Our Language Is Medicine

Shiprock, NM

Our language is who we are. It is powerful. It is medicine for our Diné people.

For more than two years, I’ve been doing radio talks about land stewardship, our culture, our laws, and our language. One thing I continue to believe is this: we cannot keep trying to build our future only through someone else’s worldview. Too often, we negotiate schools, healthcare, government, and even our identity through English and Western ways of thinking first. Then we turn around and try to fit our people into systems that were never built from our teachings.

That weakens our ability to advocate for ourselves as Diné people.

Everything must begin from our own foundation our language, our culture, and our understanding of the world.

Our Creator instructed us (Diné) to move into this area. We are not immigrants to this land. We belong within these four sacred mountains. That understanding came long before the Navajo government, before English, before outside systems. Those things are secondary. Our language and teachings are primary.

Sometimes I think we have forgotten that.

It’s admirable that young people leave to get degrees and educations, but literacy in the outside world is not the same as understanding who you are as Diné. Too many young people come back and see their grandparents as “uneducated” because they only speak Navajo. But linguists say Navajo is one of the most difficult and complex languages in the world. Our elders carry knowledge, memory, teachings, and ways of thinking that cannot fully be translated into English.

A lot of my understanding came from my cheii, who was a medicine man. His songs and stories were part of his medicine, passed down long before 1868 through generations of ancestors. But when he passed, much of that ended too. At the time, we thought we were too modern, too educated, too advanced for those ways. Looking back now, I think he probably saw us as people slowly losing who we were.

That is why protecting our language matters.

Language is not just words. It is governance. It is clan relations. It is how we understand responsibility, wellness, land, and one another. If we lose the language, we lose the roots that hold everything together.

And if we want a strong future as Diné people, we have to retrace those roots and remember what guided us before everything else.

Tom Chee, Shiprock Chapter

June 2026