My nephew Rob is getting first-hand experience with this as he is serving an LDS mission in the Four Corners region and works with the Navajo people on a daily basis. I emailed him a couple of weeks ago listing some of the things I've learned about the culture since reading the book- in particular their beliefs about the dead. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
In Navajo religious belief, a chindi is the ghost left behind after a person dies, believed to leave the body with the decedent's last breath. It is everything that was bad about the person; the "residue that man has been unable to bring into universal harmony." Traditional Navajo believe that contact with a chindi can cause illness ("ghost sickness") and death. Chindi are believed to linger around the decedent's bones or possessions, so possessions are often destroyed after death and contact with bodies is avoided. After death the decedent's name is never spoken, for fear that the chindi will hear and come and make one ill. Traditional Navajo practice is to allow death to occur outdoors, to allow the chindi to disperse. If a person dies in a house or hogan, that building is believe to be inhabited by the chindi and is abandoned.
Here's is Rob's response to my email:
When a native dies in the hogan, yes they do punch a hole in the wall, but they also burn all of the native's earthly possessions. There was one family when their father died, he died in his bed so they took him and the bed and burned him outside. The next day when they went to go read his will, he wrote that he had been saving a lot of money for them for many years and it was in the mattress. They had burned all of the money.
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