Do choose your parents carefully according to their genes.

She is like the character from Horizon but instead of climbing trees she climbs cakes

I can't believe they had non Navajo Women as speaker for the house of the Navajo Nation Council.

I can't even imagine what a metric ton of carbon looks like, but it sounds huge. $39 to remove that seems like a steal. Why aren't we using this now?

That they don’t have a firm grasp on reality if that was their first assumption

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Let them do that, then just stop recycling any cardboard or paper and instead pump it into old oil wells.

Good question! It is really long, like explaining the Old Testament or something like that. But First Woman is basically the mother goddess-equivalent mixed with an Eve-equivalent. She and First Man came to be in the First World as spiritual beings, gained consciousness, and brought the People to this world (the fourth or fifth world, where we are now). After lots of other stuff that happened, they formed the sun and moon and land and stars, and formed themselves bodies to inhabit and became humans.

The creation myth is called the Diné Bahane, if you want to look it up! Also, Wally Brown, a Navajo historian, has some slightly long winded but highly informative videos about it on YT. My favorite source about Navajo culture in general (though not necessarily about mythology) on YT though is Navajo Grandma. She talks a little bit about the origins of the people here, mostly starting with Changing Woman.

shrug You can't blame society as a whole for your own mental state. If your first thought was that the Navajo nation was run by a white guy, maybe that is a good time for some introspection.

We all have implicit biases. It shouldn't be so difficult to admit that we all can improve. Externalizing mistakes means that you will repeat them.

Yuk

There were 2 healthcare providers in some reddit thread the other day who agreed that in their practice, they never see obese people over 50. Either they lose weight, or fall prey to obesity-related conditions.

Google what happened when the Sioux tried to have stricter Covid regulations on their reservation than the rest of South Dakota. The governor worked harder at stopping them then she did at stopping Covid.

First Navajo woman? what is she, like five, ten thousand years old?

Every Redditor: "Fuck"

In Navajo culture as I was taught to understand it by my family, we are all spiritual people housed in physical forms. Our spirit and our relationships are who we “are.” It is part of why a Diné will introduce themselves with the names of the clans of their parents/grandparents when first meeting someone: it establishes their relationships and where they sit in the world.

When we introduce ourselves like this, we lead with our mother’s clans, as the Diné are matrilineal. That’s why woman is the primary gender. Traditional Navajo society is also matriarchal and matrilocal. That is, men leave their mothers’ home and relocate to their wife’s home when they marry, and children “belong” to their mother’s family. So, if you are Navajo, your cousins on your mother’s side are closer to you than your cousins on your father’s side, something a little closer to siblings. Property is also inherited through the mother’s line.

The genders are:

1. Asdzáán - Woman - as above. To put it in modern terms, a straight cis-gender woman.
2. Hastiin - Man - male-bodied, masculine-spirited person that fulfills the masculine gender role in Navajo society and in his relationships with others. Straight cis-gender man.
3. Dilbaa - Female-bodied person with a masculine spirit who fulfills the masculine role in society and in relationships with others. The closest but-not-quite-right analogues in modern society would be a butch lesbian or a FTM transgender person who is attracted to women.
4. Náhleeh - Male-bodied person with a feminine spirit who assumes the feminine role in society and in relationships. Closest analogues: effeminate gay man or MTF transgender person attracted to men.
5. Nádleehi - Person of indeterminate physical gender, or of either physical gender, who can switch back and forth between being fully masculine and fully feminine and can fulfill either role in society. We don’t really have a good modern analogue for this - closest would be an intersex person. They are perceived as literally embodying two spirits: a masculine one, and a feminine one, which is what enables them to switch.

Sometimes this last one is broken down even further into relevant subtypes: a person with a male body who changes, a person with a female body who changes, and an androgynous person who switches/changes. That’s why sometimes people say that Navajo culture has “at least five” genders.

As a side note, that could also be a reason why the author didn’t put something like “Navajo council speaker to be woman for first time”, as some people have suggested. It wouldn’t be wholly out of the ordinary for a person in this last category who had been acting according to their masculine spirit until now to “be a woman for the first time” if it were the first time they were fully embodying their feminine spirit. I mean, it would still be a weird headline, and not exactly newsworthy, and it is really, REALLY much more likely that it is just poorly written, but it is just this side of possible that it was a deliberate choice (probably not!)

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No matter what we do we're always going to be taking up a crapton of land that used to be trees. If its possible to make a machine equivalent to a crapton of trees but that fits in a normal sized building it would go a great length towards mitigating the impacts of our permanent scars on the landscape.

Its worth exploring.

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I'm too lazy to read, but certainly nutrition and weight has to be a factor. I don't think there is a statistically important number of obese persons who lived to be 100 or even 90. Or even skinny persons who lived long without a lot of fiber in their diet.

Nope. You can’t even run for office unless you’re on the tribal roll and you must be at least 50% Navajo to be on the roll. They’re really selective about who they vote as Navajo Nation president too. Several years ago a guy in his 40’s was trying to run become president. Because he’d spent time outside the Navajo Nation and cultivated a successful career along with solid degrees he was seen by the younger generation as someone that would be really good for the NN as a whole. If I remember right he wasn’t elected because he didn’t speak Navajo.

You could plant a billion trees tomorrow and they'd have a negligible impact on the amount of carbon that we need to worry about.

I'm all for planting more, but we need multiple solutions, and some of those are expensive.

Right. I got halfway in and read “in two years, we’re gonna start a project to see if it can work”

Is there a Navajo language version of the Navajo Times?

They are the best purely for carbon capture rates since grow quik

And would anyone have been even slightly surprised?