Hózhó
Current approaches to AI governance look at harm as something to be addressed with a band-aid rather than an exploration of the root cause of an issue. From the minerals and data that are extracted to back up the technology, to the use-based impact of the entire AI lifecycle, there are plenty of areas that deserve to be governed with careful attention to impact. The unabashed disregard for harm across the AI lifecycle has also propped up the approach to governance, which looks at post-harm remediation that often stops short at being tokenized rather than meaningful. Hózhó offers us an alternate pathway to AI governance by keeping an eye on balance from start to finish, rather than as an afterthought.
Before proceeding, we want to state that Hózhó is a sacred and living concept at the heart of Diné philosophy, spirituality, and healing practice. It is inseparable from the specific ceremonial, linguistic, and relational context of the Diné people, and it cannot be fully understood through English translation. The scholars and practitioners who have written about Hózhó for external audiences, including Diné scholar Michelle Kahn-John and non-Diné scholars including Gary Witherspoon and John Farella, have consistently noted that all translations are inadequate. The concept exists fully only in Diné Bizaad — the Navajo language — and in the ceremonial life through which it is enacted. We draw on what has been made publicly available by Diné scholars and respectful outside researchers while acknowledging that the full meaning of Hózhó belongs to the Navajo Nation and its people. We welcome correction and deeper engagement from the Diné community and from those who carry this tradition.
Understanding Hózhó
Hózhó is a principle from the Diné, the Navajo people, and refers to the state of beauty, balance, harmony, and order that is the natural condition of a life lived in right relationship with the world. In this framework, any misalignment, be that between person and family, human and spiritual forces, and person and land, reminds us that there is something in the web of relationships that has been disturbed. The ceremony then weaves what has been torn. Hózhó is a dynamic, continuous process of maintenance and restoration.
Hózhó treats beauty, balance, harmony, order, and goodness as inseparable dimensions of a single state of being. It is the whole, rather than just an understanding of it. It is a description of how the world is when it is in its right condition, and a path of practice for restoring it when it is not. It drives home the understanding that the purpose of life is to achieve balance as a continuous cycle of gaining and restoring harmony across a lifetime. Illness of any kind is a disruption of Hózhó and not a failure of the body, but rather a symptom of relational imbalance. Ceremonies performed to restore Hózhó are relational acts that repair the connections between the person, their community, the land, and the spiritual forces that sustain life. In Diné understanding, health and wellbeing cannot be separated from the health of those relationships.
What Hózhó unsettles in AI governance
AI governance, which treats harm as an anomaly to be remediated and then set aside, has something profound to learn from Hózhó.
First, Hózhó presents AI governance with its most fundamental challenge: the question of what a governance framework is trying to maintain. Current AI governance frameworks are oriented toward harm reduction and risk management, starting with the identification of specific harms, an assessment of their probability, and the creation of interventions to prevent or remediate them. Hózhó asks us to explore whether the overall state of relationship between AI and the communities it affects is one of balance and beauty or of disturbance. This is not a question that harm inventories can answer. It requires an assessment of whether AI systems are contributing to or eroding the web of relationships between people, between communities and their environments, and between the present and the future, that makes good life possible.
Hózhó asks AI governance to ask pre-deployment questions that current frameworks treat as post-deployment concerns. In Diné practice, the ceremony that restores balance after disturbance is far more expensive when compared to the maintenance practices that keep disturbance from occurring. The parallel in AI governance is direct: remediation after harm through lawsuits, regulatory action, and system recalls. Each of these is vastly more disruptive and expensive , to all parties, than the deliberate practice of assessing whether a proposed AI system will disturb or sustain the relational balance of the communities it will affect. Hózhó governance asks, before deployment if this system walks in beauty with all the communities it touches or disturbs what is in balance. It would treat a 'no' to that question as sufficient grounds for not proceeding.
Finally, Hózhó’s insistence that beauty, harmony, health, and order are inseparable challenges the fragmentation of AI governance into separate regulatory domains, such as privacy law, consumer protection law, anti-discrimination law, environmental regulation, each addressing one dimension of a problem that cannot be understood in fragments. A community whose data has been extracted without consent, whose environment has been degraded by AI infrastructure, whose social fabric has been disrupted by algorithmic recommendation systems, and whose children are growing up in algorithmically managed environments is not experiencing a set of separable regulatory violations. It is experiencing a disturbance of Hózhó, a breakdown in the web of relationships that makes its life possible. Governance adequate to that experience must be capable of seeing the web whole.
References
Farella, J. (1984). The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy. University of Arizona Press.
Witherspoon, G. (1977). Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. University of Michigan Press.
Kahn-John Diné, M., & Koithan, M. (2015). Living in health, harmony, and beauty: the diné (navajo) hózhó wellness philosophy. Global advances in health and medicine, 4(3), 24–30. https://doi.org/10.7453/gahmj.2015.044
Iverson, P. (2002). Diné: A History of the Navajos. University of New Mexico Press.
This article draws from the sacred philosophy and ceremonial life of the Diné (Navajo) people. We are grateful to Diné scholars who have made aspects of this tradition available for wider engagement, and we acknowledge that the full meaning of Hózhó belongs to the Navajo Nation. We invite readers to support Navajo Nation cultural preservation programs, language revitalization efforts, and the Diné sovereignty campaigns that continue to defend the conditions under which Hózhó can be lived.
