Nááts'íílid- Navajo ConceptConcept"Path of the Holy People"

Fastened to the Mountains

When First Man and First Woman established the four sacred mountains to anchor the Navajo world, a rainbow beam fastened Dibé Nitsaa in the north to the earth. Lightning secured Sisnaasjini' in the east, but the northern mountain held by rainbow light. The Blessingway narratives describe the Holy People traveling by rainbow between these peaks, dressing each one with its precious materials and guardian beings. The rainbow was their road, a luminous arc spanning the distances between the mountains that define Dinétah.

The Road to the Sun's House

When Monster Slayer and Born for Water set out to find their father the Sun, they traveled on sunbeam and rainbow beam. The Sun's house lay beyond the reach of ordinary walking, past regions haunted by the monsters that still roamed the Glittering World. The rainbow carried the twins across that distance, a protected corridor between earth and sky. What waited at the other end was a father who tested them before he acknowledged them, but the road itself kept them safe.

Other chantway heroes follow the same path. In the Shooting Chant, heroes lost among supernatural beings are carried to safety on rainbow arcs. In the Nightway, the Holy People descend along rainbow paths to attend the healing ceremony. When someone is stranded in the realm of the sacred, a rainbow brings them home.

The Rainbow People

The rainbow is alive. The Rainbow People, Nááts'íílid Dine'é, are Holy People with will and purpose, and they appear throughout the chantway narratives alongside other sacred figures. In the Nightway ceremony, they stand among the Yéi'ii in sandpaintings, persons who chose to be present, not atmospheric decoration.

When a rainbow appears after rain over Dinétah, the Holy People are traveling. The sky shows their passage as plainly as dust shows a walker on a desert road.

The Guardian on the Hogan Floor

During healing ceremonies, a singer builds a sandpainting on the hogan floor from colored sands and crushed minerals. The Navajo call these paintings "places where the gods come and go." Around three sides of the image bends the Rainbow Guardian: an elongated figure with a head at one end and feet at the other, its body forming a U-shaped arc. The eastern side stays open. That is the door.

The patient sits directly on the painting, skin against the sacred images. Illness passes outward along the rainbow. Healing power flows inward along the same path. The Guardian holds the boundary between ordinary ground and the charged space within, and through the open eastern gap, both sickness leaves and restoration arrives.

The Nightway ceremony runs for nine nights and fills its sandpaintings with elaborate rainbow imagery. The Yéi'ii, masked figures who appear during the ceremony, are depicted inside the Guardian's embrace. The songs call them down rainbow paths from their distant homes to the hogan where the patient waits. When the last sand is swept away and the painting destroyed, the rainbow has done its work: the patient carried back, like the Hero Twins, along a road of light.