Ch'óol'í'í- Navajo LocationLocation · Landmark"Where Changing Woman Was Raised"

The Medicine Bundle at Dawn

Ch'óol'í'í rises from the Gobernador Canyon in New Mexico, a pinnacle shaped like the Male Hogan. It stands beside Dzil Ná'oodilʼii (Huerfano Mesa) at the interior of Dinétah, the traditional Navajo homeland whose outer edges are marked by four cardinal mountains. These two inner peaks are where the creation narrative turns personal.

Before Changing Woman existed, First Man carried a medicine bundle he had brought upward through the underworlds during the emergence. With it he had placed mountains, separated night from day, ordered the present world. But the world lacked something. He turned the bundle's power toward Ch'óol'í'í at dawn and sang over it for four consecutive mornings. Clouds wrapped the summit. Lightning cracked against its sides. On the fourth dawn, a thin cry rose from the peak. The mountain had answered.

The Discovery

In the Diné Bahaneʼ, Talking God (Haashch'ééłti'i) heard the crying and climbed to the summit. At the top he found an infant girl in a cradleboard fashioned from the land itself: lightning for its lacing strings, sunbeams for its fastenings, a rainbow arching overhead as a canopy. Clouds wrapped the child. This was Changing Woman (Asdzą́ą́ Nádleėhé), called into being by the medicine bundle's power directed at sacred rock.

Talking God carried her down from the peak to First Man and First Woman.

Twelve Days

Changing Woman grew at a pace no ordinary child could match. In the Blessingway account, she passed from infancy to womanhood in twelve days on Ch'óol'í'í's slopes, each stage compressed into hours: infant to toddler, toddler to child, child to young woman. By the twelfth day she stood fully grown. The name Changing Woman came from this first transformation. Later she would age with winter and grow young again in spring, but the original change happened here, on this summit, in less than a fortnight.

The First Kinaaldá

When Changing Woman reached puberty on Ch'óol'í'í, the Holy People gathered. Talking God officiated. First Woman molded Changing Woman's body into its adult form, shaping not only bone and muscle but the qualities she would carry: kindness, endurance, generosity.

Changing Woman underwent four Kinaaldá ceremonies, one for each of her first four menstrual periods. She kept two and gave two to the Navajo people. Every Diné girl who undergoes the Kinaaldá today runs east at dawn to greet the sun and grinds corn through the night, as Changing Woman did first on this peak. For the duration of the rite, the girl becomes Changing Woman herself. The ceremony is not a memory of Ch'óol'í'í. It is Ch'óol'í'í happening again.