Where else could the Navajo have gone?

[Mort the Reaper]

Believe it or not, the Navajo are believed to have originally been from Eastern Alaska and/or Northwestern Canada, only arriving in what is now the American Southwest around 1400 CE.

Where else could they have ended up?

 

[Arkenfolm]

Central or northern plains, like a more northerly version of the Apache (their closest relatives) or like the Sarcee/Tsuutina, more distant relatives. They'll probably end up around western Nebraska and South Dakota where the modern Lakota are at. Or maybe at the fringe of the Great Basin where perhaps they'd take the role Numic-speaking groups did OTL and aggressively push at the peoples on the Columbia River and in central Oregon. It would be interesting if they could somehow cross the Cascades and join with their distant Pacific Athabaskan kin but that seems difficult.

In any case they wouldn't be recognizably Navajo though except partially in language since so much of Navajo culture was inherited from other Southwestern Indians. Navajo lands would be inhabited by groups who live around them OTL like the Hopi.

 

[UnaiB]

@Alexander Helios

 

[Tempered Zen]

@UnaiB Thank you for the shout-out.

I'll go the eastern route, as people have already mentioned the west (most likely alternate location). I haven't seen any concrete dates on the Navajo migration, but we'll use 1000 CE (a glottochronological date for the split between Navajo and Apache).

I could see the Navajo going into the Mississippi Basin, traveling through the northern Great Plains along the Missouri River. They could end up anywhere along the river, but for dramatic purposes, by around 1300 CE, they reach the crossroads of three great rivers, home to the heart of the Mississippian Culture, within it the dying city of Cahokia.

Do they go to war with them? Assimilate? Replicate their mounds and lifestyle? Hard to tell, but in the Southwest they did a bit of all the above. Navajo moundbuilders would be cool. Historians ITTL will probably think the *Navajo caused the fall of Cahokia.

Could they break the Mississippian cycle of periodic collapse and establish a stable, more permanent, way of life? A *Navajo leader could decide to conquer the Mississippians and their constantly fluctuating chiefdoms under a more centralized rule, with a *Navajo elite. If they do, they could maybe live to see the Europeans, and some colonization butterflies ensue.

ITTL, they probably assimilate the religious aspects of the Mississippians, as they did the Puebloans IOTL. More thunderbird and underwater panthers in their mythology than in OTL.

In conclusion, my conservative prediction is that we probably see an anomaly, an Athabaskan speaking people in the heart of the Mississippi, for linguists and anthropologists to argue about. But it's a pretty open scenario. Could a migration and its accompanying social pressures lead to new innovations and cultures? Who knows.

 

[Raferty]

A migration Southwards during the rise of the Aztecs, so as to have access to trade with its exterior boundary regions, wouldn't be out of the question. There are areas of Northern Mexico with a similar topography the Navajo would find attractive.

 

[Tempered Zen]

A migration Southwards during the rise of the Aztecs, so as to have access to trade with its exterior boundary regions, wouldn't be out of the question. There are areas of Northern Mexico with a similar topography the Navajo would find attractive.

Remember, migrations tend to take a while, and there's plenty of obstacles along the way. The ancestors of the Navajo, living in the boreal regions of the Americas at the time of the POD, would have no more knowledge about the Aztecs (who didn't even exist by this point) than they would about Europe.

 

[Arkenfolm]

In conclusion, my conservative prediction is that we probably see an anomaly, an Athabaskan speaking people in the heart of the Mississippi, for linguists and anthropologists to argue about. But it's a pretty open scenario. Could a migration and its accompanying social pressures lead to new innovations and cultures? Who knows.

They'd probably migrate back west like a lot of Siouans did assuming the Mississippian collapse and wars surrounding the fur trade still occur which means they'd encounter the Apache on the Plains at some point.

 

[Tempered Zen]

They'd probably migrate back west like a lot of Siouans did assuming the Mississippian collapse and wars surrounding the fur trade still occur which means they'd encounter the Apache on the Plains at some point.

Definitely one outcome. I was thinking of a scenario where they move into the dwindling Mississippian population centers and assimilate in with the Siouans, like the OTL Navajo integrated into Oasisamerica.

But yeah, this is all assuming a lot of things happen. In this scenario, the Siouan migrations (at least the Dheigan migration, and maybe the Chiwere migration if butterflies reach the Ojibwe's expansionist behavior, the rest had mostly already happened) into the Plains aren't guaranteed.

 

[twovultures]

There's at least one proposal that the Navajo migrated to the Southwest from the Black Hills after the end of a medieval period of drought which brought down Cahokia and the Ancient Pueblo. It's possible that they could not migrate from there at all, and remain in the Black Hills. If so, the Navajo would probably end up absorbing more of the culture of the Plains Indians, hunting buffalo instead of raising sheep after contact for example.