Two accounts of origin sit side by side and are not reconciled. Dine tradition describes an emergence upward through a series of worlds, each left behind because of disorder, into this one, followed by the establishment of the mountains and the ceremonies. Archaeology and historical linguistics describe the Dine and the Apache as southern Athabaskan speakers related to peoples of the western subarctic, with the separation usually dated near 1300 and securely dated building in the Dinetah region of northwestern New Mexico from the fifteenth century. Estimates of arrival range from as early as 800 to as late as 1500, the material trace is thin because mobile people leave little, and Dine oral tradition contains no account of a migration from the north. Both accounts are held sincerely, and the disagreement will not be settled by more evidence of the kind now available.
What is not disputed is that Dine practice took its recognisable form in the Southwest, in contact with Pueblo neighbours, with refugees from the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and with Spanish livestock. Sheep became central to Dine economy and thus to Dine ceremony.
In 1864 the United States Army, under Kit Carson, applied a scorched earth campaign to Dine fields, orchards and flocks and forced roughly 9,000 people to walk more than 300 miles to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico, where up to 3,500 died over four years of exposure, disease and inadequate rations. The internment failed on its own terms, and the treaty of 1 June 1868 permitted a return to a reservation inside the four sacred mountains. The Long Walk is a religious event in Dine memory, not only a political one: it removed the people from the ground on which their ceremonies must be performed, and the return brought them back inside the mountains.
Federal stock reduction in the 1930s, intended as conservation, destroyed hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats and horses and is remembered as a second dispossession. Uranium mined on the Nation from the 1940s left contaminated ground and water and a legacy of disease; mining is prohibited there today. The Nation now counts more than 399,000 enrolled members, and Dine religion is practised alongside substantial Native American Church and Christian membership, with many families involved in more than one.