Charlotte Frisbie's monograph, built on fieldwork and on Dine collaborators' own accounts, records kinaalda as a structured four-day ceremony beginning at a girl's first menstruation. Each morning she runs toward the rising sun for an increasing distance, a practice understood to shape the length and vigor of her life, with family and friends sometimes running alongside her. An older woman selected for the role, ideally one admired for her own good character and physical form, molds the girl's body by hand early in the ceremony, an act of blessing meant to shape her figure and her nature at once.
Through the four days the girl's hair is washed and dressed, she is dressed in fine clothing and jewelry to visibly stand for Changing Woman during the ceremony, and she and her helpers grind corn continuously to prepare the alkaan, a large sweet corn cake baked overnight in a specially dug earthen pit and cut and distributed at the ceremony's close. The scale of labor involved, feeding and involving an extended family and community over several days, is itself part of what the ceremony teaches the girl about adult responsibility. Neighbours and relatives who join a run, or who help with the long hours of corn grinding, are themselves understood to share in some of the ceremony's blessing, which is part of why kinaalda draws in far more people than the girl's immediate household alone.