First Woman- Navajo PrimordialPrimordial"First of the Women"

Fire in the Darkness

First Woman came into being in the Black World, the first and lowest of the four worlds. She formed from the meeting of yellow and blue clouds in the west, while First Man formed from white and black clouds in the east. The Black World was small, centered on an island floating amid four seas, and dark. They each saw the other's fire burning in the distance. They came together across the dark water, drawn by the light, and from that meeting everything followed.

First Man carried a medicine bundle of masculine sacred knowledge. First Woman carried its feminine counterpart. Neither bundle held the complete pattern for creation alone. Together they contained everything the world above would need: the soil for building sacred mountains, the songs from which all ceremonies would come. This pairing, east and west, dawn and twilight, white corn and yellow corn, would define the shape of Navajo life.

Through the Worlds

The Black World grew crowded and contentious. First Man and First Woman led the beings upward into the Blue World, a realm of blue-furred mammals and birds, but conflict followed them there too. In O'Bryan's account, the beings quarreled with Swallow People and were driven out. They climbed into the Yellow World, where they found six sacred mountains and rivers running through the land. Here First Man and First Woman planted corn for the first time and taught the beings how to farm.

But the Yellow World flooded. Coyote had stolen two of Water Monster's children from beneath the waters, and the seas rose in fury. Water climbed the mountains. The beings fled upward through a hollow reed, climbing one by one into the Glittering World. The waters kept rising until someone discovered the stolen babies hidden under Coyote's robe. Only when the children were returned to Water Monster did the flood recede and the new world become safe to inhabit.

The Separation

A dispute arose about which sex needed the other more. In the accounts recorded by Matthews and O'Bryan, First Woman declared that women could live perfectly well without men. First Man, angered, led the men across a river to prove her wrong.

The separation lasted four years. At first, both sides managed. The men hunted and ate well. The women farmed and kept their homes. But season by season each group weakened. The men's clothing went unmended; no one could process hides or weave blankets. The women's fields yielded less each year without the heavier labor; their stores dwindled. Both sides grew gaunt.

Worse than the hunger was what the isolation did to them. The unnatural separation drove both groups to improper acts, and the women's attempts to satisfy themselves by other means conceived the Naayééʼ, the alien monsters that would later terrorize the Glittering World. The separation had not just made people suffer. It had created genuine evil.

Both First Man and First Woman acknowledged their error. The sexes came back together across the river, each side having learned that neither could survive alone. But the Naayééʼ had already been conceived and would grow until the Hero Twins destroyed them.

The Stars and the Mountains

After the emergence, First Woman worked alongside First Man and the other Holy People to order the Glittering World. They placed the sacred mountains at the boundaries of Dinétah and fastened each to the earth with its own covering: white shell for Sisnaajiní in the east, turquoise for Tsoodzil in the south.

The star placement was more delicate work. In Zolbrod's retelling, the Holy People laid the constellations out on a buckskin, carefully positioning each star in patterns that would govern seasons, ceremonies, and the movements of daily life. First Woman helped arrange them. But Coyote grew impatient with the slow precision of the work, snatched the buckskin, and flung the remaining stars across the sky in a scatter. The Milky Way is his handiwork, beautiful but disordered.

The Child on the Mountain

After the world was set, First Man found a miraculous infant on Gobernador Knob, the peak the Navajo call Ch'óol'í'í. The child was Changing Woman. First Woman helped raise her.

The infant grew to maturity in four days. When she reached puberty, the Holy People gathered at Gobernador Knob to perform the first Kinaaldá, the coming-of-age ceremony that Navajo girls still undergo. First Woman's ceremonial knowledge was essential to this rite. She had carried the feminine sacred bundle from the Black World through every passage and every disaster. Now she could pass it forward.

Changing Woman took that knowledge further than First Woman could. She created the four original Navajo clans from her own body and established the Blessingway, the ceremony at the heart of Navajo religious life. First Woman had carried the seed. Changing Woman made it grow.