| Hosteen Klah, Nadle Hatali:
Gender, Transformation, and Navajo Weaving Navajo Ceremonies | | |
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Navajo ceremonies are held to cure illness,
insure general well-being, protect people
from evil or accidents, promote good crop
harvests, and for any number of similar
reasons. There are about fifty ceremonies,
usually called "chants," "sings," or "ways,"
such as Blessing Way, The Mountain
Chant, or Shooting Way. Navajos who
practice the traditional religion believe
that if a person who is ill recounts and
reenacts the adventures of a hero of a
mythology they will, like the hero, return
to a life of health and happiness. For
example, if a person suffers from vision
impairment, he might have the Bead
Chant sung over him, since there is a
passage in that myth wherein a man has
his eyesight restored. If a person suffers
from mental uneasiness or nervousness,
she might make arrangements for a
Mountain Way ceremony. The general
aim of the ceremony is the restoration of
health and well being to the "patient," or
"the-one-sung-over."
Ceremonies typically take place inside a
hogan, the traditional Navajo house. The
hogan is an eight-sided structure roughly
modeled after the visible world that surrounds
us all—a kind of dome or hemispherical
shape. The door of the hogan always faces
the east. The length of the many ceremonies
has been compared to that of Homer’s
Odyssey. They last from one to nine
nights, as well as the intervening days,
with nine-night ceremonies being the
most common. The ceremonies are
composed of oral storytelling, singing,
bodily performance, and sandpainting.
Sandpaintings, like the hogan, are aligned
to the cardinal directions and the colors,
characters,and depicted events are
oriented to those directions and placed on
the appropriate locations on the
sandpaintings. In some cases "the one sung
over" walks or sits on the sandpainting
and may apply parts of it to her own body.
If the ceremony is performed correctly,
the result should be satisfactory. |
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