1914] Northwestern D6n6s and Northeastern Asiatics 155 



But even though this statement were correct, we must not forget that 

 it is a well known practice of the native mind to transfer to places within 

 its actual knowledge and vicinity the scenes of the happenings handed 

 down by the ancestors. 



But a correspondent of mine, Father Leopold Ostermann, O.F.M., 

 who has long and faithfully laboured among the Navahoes and whose 

 pen has yielded valuable information concerning that important tribe/ 

 wrote but a few years ago: 



"The Navajos have a faint tradition of other Navajos, or Din6, 

 away to the North, whom they call 'D6n4 nahodloni', i.e. 'they who 

 are also Navajos' . . . They even tell of a party of Navajos who once 

 set out to look up the Den6 Nahodloni, and say that their hunters found 

 their fellow-tribesmen, stayed with them a short time, and then returned 

 to their homes in the south, after their northern kin had refused to go 

 with them ".2 



In a private letter to me Father Leopold confirmed his printed 

 statement by adding: 



"Most of the old Navajos, at least all the old-timers whom I have 

 asked, know something about the D6n6 Nahodloni . , . They know 

 that somewhere, at a great distance, there are 'people who are also 

 Dene', who speak their language, and who at one time were one people 

 with themselves. They do not mean the Apaches, for the Apaches 

 have time and again made themselves very clearly and distinctly known 

 to the Navajos. The home of the Den6 Nahodloni is said by some to 

 be in the north, by others in the northwest; most of them do not know 

 in which direction to place it".^ 



These declarations by one who has first-hand knowledge of what he 

 writes about must for ever set at rest the question of the origin of the 

 Navajos, and convince the reader that the southernmost of all the 

 Dene tribes really came from the north or the northwest. 



vn. 



Physiology, sociology and technology are at one in confirming us 

 in the belief that the whole of the so important aboriginal family which 

 we call, or rather which calls itself, D6ne is a relatively late arrival on 

 the continent of America. I shall not dwell on the similarity of the 



^ As far as numbers go the Navahoes form what I believe to be the most important 

 tribe of all North America outside of Mexico. They are to-day estimated at no less than 

 28,500 souls. 



* The Catholic Pioneer, Oct. 1905. 



' December 27, 1905. 



