Blessingway- Navajo EventEvent"The Foundation Ceremony"

The Emergence

First Man carried the medicine bundle upward through successive worlds, through darkness and flood and conflict, until the beings emerged into the Glittering World. The Holy People opened the bundle and used its contents to place the sun and moon in the sky and set the sacred mountains at the four cardinal directions. The songs, prayers, and sacred objects inside became the prototypes of every future ceremony. Blessingway was first among them.

Changing Woman

On Gobernador Knob, Ch'óol'í'í, a baby girl was found. She grew to maturity in four days. The Holy People performed her Kinaaldá, the first puberty ceremony, and she became Changing Woman: the only Holy Person whose power flows entirely toward sustenance and blessing. She never causes illness. She never demands appeasement.

She lay with Sun Father, and from that union the Hero Twins were born. After they had killed the monsters that plagued the world, Changing Woman traveled to her home beyond the western ocean. There she rubbed skin from her own body, and each piece became a Navajo clan. Each carried her substance forward.

Two Nights in the Hogan

Blessingway lasts two nights. It takes place in a hogan, the traditional Navajo dwelling whose circular form and east-facing door mirror the shape of creation. The hogan becomes the world during the ceremony: its interior the earth, its roof the sky.

A hatałii performs the rite. Unlike the curative chantways, Blessingway uses no sandpaintings. Its power comes through song, prayer, and corn pollen alone. The first evening begins with consecration of the hogan and the singing of creation songs that recount the emergence. Prayer sticks are prepared and offered to carry words to specific Holy People.

Hundreds of songs follow in precise sequence: the Chief Hogan Songs, the Earth and Sky Songs. Each invokes the sacred mountains by name and calls on the directional powers that hold the world in place. The final songs are timed to dawn. As light enters, the patient walks out of the hogan to greet the sunrise, breathes in the morning air, and applies corn pollen. The closing prayer declares: "In beauty it is finished, in beauty it is finished."

The Kinaaldá

When a girl experiences her first menstruation, she undergoes a four-day ceremony that reenacts Changing Woman's own maturation. For the duration, the girl becomes Changing Woman. She carries the Holy Person's power of renewal, and community members approach her to receive it.

Each morning she runs toward the east, her runs growing longer each day. She grinds corn as Changing Woman did. A female relative molds her body as Changing Woman was shaped at the beginning, pressing the young woman into the image of the Holy Person she embodies. On the final night, Blessingway songs accompany the baking of a large corn cake in a pit oven. The cake, made from corn batter sweetened with sprouted wheat, feeds the entire community. What the girl provides now, she will provide all her life.

Charlotte Frisbie's fieldwork documented the ceremony in detail: the specific songs for each stage, the preparation of the alkaan, the prayers that accompany each run. The Kinaaldá remains widely practiced, with families preparing for months to support the event.

The Pollen Path

Corn pollen is Blessingway's primary sacrament. It is applied to the patient, sprinkled in the four directions, offered to the Holy People with each prayer. It carries life: fertility, sustenance, the nourishing power Changing Woman gave when she taught her people to grow corn.

The Pollen Path prayer is the heart of the ceremony. The supplicant walks a path of corn pollen stretching in all directions, surrounded by beauty: "In beauty I walk. With beauty before me I walk. With beauty behind me I walk. With beauty below me I walk. With beauty above me I walk. With beauty all around me I walk. It is finished in beauty." In Navajo understanding, speaking beauty creates beauty. The words bring hózhó into being.