Talk:Yeii

What is ?

I need to ask--should this article exist at all? The Navajo word "yei" only means "supernatural being" and has no connection to the petroglyph kokopelli. That said, I now must ask, how can rock-art be "rainbow"?Asdzani Bah 08:12, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Um...the Navajo god Water Sprinkler (I forget the Navajo for it) is considered identical to the Pueblo rain god Kokopelli, who is represented in the aforementioned petroglyphs. But the only rainbow art I know of among Navajos is a separate god, whose image, stretched to cover three sides (not the east) is used as a protective barrier around a sandpainting.

That said, yeah, this article probably isn't good enough to exist. Nagakura shin8 (talk) 18:54, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Fixed it!

Okay, the previous version of this article...sucked. There was a lot of New Age airy-fairy nonsense about "living in harmony with nature" and most of the references were to ethno-knicknack merchants (one of them in the UK!!!) who are not exactly going to challenge their target market's conception of Native Americans as paintin' with all the colors of the @#$*ing wind. The Navajo don't live in harmony with nature as Modern Westerners understand the idea (as in, something distinct from humans); they strive to live in hozhon, which is an idea of cosmic order not unlike the Tao, or maybe the Torah or Aristotle's Golden Mean (or the Egyptian idea of Maat, perhaps) that includes every aspect of life. The whole thing is based on an idea of moderation and obligation that essentially tosses Male and Female Lightning at every individualistic, "liberationist" Western cultural movement of the last four hundred years--hardly the theme to sell well to trendy Europeans or the holistic medicine set in America! Or in other words, "Diné binahagha' bił doo yá'át'ééh, yá?

So anyway, I replaced a lot of utter nonsense with some tasty meat, and added a thing or two that ought to at least upgrade this from "waste of bandwidth" to "stub". Nagakura shin8 (talk) 07:11, 5 August 2008 (UTC)