
and the human participant. So, whenever we greet people we acknowledge the universe and
also the human participants in this big universe. So, that's how we say greetings, hello, welcome.
Thank you David. Thank you, Rader for your nice introduction ,
and thank you for the opportunity of being here albeit virtual, but we're pretending we're
at the Grand Canyon right now. So, in the background of where I'm sitting
you'll see Monument Valley. That's the backyard of where my family lives in
Southern Utah on the Navajo Nation. It's a great privilege to be here tonight,
and to be sharing with all of you. I'm sorry we're not all there in person, maybe next year,
but at least we can do something virtually right now, and so what we want to do tonight
is talk to you a little bit about Navajo astronomy and how to see the skies through Navajo eyes.
This is something that's not in very many books. You can't go to the library and
learn all you want to know. This is work that we did research on for 20-25 years.
We did our research much of it together, David learning from the men's side of a family, and I
learned from the female side of my family, and so when we put them together we have more of a whole
picture of what's going on in the skies. So, we'll go to the next slide here.
So now you can see David and see me. The Dine-Navajo word for star, Sitsoii Yoo,
refers to my ancient relation from where I come. When we look at the Milky Way Galaxy at night,
we are actually looking at ourselves. David...
I think this goes back to how Navajo's relate to the universe.
In the Navajo worldview we are made out of stars, very similar to what the
Astrophysicists and Astrobiology say about human being made out of stardust. I think
we have something in common here. In Navajo when they say the Sitsoii Yoo,
they were referring to their ancient past, and they are a part of a much bigger universe.
In this world we are experiencing our existence as a human, but we're also related to the
to our ancient past, the star, the energy that preceded our life.
What we have here is a Navajo Hogan. It's a traditional home.
Whenever you see Hogan on the Navajo Reservation, you will see the Hogan facing east.
The Hogan is made in accordance with the natural cosmic cycle,
the Summer Solstice, the Winter Solstice, and the Equinoxes. Whenever you go into a Hogan you go
clockwise, or sunrise. If you say Navajo [Navajo word] and that's direction of the sun.
You walk in accordance with the direction of the sun, and how the sun travels.
Most of the stories about Navajo star stories, the constellations, are told in the winter time.
But, there's a small part during mid-summer,
Navajo's, they referred to that period as shí'ílníí',
"shí'" meaning the summer, "ílníí" is referring to the mid-summer, and that refers to the summer
solstice. Traditionally people can talk about these winter stories there at that time
very briefly. What we're presenting is consistent with that teaching.
Yes, and the Hogan that you see here is somewhere west of Monument Valley,
and this is a female Hogan. It's rounded, and this particular region of Navajo Nation,
the hogans are made of the sand. It's sort of a sandy muddy mixture
over a wooden frame. There are also male Hogan, there are also Hogan's made of logs,
and today they are sometimes made of all kinds of different materials. If you look at the shape of
the Hogan, it's a reflection of the sky. It's a dome shape, and it's what you see if you're
standing on the ground looking up. You'll see the sky as a kind of a dome-shaped sky.
All of the stars that we're going to be talking about fall into what direction you're
looking at, and then the top of the sky and the north star would be about halfway up to the top
of the sky if you were looking north. This particular shot was taken looking west.
So, what we want to do right now is talk a little bit about world views, because all cultures
have had in the past, and many have them today, an astronomy. Most tribes have a very rich
complex version of the skies, as they sometimes say,
you'll hear people say "As above, as below."
But it all is dependent on a sense of place; where were you rooted, where does your family come from,
what are the stories of the land that you're on, what are the stories of the sky that's above?
That interrelationship of Earth and sky is so important, and that sense of a place is
so important. That sense of place determines, to a great extent, what is your world view. Now, on
this slide, we're showing you two different world views just to make this point. All kinds of
different cultures have their own world views, whether it's Peru, or India, or Celtic, or
in this case you're seeing the Navajo worldview and the Mayan world view. The Mayan's, this
particular one came from down in the Yucatan, and this was done years and years ago for National
Geographic, but we've always liked this slide. What's interesting in this slide is that
they're featuring four different colors of the earth, so you've got white, and red, and yellow,
and black. Then you'll see the Navajo has four different colors also,
but you'll also see different worlds. If you start at the bottom, that's the underworld, that's where
Mayan athletes would play ball games, but they were they were not like our NBA basketball games.
These games were life and death games, and if you were on the losing team and
you were the captain, you would lose your head. So, the games were played with very high stakes.
That was the underworld, and then you come up to the yellow world, which is the world of plants.
Then you go up to a third world which is where you see a pyramid, and then that connects
you to the sky, and you'll see different constellations of the Mayans in the sky.
Now we'll switch over to the Navajo world view, and David will explain that.
If you peek through the mind of a Navajo traditional person,
and how that mind works, this Navajo worldview that you see here might be a way this traditional
person might be thinking. They believe that they emerge from an original light pretty much
related to what we discussed earlier, Sitsoii Yoo, that what preceded
all life process is starlight, and that's what you see here in this
Navajo world view that's shown here. On the bottom there's a black star and that preceded all
life process and that's how Navajo was emerged to this world. To this world they were
given land with boundaries, so if you look straight across you see east, you see "E",
and that refers to Mount Blanca, the south on the right side the Mount Taylor,
on the west side is San Francisco Peak by Flagstaff, and the north Mount Hesperus
by Durango. Navajos refer to their homeland by these sacred mountain.
You also see some yeii figures - the white, the turquoise, the yellow, and the black -
that refers to the different parts of the day, white representing the predawn
mid-days; the turquoise, evening twilight when the sun goes down; and then the black
represents the darkness or the night. So, it's really the natural cosmic
order what you see here. Then there's eight main constellation that Navajos refer to
most of the time, and then there's other time when they refer to 12 main constellation, and so that's
what we have depicted up here on the upper part.
This is what Nancy was talking about, this is a Hogan. The Hogan was made with this in mind,
the dome on top and and then the inside, if you go inside a Hogan,
it'll be circled like that, what you see right here.
Okay you might be wondering how ancient star knowledge is acquired. As I already said you can't
go to a library and look it up. You may be able to go to Google and find something on online, but
when we started out our research, about 25 years ago, the only way you could get this information
was to go to knowledge holders, primarily elders and medicine people. At that point
a lot of tribes have this knowledge and they keep it they keep it protected;
they don't let it out of the tribe they because it's sacred knowledge. We're always very careful,
what we leave out and what we share with others, but basically the knowledge is acquired
from people. It's an oral knowledge, and so elders like this woman,
that's a primary way to get your knowledge. I would get it from elder women and my
family. David would get it from elder men and his family.
We also went to traditional practitioners, medicine people,
and you couldn't just go to them and ask a question like "Well, where's the Big Dipper and
what does it signify?" They question you first, "what do you want that knowledge for?"
It has to be for a really good reason, and for us, our primary audience
has always been young Navajo's, so that the knowledge will be carried on of the skies.
Another way, it's very directly connected with learning from animals, and birds, and plants,
and what plants are coming up at certain times. For example, in the month February,
the Eagles, the months are named after things that are happening, so in February it has to do
with the little Eagles and their nests. But before the little Eagles can be in a nest, there have to
be food for them and that food is normally insects and worms, then there has to be food for them. So,
it's all a cycle, and as you see it all, as it unfolds from the insects. and the worms,
and then the smaller birds. and then the Eagles. and they all feed their own young.
This is directly connected with certain things that are happening in the sky, and what's being
planted, what's being harvested, you have to see the whole picture interrelated. So,
you go to the animals, and birds, and plants. You do your round observations.
You have to get up before dawn and go out because that's the time just before dawn when everything
that is visible that's really important, it happens just before the sun comes up. A
lot of our observations had to be done very early, and it always had to do with what was coming up in
the eastern horizon just before the sun. That's called in western astronomy the heliacal rise.
You had to be looking at what stars were available, and then imagining that hundreds of
years ago, even thousands of years ago, people were using those stars to identify certain
constellations and certain things they should be doing at that time of year. It's very seasonally
based. We also had access to some ancient star maps that were done in the 1800s. They were done
in an older language, and so I had a very complex process of translating them, which
went with I had to learn how to pronounce that old old language, and then say it to David.
Then he had to take the ancient language back to today's Navajo, and then we had to put it into
English, and then in English that everyday speaking English. There were many steps
all along the way, but this is how we got a lot of our information. Also, a lot of it is contained
within ceremonial songs and language, and so having access to the language we were able to
go much much further and deeper than people had gone before, and resurrect certain things that
had really been forgotten by mainstream Navajos, like for example the Thunderbird constellation.
Then we also used computer technology, and we used programs like starry skies, and we'd run
the skies back and forth, back and forth, because we wanted to identify the Navajo
constellations with the western Greek constellation. We could
point at a star and say "Yes, Navajos did this with that star,
but this is the name of the star in western astronomy" so people could put
the things together. We knew exactly what patterns and cycles we were talking about.
Yeah one of our mission of IEI, Indigenous Education Institute, is to do outreach,
educational outreach to students K through 12. Here we were working with star school
which is located northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona and one of the employees is here. We were working
with students, and we handed out t-shirts and so everybody got a t-shirt, and I think this is what
the employee here he's trying to display on his t-shirt, the Navajo universe. What we did is we
developed this Navajo star map in comparison to the Greek star map.
We wanted to do a comparative illustration, a comparative
presentation, so people will use the Greek constellation as a reference.
But, the only thing that comes out different is the different pictures.
Right in the center of this t-shirt is the
is the North Star. Maybe we can go on to the next slide where it shows that in the universe. That
map of the universe, right at the center there's a fire,
and there's a man and a woman. On the bottom is the man, on top is the woman,
and the one on the bottom, we call it Nahookos Bika’, male revolving.
The top one is female revolving, and it's Cassiopeia in Greek constellation.
They kind of go counterclockwise in the sky, and those three
are considered one group of stars, male and female and the central fire. What we did is,
we picked some of the main constellation like Pleiades, Orion, Scorpius, the people
pretty much know these constellations. We wanted to work with them, mainly to educate the young
students so people will know the cultural stories behind these constellations ,and make comparison
to not only the Greek constellation but other constellations like the Babylon,
and other nationalities like the Chinese. So, mainly,
this work, it was done to to reach out to young students
This is a poster we developed. All the numbers are compared to their
names in Navajo, and their names in English, and their location. Some other ones you can
see up here, down at the bottom there's a coyote waving a blanket full of crystals.
That's a story about how the coyote brought chaos to the universe. There's a white horse
with a rider who's carrying the moon. There's a bear, I'm going clockwise here,
there's a bear which has to do with the Thunderbird constellation.
Keep going on around the sun is the turquoise horse with a
a being carrying the sun. Then we have a snake, and we have the Pleiades
just a little bit to the right of the north star. Basically this is a way,
what was fun was when all the students in the school put on their t-shirts and we went outside,
and it was like a wearable curriculum, because they all could point out different
stars on each other because they were wearing the t-shirt that had all the locations.
So let's talk about a little bit more about some of the Navajo
constellations. This is the one we said that was the Nahookos constellations,
and in western astronomy these are normally considered three different constellations, but in
Navajo they're all considered one. In the middle you see the central fire, so this is like the
central fire of the sky, also you may know it as Polaris or the north star. This is the star that
doesn't move, and this is a star you can use for navigation. What is painted here is pretty much
what you'll see if you go outside tonight toward the end of May and look up. You'll see,
maybe about 10 or 11 at night, you'll see the Big Dipper with the handle of the
dipper pointing more up to the middle of the sky, and right across you're going to see Cassiopeia,
and then of course the central fire. If you remember back to the Hogan slide,
even today in the Hogan's, and even today in Navajo homes, the central fire
is where you would do your cooking. It's how you'd stay warm, it's like what makes your house
comfortable, usually, if you have a fireplace or something that relates to a central fire.
Then on the left here you will see the male revolving one,
Nahookos Bika, that is the Big Dipper,
as you can see by the stars on his clothes. He's a warrior, and he's connected here with the crescent
moon, the first crescent moon. He's got eagle plume on his head, he's got bows and arrows
because he's a warrior, he's got turquoise for protection, he's wearing a bow guard, and holding
an arrowhead, and then he has a medicine bag. He's all about being the father of the family
and taking care of the family. On the other side is Nahookos Bi’aad, and she's the female.
She's also a warrior, and she also has eagle feather, and she here is represented by the
full moon. If you look down to where her hands are, she's also wearing a turquoise bracelet
and that's for protection, and she's got two weapons. Her weapons are the grinding stone
and the stirring sticks, and with those she can feed her family and keep them healthy.
She too never leaves the Hogan, she's always there and they're like the ideal
mother and father. These stories were put up in the sky because land
forms can change. You can have floods, you can have a mountain slipped down, but the stars
stay the same. So, they put stories up in the sky connected with them, so those lessons,
those virtues, those ways of living would always be there to remind the people.
Another one that's very important in Navajo is the Pleiades. This one, if you go outside you're not
going to see because this is the time of year when the Pleiades become invisible from Earth.
It's really interesting, a lot of different tribes use the Pleiades to tell when to plant.
They also use them to tell what the harvest is going to be like, but the Incas for example,
they they use the Pleiades to know when to plant and so does Navajo. Here you have the
Pleiades, and you have one shot on the right hand side that's a beautiful NASA a photograph
from the Hubble Telescope, and on the left hand side you have one of our paintings. We had this
excellent painter named Melvin Bainbridge who did about 26 constellation paintings for us. Anyway,
this one is of boys going out, and they're learning how to be little warriors. They're
followed by a woman with a buckskin slung over her shoulder. The boys get excited and they run
on the head, and they go over a hill, and they're not seen anymore. Okay, that's an indication
to Navajos that it's time to plant your corn. That is connected with other things, like
certain waterfalls will start running down from the mountains, and certain plants start growing.
With all these indicators you plant your corn. There's a little saying that says "Don't let
Dilyehe see you plant your seeds." Well, Dilyehe is the Navajo name for the Pleiades.
The idea is when it becomes, it travels with the sun in April and May, and when the sun goes
over the western horizon for sunset the Pleiades are also go over the western horizon, and
then they become invisible from Earth. About six weeks later, at the end of June or into July,
you see them again. This time they're going to be in the east part of the sky, and when those
are visible, for the lack of rise again, when they're visible on the horizon, then you stop
planting. If you don't follow these processes you'll plant too early, and what will happen then
there could be an early frost and you'll lose your little plants, and if you plant too late
you can also have an early fall frost and you lose your crop. So, it was
very important. Today we have calendars, and we have computers, and all this. We always know
what time it is, what season it is, but a long, long time ago people had to depend on the stars
for these kind of indicators. So, the Pleiades are very, very important in a lot of cultures.
An interesting thing, if any of you drive Subaru, Subaru is the Japanese name for the Pleiades.
That's lots of, lots of different cultures acknowledging the Pleiades.
The Navajo word means something like "pin-like sparkles". They're kind of
dim and they sparkle, but you can always see them because they're near Orion. If you know where to
look you'll find Orion, you'll find the Pleiades just ahead of Orion.
Here's Orion. Orion is called Atse Ets'Ozi in Navajo,
and he too is a warrior. This is a really easy constellation to find in the sky, primarily
because of these three stars that make, what they call make up the belt of Orion, but Navajo it's
his quiver and arrows that you're seeing. He is a warrior just totally traditionally, with his bow
and arrow, and he's a protector of the people. On the other side, this is another Hubble photo
of what's in Orion's belt. This is a nebula, and this is where stars are born.
If you're looking up toward Orion and you see Orion's belt or you see, let's say,
arrow and quiver, you will see that is where stars are made,
created. It's a really important part of the sky and very easy to see.
If you were looking for the Pleiades, you'd go past the hand of Orion and go out to the,
up to a little bit north, a little bit in front of him and that's where the Pleiades will be.
Here's another one that's important, really important for Navajo is the coyote Ma'II,
is in Navajo. All kinds of tribes and peoples have a trickster element, it seems to be almost
universal. This one, the coyote, the Ma'II, is no exception. Now, if you were up in the Pacific
Northwest, you would have stories about Raven coming in and disrupting the order. If you were
in Cherokee, in North Carolina, or in Oklahoma, you'd have stories about Giant Rabbit coming in
disrupting the order. But because we're talking about Navajo, a sense of place now it's the coyote
that comes in and disrupts the order. What he did is he brought chaos, and the way he did it
is he went up to where the holy beings were very carefully placing stars in the sky,
and he got very excited, and he wanted to be part of it. They said "All right,
you can plant one star" and he planted one, and then he planted a second star,
and then he said "Well, it's kind of boring, I think I'll make it all happen differently." So,
when nobody was looking he grabbed a pouch from one of the holy people. He threw it up in the air
and hundreds of crystals gathered all over the sky,
and they didn't have an order, and they obviously wouldn't have names. That is
how the coyote created chaos. There's always a little coyote factor everywhere. Just as you think
everything is going right, something will come in and disrupt the order, you can almost bet on it.
Anyway, that's the Navajo trickster. It's also a star, he has his own star too.
It's called Canopus, and if you are in the more southern part of the Navajo reservation
or anywhere else further south, you will see Canopus. It's very much to the south, due south,
and has a very tiny little orbit that just comes up and goes down. It comes up and goes down
only in, like, two months of the whole year. It's also called the monthless star because
it doesn't even last for a month. So, monthless star, that's the coyote.
The star, the Coyote star, is referred to Ma' ii BizǪ.
In Greek it's Canopus, and about the third week in
September of each year, this star will come up, and it sits directly south from Navajo land.
Every three years when this star comes up, Canopus, a 13th moon is added to
re-align and to put the universe back in the order.
Because, the lunar calendar and the solar calendar are two different process,
and so they use Canopus to bring order back to the lunar cycle.
Right after Canopus comes up, right there afterward, a 13th moon is added.
What we have here is a Navajo rug depicting Father Sky, Mother Earth.
On the left side is the Father Sky depictions as all the main constellations.
Some of the constellation that we covered, they're all in here in this figure,
including the moon, and the sun, and also the milky way.
On the right side is Mother Earth, and it depicts some major
food that Navajo used over the years: the corn, the squash, and the beans.
Many indigenous people in Central America and South America also use corn, squash, and beans.
It goes all the way up into North America, and all the way to the east coast among the Iroquois,
and also all the way into Canada. This food source goes across the continent.
What we have here is the relationship between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
The Earth is a participant of a much bigger universe.
The human being, a part of the Earth, is a participant of everything on Earth,
and the human and the Earth are a participant of a much bigger universe. It's holistic,
everything is interconnected. It's one big universe and we are a participant,
and this is what it tries to show here.
Here we have the sun. The sun is everything in Navajo. It makes everything happen.
In the Navajo worldview, for example, when a Navajo sees a whirlwind, an elder
sees a whirlwind, they will say that it's the sun acting. Or, if they see a tornado,
they'll say it's the sun acting. A tornado comes into being through the sun's heat and
the air that's up in the atmosphere. So when thunder emerges from the tornado,
it's the sun acting. Whenever there's something that falls to the ground,
you know it's the sun acting. It's interrelated, the gravity is interrelated with the sun.
Whenever people talk about electromagnetism, and western Navajos talk about those things,
they refer to it through the electrical current that exists in the sun. It makes its own
nuclear fissions. That's how physics would talk about it and Navajos talked about that too.
These things can be talked about, but they take a much longer presentation.
Rader told you earlier that David and I work with NASA and have for about 20 years.
Right now we're working with Goddard Space Flight Center in a heat, it's called the heat consortium,
which has to do with heliophysics. We've been wondering for a long time how we
can connect Navajo astronomy with the sun. David just shared with you some of these ways,
through electromagnetic forces, and gravity, things like that. There is a Navajo story,
they call them the hero twins, Monster Slayer and Born For Water, and they
were born when the Sun impregnated two twin girls. One of the twin girls had these,
Monster Slayer and Born For Water, and the other one had a monster. As the twins
grew up they wanted to know who their father was, and when they found out their father was the Sun,
they they wanted to go see the sun. They had a very specific reason for going to the Sun.
The monster, and other monsters, as well were roaming the earth,
and one in particular was eating a lot of children. This was a terrible thing,
as you can imagine, and so they wanted to
go to the Sun and get some weapons they could bring back to help slay the monsters. So, they
they began a long intricate journey, and there's not time to tell you the whole thing,
but basically they visited Spider Woman. They got weapons like a bow and an arrow,
I mean not a bow and arrow, I'm sorry, an eagle plume, and they used that to protect themselves
as they journeyed on a rainbow to the Sun. When these twins got to the Sun, they went inside the
Sun where the house of the Sun was. At first the Sun didn't recognize them and said "You're not my
children" but he gave them all these tests and they passed every one. Finally the Sun
had to admit that they were his boys, so he ended up giving them weapons,
and they got a bow and an arrow. They came back to Earth and they were able to slay the monster.
This also, you could look at this as a story for our times, because you can think of the
Covid virus as a monster being in our time. You can think of using the sun's rays to
combat the Covid virus, because we know that sun and radiation can have an impact. We were
trying to figure out how we would relate this, and when we started remembering there were two sons,
two boys, and they went to the Sun. Then we started thinking about some of NASA's missions,
and there's two right now which are doing some amazing things.
One is the Parker Probe, which is going into the sun itself. It has all its heat shields at the
forefront of the mid of the machine, and it goes into the sun, but the part
that's recording things stays cool enough to send back to earth the information.
The other one is the Solar Orbiter, which has the wings sticking out, and it goes around the sun
collecting all kinds of information about solar flares. It's kind of like Navajo's had two twins
that went to the sun and now NASA has two missions that are going to the sun.
Surprisingly enough
the scientists that are in charge of these missions,
they're very interested in the Navajo story and what
it stands for. We're working with them and I think we'll have, probably in a
year or so, we'll have a PowerPoint, or a video, or something, to explain the whole relationship.
Anyway, that is the end of our presentation today. We say thank you, we say aʼhéeʼhee.
We hope you've learned something you can use when you look at the skies wherever you are,
and hope to see you someday in the Grand Canyon. Goodbye!
Well, thank you both so much. That was such a fascinating talk!
So many questions, but I'll just keep it down to maybe one or two here.
it seems like from a lot of the talks we've heard this week, particularly from some of
the Puebloan peoples of the Grand Canyon region, that that sun watching is a very important part of
some of those particular cultures. It seems like the Diné culture has a much more robust
constellation cannon, and maybe more of an attention towards the stars themselves.
Is there some reason that you can, or do you want to comment on how that might
be accounted for? Or is it just maybe, in virtue of the very influential book you've
both published, Sharing the Skies, that maybe have revealed much more
star knowledge and things like that from the Diné culture? Or do you feel like the Diné
Diné culture actually does pay a little bit more attention to the stars for some particular reason?
Let me take a crack at that and then I'll hand it over to David. Good question, Rader,
really good question. We've always thought, I mean it's up to each tribe to let out what
they think is appropriate. We know that the Pueblos, I'm not talking about the
Hopi or the ones in Arizona, but the Pueblos
per se, you'll find they don't talk much about their
own astronomy. They're not supposed to, and they really keep it to themselves.
But, it makes sense to think that when you look at these Ancestral Pueblo places like Mesa Verde,
or Chaco Canyon, that are so based on watching the sun, and the solstices,
and the equinoxes, when the sun's rays hit certain places on certain buildings.
They were a more sedentary people. They were growing corn, and they had to
stay home and take care of their crop. They were planting corn way before Navajos were,
and the Navajos we know because we traced Navajo language similarities all the way up to Alaska
in the early 1990s. We'd go up and work with different Alaskan knowledge holders.
We found that everything we told you about the Nahookos names, they have that name up there,
Nahookos, for the North Star. We followed the trail all the way down to, I think with
Sarsi in British Columbia, and they have Plains Indian influence. That's when
some of the other stars got their names. So, it was like Navajos had a journey down
from Alaska. I mean, they had to have because the language similarities show it all the way
down. Since we had the language, we could talk to people and ask for their star knowledge and names.
It was really fascinating. So, Navajos were a nomadic people for a long, long time, and
where the sun was hitting a certain specific rock wouldn't have been as important as to
know where the north star was and follow the stars. We've worked
very closely with Native Hawaiians over the years, in fact I love to acknowledge one,
Kālepa Baybayan, who just passed away, who was a really dear friend of ours,
and was one of the main navigators for the Hōkūleʻa around the world voyage. He and his
accomplices, they traveled by canoe, and they traveled by the stars, and the waves,
and the birds, and they did travel all the way around the world without any western instruments.
It's astonishing, and people like Kālepa, who was the captain, had all that in his mind;
where the stars were at certain places. If you're going from one place to another in the
Pacific, you've got to depend on the stars because there's nothing else there. There are
aspects, like certain fish would come up, and see them over and over in certain places, and
when the birds were doing certain things they knew they were in sight of land.
But they had to be really precise on triangulating their stars, as they go
over the equator and down into the southern skies, everything changed. They
had to have other stars to look for. You had to because if you were off, like,
20 miles, you'd miss the island you were going to. There's life and death.
There were different people, whether they depended on the
sun rays, or the stars, or the waves, or whatever, it depended on their sense of place.
That's how I would answer your question. David, if you want to add something else please do.
Yeah, I think you have to think of the sun and the constellation as one big universe.
That seems to be real clear when you talk to traditional people.
The sun
manifested itself through different processes and motions. The emphasis
seems to be more on the process and the motion of the sun. For example, for east
and west,
we say for east, "Ha’a’aah" is where the sun comes up. It's never in one place because the sun
travels left and right, and you know the solstice, and the equinox - it's constantly in motion and
process, so where the sun comes up every day is different, in all the seasons,
and all the months between these two, east and the west. Where the sun comes up in the east,
where the sun goes down in the west, and in between. How the sun travels between those two.
If you put those two together, sort of like side by side, east and west directly,
between those two will be directly south, and that's where the sun travels. It gives
direction, and then for the north you use north stars to do the four direction.
The sun and the constellation the exist together, it provides
day and night. They enable you at certain parts of the night sky, for
example in the pre-dawn hour when the sun's light first emerges in the east direction,
they call the time hayííłką́. Five minutes later, we refer to that period as
[Navajo word], the light spreads out. Five minutes later again, "dah’a’dii’ą́" the light emerges up.
Then the five minutes later again, [Navajo word], that dawn and
process is over. In that period, at that time when the rays are going up, it's like a feather.
In that time each month, there's going to be the constellation
that's connected to that month. Between crescent moon and full moon of each month,
there's a constellation that's going to appear and it's going to be sitting in the sun rays.
People refer to that as heliacal rise.
Then there's also the sun and how it interrelates with the movement
of the season. It's right in there, and it's happening all at the same time.
It just so happened that we talked more about the star constellation in the book,
and we could easily, probably, write a whole book on the sun by itself. There's many
relationships, there's some personal relationship. whenever the sun comes up, the sun rays will hit
your forehead, right, and then the sun rays, the sunlight will go down from here, this way,
down to your feet. In the evening when the sun goes down, it goes back the other way,
from your feet all
the way up. The sunlight will move, once it goes
over the hill on western horizon, this is where the
sunlight will move away from the body. Like the star dust that we mentioned earlier,
the same stories goes with the sun. We are stardust, we are sun.
we're literally sun. Everything that the sun provides, the resources, what provides life.
without the sun there is no life. So the sun is life.
Navajo say that all the energy and mixed matter,
it's what Einstein talks about, same thing. To Navajos this is old knowledge. No big thing.
That's incredible! From what I'm hearing from both of you is, it's just that maybe the
semi-recent history of nomadism, in the Diné culture means that the stars
are maybe a little bit more important in the culture, because independent of your latitude,
you can be traveling over vast distances and still tell time based on the helical rising of stars,
which is what you were, David, explaining there, and the fact that, David, you just mentioned
that there's various names for the time periods just before the sun rises and as the sun rises,
is a testament to the fact that the Diné people have been watching the heliacal
rising of stars for so long. Just to have those names is incredible for that. What a beautiful
and wonderful unique cultural trait that you were just able to share with us. Thank you so much for
sharing that and I think that's a great way to end this talk. Everybody please
thank David and Nancy in the chat when you get a chance. If you want to learn more about Diné
astronomy and the cosmological worldview of the Navajo people, please check out their work Sharing
the Skies, an amazing book, incredible resource that many people use around the Southwest here.
Please stay tuned for the virtual telescope viewing sessions occurring right after this
program, and again the 2022 Grand Canyon Star Party is June 18th through the 25th.
We hope to see all of you online visitors on site here next year for the star party. Cross
your fingers that we'll be able to celebrate on site, and hopefully in future star parties you'll
be able to meet Nancy and David here on site at the Grand Canyon, as we're going to try to get
them, as hard as we can, to come and visit us here at the Grand Canyon Star Party in future years.
Once again, David and Nancy, thank you so much for your time, and knowledge,
and wisdom. We really hope to see you at Grand Canyon and in the future.
Thank you, thank you, we hope so too!