A proverb tradition
The proverb traditions of North America covered here are Indigenous ones, and they come with a particular hazard: the English-language internet is thick with invented “Native American proverbs,” most of them traceable to no nation at all. This region holds only sayings that can be anchored in real scholarship or in a people’s own documented use of them — not the pretty, unattributed lines that circulate as wisdom.
The traditions are also, by their own nature, often closer to teaching than to the European folk proverb: value-phrases spoken to children, carried in ceremony and daily instruction rather than gathered into books. The first of them here is Diné — the language of the Navajo Nation, in the high desert where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet.
A rocky vineyard does not need a prayer, but a pick ax.
a rocky vineyard does not need a prayer, but a pick ax.
A 'Navajo proverb' about stony ground and a pick ax that almost certainly isn't Navajo — and the genuinely old Spanish, Arabic, and Greek sayings that make the same demand: pray if you like, but pick up the tool.
T'áá hwó ají t'éego.
tah hwoh-ah-jee tay-go (approx.)
A documented Diné teaching — t'áá hwó ají t'éego, 'it is up to you' — places your life in your own hands. Latin, Aesop, and Russian agree, but only the Diné one makes self-reliance a spiritual discipline.