About Ádahooníłígíí

Ádahooníłígíí

Ádahooníłígíí was a Navajo-language monthly newspaper that was published from Window Rock, Arizona, from 1943 to 1957. Its title meant, in the rendering used by its editors and by later scholars, occurrences in the area, or current events. It was the first newspaper ever published in the Navajo language, and for its first four years it was written entirely in Navajo. No other newspaper matched that distinction.

The paper was published by the Navajo Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and it was printed at the United States Indian School in Phoenix. It was modest in physical form, at first a single folded sheet of newsprint, but it reached across the Navajo Nation through a network of local chapter houses. In its fourteen years it helped to standardize the written form of the Navajo language, carried news of the Second World War to Navajo families, and left a body of Navajo prose that scholars and language teachers continued to use long after it closed.

A Language With Almost Nothing in Print

To understand why a single folded sheet mattered, readers had to understand how little Navajo print existed before 1943. Navajo, or Diné bizaad, was a spoken language of great complexity and reach, but it had no long tradition of mass print. The only widely available texts prepared for a Navajo audience before the newspaper appeared were religious publications and portions of a Navajo translation of the Bible. There was no Navajo daily or monthly press, no Navajo commercial publishing, and no agreed everyday orthography in general use.

That absence was not an accident of one language alone. It reflected federal Indian policy, boarding-school education that had punished Native language use, and the economics of publishing for a largely rural readership. A government agency newspaper, produced by linguists who were simultaneously codifying the language, was therefore both a practical bulletin and a linguistic event. Every issue demonstrated, in public, that Navajo could carry war news, council proceedings, health advice, and history in its own written form.

Young, Morgan, and The Navajo Language

The paper was edited by Robert W. Young, a linguist employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and translated and drafted in Navajo by William Morgan Sr., a Navajo collaborator whose role was central rather than auxiliary. In a tribute published decades later, Young explained the division of labor plainly in substance: Morgan drafted the Navajo texts, while Young set the type and supervised distribution.

In the same year the newspaper began, 1943, Young and Morgan published The Navajo Language, the dictionary and grammar that became the standard reference for the language and remained in use, in revised form, into the present century. Their later work grew into an even larger grammar and colloquial dictionary. The newspaper and the dictionary developed together. Words, spellings, and constructions that the two men tested in the dictionary were used, month after month, before a real Navajo readership, and the paper's needs in turn showed them how written Navajo had to work for ordinary readers and not only for linguists.

The First Issues in August 1943

The first issue was published in August 1943, with the paper subtitled as a Navajo language monthly. Its home was Window Rock, the seat of the Navajo Agency and of Navajo government, although the physical printing was done in Phoenix. In its first two years its masthead carried a slogan that the paper itself translated as a pledge to education, liberty, and progress.

The physical paper was simple. It was printed on a single folded sheet of newsprint and distributed through the chapter houses, the local meeting institutions that dotted the reservation. That distribution system mattered. Chapter houses were where Navajo families gathered for local business and announcements, so a paper that arrived there entered community life directly rather than depending on newsstands, subscriptions delivered to scattered rural homes, or agency offices alone. A surviving late issue showed the practical terms plainly: it was published on the first of each month, letters were directed to its editor at the Education Branch of the Navajo Agency at Window Rock, and a yearly subscription cost fifty cents, payable to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Entirely in Navajo, Then Bilingual

From 1943 to 1947 the paper was written entirely in Navajo. That choice made it, after the Cherokee Phoenix of 1828 to 1834, only the second regularly circulating newspaper in the United States written in a Native American language, and the only one of its era written wholly in its Native language. After 1947 its practice changed. Articles appeared bilingually, or in Navajo accompanied by an English summary.

The Arizona Memory Project's account of the paper described how the balance shifted in layout as well. At first, front-page articles appeared in Navajo followed by a few pages of English translation. As the paper grew, more material was written in Navajo with short English summaries placed at the back, and later still the English summary followed each Navajo article individually. The direction of travel was consistent: Navajo remained the primary text, and English served as the finding aid for officials, teachers, and bilingual readers, rather than the other way around.

War News and the Home Front

In its early years the paper's main editorial function was to convey the views of Washington, rendered in Navajo as Wááshindoon, about the Second World War to the Navajo people. Much of its news concerned the war overseas and its impact at home. It reported, for example, on a Navajo sergeant who received the Distinguished Flying Cross, and it published a photograph of two Navajo code talkers, the Marines who transmitted battlefield messages in a code built on the Navajo language.

Just as importantly, the paper provided a connection between Navajo men and women who served in the United States military and the families who remained at home. For households spread across a vast reservation, with sons in the Pacific and daughters in war work and service, a monthly paper in their own language that named servicemen, printed their photographs, and explained the war they were fighting performed a function that no English-language metropolitan daily could perform for them.

News of the Navajo Nation Itself

The war did not fill the whole paper. Ádahooníłígíí reported on the Navajo Tribal Council, on agriculture and livestock, on schools, and on public health. A surviving issue from the beginning of 1957, edited by Edward Mays with Morgan still serving as translator, devoted extensive space to an expansion of health services for Navajos, reporting increases in doctors, nurses, and other personnel, authorization for new hospitals at Shiprock and Gallup, and plans for health centers and field stations at communities across the reservation. Grain relief arrangements for stock owners were explained in the same practical detail.

That mixture of agency announcement and community reporting defined the paper throughout its life. It was an official publication, and it did not pretend to be an independent opposition press. Within that limit, it gave Navajo readers regular, intelligible accounts of the institutions that governed their daily lives, from council decisions to clinic openings, in the language most of them spoke at home.

History, Tradition, and the Written Record

The paper also published historical and traditional material, and that portion of its contents acquired a second life. A later bilingual selection of its articles, prepared by Young and Morgan, gathered accounts of traditional Navajo country, of the Four Sacred Mountains, and of how the clans were created, alongside a story of Navajo scouts on the trail of Geronimo. The same selection included articles about the livestock reduction period of the 1930s, which the editors presented as an economic and social disaster for Navajo families, and about the long-range rehabilitation program that followed the Second World War.

Those republications showed what the newspaper had quietly accomplished. Because it printed Navajo elders' and writers' accounts in standardized Navajo prose, it preserved versions of history and tradition in the language itself, at a moment when few other venues did so. Students of Navajo history and language later mined its back issues as a primary source that existed nowhere else in the same form.

Termination and the End in 1957

The paper's existence depended on federal funding, and federal policy turned against it. In the 1950s the United States pursued the Indian termination policy, which sought to end the special federal relationship with tribal nations and to withdraw federal services and support. As the effects of that policy reached the Navajo Nation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs withdrew the paper's funding.

Ádahooníłígíí ceased publication in 1957. It did not fail for lack of readers or of material. It ended because the institution that paid for it chose, as a matter of national policy, to stop paying. The distinction mattered to its later reputation: the paper was remembered not as an experiment that readers rejected, but as a service that a changing federal doctrine discontinued.

Successor and Survival

Shortly after Ádahooníłígíí closed, the Navajo Times began publication. The Times was written in English rather than Navajo, and it developed into the Navajo Nation's principal newspaper, a position it retained into the present day. The succession was real but incomplete. The Nation kept a newspaper, but it lost a newspaper in Navajo, and no successor restored the earlier paper's all-Navajo or primarily Navajo character.

The original paper itself survived physically to an unusual degree. In April 2019 roughly one hundred issues were digitized through the University of Arizona Library's work in the National Digital Newspaper Program and made available online, and the Arizona Memory Project maintained its own presentation of the title. A late issue's printing note recorded a run of 3,500 copies for a single month in 1957, evidence that at the end of its life the paper still circulated in the thousands across the Nation it served.

Legacy for the Navajo Language

Scholars of language planning treated Ádahooníłígíí as a landmark. Because it was widely distributed, it contributed directly to the standardization of Navajo orthography: spellings settled by Young and Morgan were seen, month after month, by readers in every part of the Navajo Nation, and usage followed print. Few government bulletins anywhere could claim a comparable effect on the written form of a language.

Its larger legacy was demonstrative. For fourteen years a monthly newspaper proved that Navajo was a complete written medium, adequate to war dispatches, council reports, medical campaigns, poetry of public life, and the oldest stories of the Diné. When later generations undertook Navajo language revitalization, curriculum building, and bilingual publishing, they worked in the knowledge that a Navajo newspaper had already existed, had already found its readers, and had already shown what written Navajo could do.