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The Navajo and the Apache are closely related tribes, descended from a single group that scholars believe migrated from Canada. Both Navajo and Apache languages belong to a language family called "Athabaskan," which is also spoken by native peoples in Alaska and west-central Canada. When the hunter-gatherer ancestors of the Navajo and Apache migrated south, they brought their language and nomadic lifestyle with them.
Scholars disagree about the exact timing of these migrations, but it seems likely that Athabaskan speakers arrived in the Southwest after A.D. 1450 and were in the Mesa Verde region by at least the early 1500s. Although they were a single cultural group when they first arrived in the Southwest, their different experiences and the different environments in which they settled eventually resulted in their separating into two distinct groups: the Navajo and the Apache. The Navajos remained in what would become northwestern New Mexico and adjacent areas of Colorado, planting crops and adopting a more settled lifestyle that eventually included sheepherding (after sheep were introduced by the Spanish). The people who became the Apaches moved farther south and east, continuing their hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
The Navajo people call themselves the Diné, or "the People." Diné origin stories say they emerged from the fourth world into the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, which border the Mesa Verde region to the northeast. The traditional Navajo homeland, which they call Dinétah, is bounded by four sacred mountains, corresponding to the four cardinal directions: Hesperus Peak (Dibé Ntsaa) to the north, Blanca Peak (Sisnaajiní) to the east, Mt. Taylor (Tsoodził) to the south, and the San Francisco Peaks (Dook’o’osłííd) to the west. The northern part of the Dinétah falls within the Mesa Verde region.
Spanish chronicles from the late 1500s and early 1600s distinguish the Navajo from their Apache cousins by their more settled lifestyle and their fields of corn and other crops. Navajos borrowed and adapted traits from their Spanish and Pueblo neighbors to a much greater degree than did the Apaches. Sheep and goats introduced by the Spanish provided new sources of food and raw materials, including wool for textiles. Painted Navajo pottery from this period was decorated with Pueblo-style designs, and scholars think the Navajos learned farming and weaving from their Pueblo neighbors. The borrowing of Pueblo traits continued after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when some Pueblo Indians from the Rio Grande valley took refuge among their Navajo neighbors to the north and west.
Source: crowcanyon.org