Blessingway

Navajo ceremonial practice is organised into complexes, and Blessingway sits apart from the rest of them. The curing ceremonials address a specific disorder, understood as the consequence of a broken relation with some power in the world, and they work by identifying and correcting it. Blessingway does not diagnose. It addresses hozho directly, and it is invoked at the beginning of things rather than after something has gone wrong. Singers describe it as the backbone of the system, and parts of it are taken into other ceremonials, so that a rite performed for a different purpose may still close in Blessingway songs. Its narrative frame is Changing Woman, the being made at the beginning who is the source of the ordering the ceremony renews.

Kinaalda, the girl's puberty ceremony, is a Blessingway rite: the girl is identified with Changing Woman and is moulded, made to run, and fed into her adult condition, and the songs sung over her through the last night belong to this complex. The same complex covers the consecration of a hogan, which makes a building a place where life can properly be conducted, and the blessing of officeholders, which has carried the ceremony into the formal business of the Navajo Nation. Its range is the point. It is what is done when something is to be set right from the start rather than repaired afterwards.

Blessingway has been written about at length, and some of that writing was done without permission. Ethnographers recorded songs, prayers and sandpainting designs through the first half of the twentieth century and published them, putting material into libraries that the Dine had not released. That history is the reason this record stops where it does. What can be said publicly is what the ceremony is for, when it is held, who conducts it, and how it stands in relation to the rest of the ceremonial system. What is not set down here is the order of the songs, the words of the prayers, the designs, or anything that would function as an instruction for performance.

A reader wanting that is being pointed to the wrong place: the knowledge is held by hataalii, it is transmitted through apprenticeship, and it is not the atlas's to hand on. This is not a gap in the research. It is the distinction the atlas keeps for every closed practice, which is that a living tradition can be described from outside without being reconstructed for whoever happens to read about it. Charlotte Frisbie's study of Kinaalda and James McNeley's account of Holy Wind in Navajo philosophy are published works a reader can go to next, and Navajo institutions rather than this atlas are the right authority on what may be said further.