Changing Woman

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An old woman walks east, toward the place the light comes from. Her hair is white and her step is slow, and the country she crosses is the high red land between four mountains. At the edge of the world she reaches the horizon and turns — and the woman who turns is a girl, dark-haired, quick, the whole of her life ahead of her again. She has done this since the seasons began and she will do it until they end. Her name says exactly this and nothing else: Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé, the woman who changes, the one who is transformed. She does not die. She grows old, and then she is young, and the turning is the truest thing about her. Pull the eye back from the horizon and set it on a single hill in what is now northwestern New Mexico, a dark height standing over the broken mesa country, and the account has a beginning: on that hill, at the start of the present world, First Man found her lying as a baby.

The child on the mountain

The Diné — the people English named Navajo — carry their sacred history in the Diné Bahané, the long account of the emergence into this world and the ordering of it, held and sung by the ceremonial singers, the hataałii. In that history Changing Woman is not born the way the Earth-Surface People are born. She is found. First Man, Áłtsé Hastiin, and First Woman, Áłtsé Asdzą́ą́, living at the sacred hill of Huerfano Mesa, Dził Ná’oodiłii, saw a dark cloud settle and rest for four days on the height the Diné call Ch’óol’į́’į́ — Gobernador Knob, an inner mountain of the homeland. A cry came from the mountain. Talking God, Haashch’ééłti’í, the leader of the ye’ii and the caller of the dawn, led First Man up the height, and there, on the summit, in the place where the cloud had rested, lay a baby girl. First Man and First Woman took her home and raised her as their own. She is, in the plainest reading of her name, a child of the earth and sky themselves, set down where the dark cloud met the mountain.

There is a second register of her parentage, and the tradition holds it beside the first without needing to choose. In it she is the daughter of Sa’ah Naagháí and Bik’eh Hózhóón — Long Life Boy and Happiness Girl, the paired principle of long life and beauty toward which the whole religion works and prays. To be the child of those two is to be, in person, the thing the ceremonies exist to keep. The reference record fixes this parentage plainly, naming her mother and father as Long Life Boy and Happiness Girl, “the means by which all life passes through time,” in the standard account of Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé. She is closely twinned, too, with her sister Yoołgai Asdzą́ą́, White Shell Woman, and some tellings braid the two so near that a deed given to one in one telling is given to the other in the next. Where the account distinguishes them, Changing Woman is turquoise and the growing green of summer, and White Shell Woman is the pale shell of the dawn; where it blends them, the blending is not an error to be corrected but the way the tradition itself keeps the pair.

This is tradition-internal sacred history, told as such by the Diné and true within the world it describes. Where it also survives on paper, the paper is an outsider record. The surgeon and ethnographer Washington Matthews set the finding on the mountain into print in his Navaho Legends of 1897, rendering her name, in the spelling of his day, as Estsánatlehi; Gladys Reichard worked through her symbolism in Navaho Religion (1950); Father Berard Haile recorded the Blessingway texts that Leland Wyman later published as Blessingway (University of Arizona Press, 1970); and Charlotte Frisbie devoted a whole study, Kinaaldá (Wesleyan University Press, 1967), to the girls’ ceremony that descends from her. These are careful books and they are the eyes of visitors — nineteenth- and twentieth-century outsiders looking in, and some of what they wrote down was ceremonial knowledge shared with them under specific conditions and for specific reasons. The knowledge is older than its transcription and it still belongs to the singers who carry it; the books record it, and do not own it.

A Diné cornfield in the Southwest, photographed around the turn of the twentieth century. Corn is Changing Woman’s own crop and the substance of the ceremonies that carry her name. Unknown photographer, Denver Public Library collection, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The woman who changes

Her defining power is written in the name, and it is unlike the power of any other of the Holy People. She does not conquer, she does not punish, she is not dangerous. She ages and renews without end. Raised by First Woman, she grew from infant to grown woman not across a lifetime but across four days — a year of life for each day — and having reached her fullness she never lost it for good. She walks with the seasons: born with the spring, ripe and green through the summer, white-haired and slow in the fall, and turning young again through the winter, so that the earth’s own year is her body’s year. To watch the land come back after the cold is to watch her come back. She is the growing power of the ground made a person, fertility and increase and the turning of the year, and because she is these things and because she is wholly benevolent, she is the most beloved of the Diyin Dine’é, the Holy People — the renewing mother rather than a force to be feared.

She is also hózhó given a face. Hózhó is the central word of the whole religion, the state of beauty, balance, order, and health that the ceremonies exist to keep and, when it is broken, to restore; to walk in hózhó is to walk in the right condition of the world. Changing Woman is the deity in whom that condition is at home. And the ceremony that is her own — the one that keeps and restores hózhó across the entire ceremonial system, the rite the singers place at the center of everything — is the Blessingway, Hózhóójí. She stands at the head of it. What the Blessingway holds within itself is held within the tradition, and it is named here only from the distance of the public record: that it is the backbone rite of the Diné world, that its songs run through the night, and that Changing Woman is its source. The interior is not a thing to be set out for strangers, and the Diné do not set it out; neither will these lines.

It is worth marking how her kind of endlessness differs from the deathlessness of a god who simply never changes. Changing Woman is not exempt from age; she passes through it, fully, and comes out the other side. The Diné cosmos is divided into two classes of being — the Diyin Dine’é, the Holy People who set the order of the world, and the nihookáá dine’é, the Earth- Surface People who live within it and who do die. Changing Woman belongs to the first and yet carries in her own body the pattern the second most needs: not a life without ending, which no person can have, but a life that ends and begins again, as the corn is cut and comes back and the year closes and opens. She is the Holy Person whose gift is precisely that the world does not stay dead. Among the Diyin Dine’é she is the one turned wholly toward the living, and the tradition returns her love — she is named the best-loved of the Holy People not for a feat of power but for a temperament, because she wishes the people well and always has.

Two of her deeds fix her place in the world with particular force. The first is that she made the people. Alone on her island in the later part of the account, wanting companions, she rubbed skin and the flesh-dust from her own body and out of it formed the first Diné. The tradition remembers even which part of her each clan came from: from the skin of her breast she made the Kiiyaa’áanii, the Towering House people; from her back, the Honágháahnii, One-Walks-Around; from beneath one arm the Tódích’íi’nii, the Bitter Water people, and from beneath the other the Hashtł’ishnii, the Mud people. These are the four original clans from which the nation grew, and a Diné who names a clan is naming a part of Changing Woman’s own body. She is the ancestral mother in the most literal sense a tradition can mean the word.

The second deed is that she bore the ones who cleared the world. By the Sun, Jóhonaa’éí, Changing Woman conceived and bore twin boys — Naayéé’ Neizghání, Monster Slayer, and Tó Bájíshchíní, Born for Water — and those two, grown in four days as their mother had grown, went out against the Naayéé’, the monsters that were hunting and devouring the first people. With weapons the Sun gave them, and with help along the way from the small persistent grandmother Spider Woman, the Hero Twins killed the monsters one by one and made the world fit to live in; where a monster fell, its body froze into a feature of the land, so that the country itself is a record of the clearing. That whole account belongs to the Hero Twins and to the weaver Spider Woman who aided them; here it is enough that their mother is Changing Woman. As with much in this world, the tellings vary at the edges: in some, Born for Water is assigned instead to her sister White Shell Woman, wife of the Moon-bearer, and the twins are shared between the two mothers. The variation is tradition-internal, a difference among the singers’ accounts and not a mistake in any of them.

An early-twentieth-century Diné storm-pattern weaving; the cornstalk at its center joins the loom to the growing power Changing Woman personifies. Navajo weaver, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The first ceremony, and the girls who repeat it

When Changing Woman first came to womanhood, the Holy People held a ceremony for her — the first Kinaaldá, the girl’s coming-of-age rite, with Talking God officiating. It set the pattern, and every Kinaaldá since has been a repetition of that first one: the Diné girl at her first menses becomes, for four days, Changing Woman herself, and passes through the ceremony the Holy People performed at the beginning. This is the point at which the deity is not a story about the past but a role a living girl steps into, and it is where the tradition is most plainly a discipline rather than a tale.

The Kinaaldá is kept today, across the Diné homeland, much as the public record describes it, and a Diné account in the Navajo Times sets out the ceremony as a coming-of-age in traditional Diné practice: four days, standing for the four seasons and the four sacred mountains. The girl runs — eastward, toward the rising sun, several times each day, farther on each run, and the length of her running is held to be the length of her strength in the life to come. The women grind corn, Changing Woman’s own crop. A great corn cake, the ʼalkaan, is prepared from the meal and baked overnight in a pit dug in the earth and lined with corn husks, and when it is done the first piece is given to the Sun. Through the ceremony an older woman — a kinswoman of good life and good character, standing where First Woman once stood over the infant — molds and presses the girl’s body with her hands, shaping her, as First Woman shaped Changing Woman, into the form of the woman she is becoming. On the last night the Blessingway songs are sung until dawn. What happens inside those songs, and the exact order and words of the rite, the tradition keeps for itself; the outline above is the outline that is already public, and it is offered at that distance and no closer. To hand over the interior as a set of instructions would be to mistake what the ceremony is.

Her home now, and the land she was found in

Changing Woman no longer lives in the country where First Man found her. In the account she went west, and the Sun built for her an island home across the water, in the direction of the evening, where she keeps a house and where the seasons still turn her from age back to youth. The daily journey of the Sun runs to her; the west is hers. Yet the land of her finding remains the ground of the whole religion — the country bounded by the four sacred mountains, with its inner hills of Gobernador Knob and Huerfano Mesa, the region the Diné call Dinétah. That land is not an abstraction. It is the same country the Diné were torn out of and returned to. In the United States campaign of 1863–64, forces under Colonel Kit Carson burned the fields and the peach orchards and drove the people out; in 1864 thousands of Diné were marched southeast on the Long Walk to imprisonment at Bosque Redondo, far from the mountains; and in 1868 the survivors signed a treaty and walked home to a reservation set within the four peaks — back inside the very order that Changing Woman and the Holy People had established at the beginning. The full weight of that history belongs to the account of the Diné and to the canyon where the 1864 campaign fell hardest; what matters for Changing Woman is only that the boundary of the world she made and the boundary of the homeland the treaty restored are drawn along the same four mountains.

The scholarly record — Matthews and Reichard, Haile and Wyman, Frisbie and the reference works that lean on them — is read now as what it is: an outsider lens, valuable and partial, some of it holding knowledge that was shared under conditions its keepers did not intend to make public. Against and above it stand the singers who carry the Blessingway, and the Diné who speak for themselves — the mothers and grandmothers who run the Kinaaldá, and writers such as the poet Luci Tapahonso, who has set Changing Woman and the ceremonies into Diné English on the Diné’s own terms. They are the ones who say who she is. And what they say is not that she was, but that she is: the mother the girls become for four days, the maker of the clans a person still names as kin, the green coming back over the red land every spring. The old woman reaches the eastern edge of the world, and turns, and the year begins again.

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