Language in Culture and Culture in Language

Gladys Reichard was an extraordinary ethnologist and an exceptional linguist. Her work has provided me with a model to emulate and an endeavor to continue. She took a holistic view of Navajo life, learning as much as she could about its many dimensions and aspects. She studied social, political, and economic organization, effects of contact with European civilization and Christianity, as well as native religious beliefs and practices. Beyond this, she studied and learned Navajo language, and correspondingly she studied Navajo weaving and learned to weave. Gladys Reichard once observed, "Navajo dogma connects all things, natural and experienced, from man's skeleton to universal destiny, which encompasses even inconceivable space, in a closely interlocked unity which omits nothing, no matter how small or how stupendous."' Although some of her writings-such as Navajo Grammar and the encyclopedic Navajo Religioncontain a certain amount of unconjoined information, always there is a vision that there is a center, a core, where all things connect and according to which all facts make sense and all details derive their place and meaning. Such a vision is never easily grasped by an outsider, much less articulated in a way that the totally uninitiated can grasp it with any degree of clarity. Most people shrink before such a