Navajo views and perspectives of Covid-19 and health and wellbeing implications from a Diné student

Yenchik, Shanell Natalie (2023) Navajo views and perspectives of Covid-19 and health and wellbeing implications from a Diné student. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

The purpose of my research project was to gain the Diné (Navajo) traditional and cultural perspectives of Dikos Ntsaaígíí-19 (COVID-19) and discuss how those views aided in the combat of coronavirus on the Navajo Nation. I learned more about how views and perspectives on COVID-19 among Navajo people tied into cultural knowledge and practices surrounding health and wellbeing. I applied an autoethnographic approach to writing my thesis, to position my existing knowledge and lived experiences from a Navajo woman’s point of view. I also conducted a social media content analysis to collect public knowledge from the height of the coronavirus pandemic from social media posts including all pictures of signage on the Navajo Nation, opinions expressed, perspectives, views, and data posted by social media participants. Additionally, I engaged in ethnographic interviews with ten Navajo residents of Flagstaff, Arizona to gain current and past COVID-19 experiences and views, as well as cultural knowledge about health and wellbeing. My theoretical frameworks included relationality and interconnectedness, the relationships that humans have to the world around them (land, animals, people, cosmos, and ideas) as well as phenomenology, the study of lived experiences. These approaches provided me with a lens to gather and interpret my data in order to understand how worldviews shape how people make sense of different experiences, such as illness. This research contributes to a growing body of scholarship regarding the validity and importance of Indigenous cultural knowledge and in the decolonizing and Indigenizing ways of viewing health and wellbeing.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	Covid-19; Navajo Nation; Culturally sensitive medicine;
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Social and Behavioral Science > Anthropology
Date Deposited:	23 Oct 2025 17:22
Last Modified:	23 Oct 2025 17:22
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6236

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