Talking God

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Before first light, in the frost months, a sound crosses the camp that no one takes for anything else — a soft rising call, wu-hu-hu-hu-u, four notes lifting and falling away. It is not a bird and not the wind. In the sacred history the Diné carry, First Man and First Woman heard it once at the very beginning, in the gray before dawn, and knew without looking who was near: the white-masked grandfather of the Holy People, arriving the way he always arrives, heard before he is seen. His name in Diné bizaad is Haashchʼééłtiʼí. Because it is his office to carry the word between the Holy People and the people of the earth, and to speak for the others when they gather, the name that has settled on him in English is Talking God.

The one who is heard first

He is a yeʼii — one of the masked Holy People of the Diné, the people English named Navajo — and among the yeʼii he is the elder. In address he is Yeʼii bicheii, which the ethnographers wrote as Yébîchai and which the standard account of the yeʼii renders as “maternal grandfather of the yeʼii.” He is the one who often speaks on behalf of the other Holy People, and that spokesmanship is the whole of his English name: not a god of talk for its own sake, but the god through whom the word passes. When the Diyin Diné’é — the Holy People who set the order of this world — need to be addressed, or need to answer, it is Haashchʼééłtiʼí who carries the message across.

He belongs to the beginning of things. In the tradition’s account of the emergence into this world and the ordering of it, he is counted among the very first of the Holy People the ancestors met. He, the House God — Haashchʼééʼooghaan, whom the record also calls the Calling or Growling God — Black God, Haashchʼééshzhiní, the keeper of fire who set the constellations, and Water Sprinkler, Tó Neinilí, who brings the rain: these four were the first encountered, the elders of the world the people were climbing into. Of the four, Talking God is the one turned toward the light. His place is the east and his hour is the dawn; he is the god of the eastern sky, the whitening that opens the day and, across the year, the turning toward spring. The others have their domains — fire, rain, the growth of things — and his is the first gray edge of morning and the word that travels on it. With the dawn goes the hunt: in the tradition he is reckoned also a god of the game animals, the wild creatures of the chase that move at first light, and the black-tailed deer whose tails hang from his mask marks the tie. The corn painted on his face marks another, for the grown crop and the wild game are both, in their seasons, his to bless.

His office turns on a division that runs through the whole Diné cosmos. There are two classes of being: the Diyin Diné’é, the Holy People who set the order of the world and gave the ceremonies, and the nihookáá dine’é, the Earth-Surface People who live within that order and who die. The two do not simply mingle; a word has to pass between them, and passing it is precisely Talking God’s work. He is the one Holy Person defined by the crossing — the elder who stands at the seam between the gods and the people and carries speech across it in both directions. To call him the grandfather of the yeʼii is to say he is the near one, the approachable elder of an otherwise remote company, the face the people meet first.

The knowledge of who he is belongs first to the Diné and to the ceremonial singers, the hataałii, who carry it and use it and were taught it under conditions. Where the fine detail also survives on paper, the paper is an outsider’s. The army surgeon and ethnographer Washington Matthews spent more than twenty years, from the 1880s onward, working with Diné singers to set down what they were willing to give; his Navaho Legends appeared in 1897 and his study of the Night Chant in 1902. Gladys Reichard worked through the symbolism of the whole system in Navaho Religion (1950), and Father Berard Haile recorded texts across decades in the field. These are careful books and they are the eyes of visitors — nineteenth- and twentieth-century strangers looking in from outside, catching, imperfectly and partially, what the singers chose to show them. The account here leans on that record where it must, and marks it as what it is: the tradition’s own knowledge, seen through a borrowed and imperfect lens, and never the property of the men who wrote it down.

Dawn over the eastern Navajo country — Church Rock, on the Diné homeland, at sunrise. The east and the whitening light are Talking God’s own. Terry Eiler for the EPA DOCUMERICA program, 1972, U.S. National Archives, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Grandfather of the dawn

Within this world Talking God is a real and benevolent power — an elder, a leader, a giver of blessing, not a danger. He is known at once by two things. The first is the call already named, the rising wu-hu-hu-hu-u that announces him. The second is his form, and the tradition has fixed it with great care. His body is white; his robe and mask are of white deerskin. On the face of the mask a cornstalk is painted, rising from the mouth upward between the eyes, for he has to do with the growth of corn. Over the top of the mask runs a fringe; two tails of the black-tailed deer hang down over the forehead; and at the back stands a fan of eagle plumes — six to twelve of them — with a bunch of owl feathers at its base. A large collar of fresh spruce is bound about the neck, hiding the join of the mask, and at his side he carries a pouch made from the skin of the tassel-eared squirrel, the small tuft-eared animal of the high pine country, the reddish spot of its back kept and shown. This is the figure the singers describe and the description Matthews recorded: the white face of the dawn, the corn, the spruce, the eagle and the squirrel of the eastern mountains, gathered into one Holy Person.

His central deed, the one that fixes his place in the sacred history, is that he found Changing Woman. The tradition’s account is precise, and the ethnographic record of the Diné Bahaneʼ preserves its shape. First Man saw signs on the summit of Chʼóolʼį́ʼí, Great Spruce Mountain — a dark cloud resting on the height by day, a fire burning there by night, four days running. Climbing at last toward it, he came into a storm of wonders: the cry of an infant, the crash of lightning, dark rain pouring, and the tip of a rainbow standing in intense color against the black sky. When it cleared, on the ground before him lay a turquoise figure of a girl. He carried her home. Twelve days later Talking God summoned First Man and First Woman to bring the figure back, and there the Holy People made her live: Talking God, the House God, Water Sprinkler, and the Wind laid a perfect buckskin on the ground with its head to the west, set the turquoise figure upon it, covered her with a second buckskin, and sang the sacred song of Hózhǫ́ǫ́jí Sin — the Blessingway song. The Wind entered between the two skins, and when the covering was lifted a living baby girl lay beneath it. Her name was Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé, Changing Woman. By the thirteenth day she had grown into a young woman, and her first Kinaaldá, the girl’s coming-of-age rite, was kept for her with the Night Chant. From her, by the Sun, came the twin boys who would clear the world.

That song is the key to him. What Talking God sings over the turquoise figure is Hózhǫ́ǫ́jí — the Blessingway, the ceremony of setting and holding hózhó, the beauty, balance, and right order that the whole Diné religion works to keep and, when it breaks, to restore. To bless a thing into its proper condition is his work. He does not slay monsters; that belongs to the Hero Twins. He does not weave; that belongs to Spider Woman. His is the older and quieter office — to carry the word, to open the day, to sing a life into its right beginning, to set things in order and pronounce them good. When the first order of the world was made, he was among the makers; when a girl becomes a woman, or a house is consecrated, the pattern he set at the beginning is the one the living rite repeats.

The infant he found grew into the mother of the Hero Twins, Naayééʼ Neizghání, Monster Slayer, and Tó Bájíshchíní, Born for Water, and into the best-loved of the Holy People; her own arc belongs to the account of Changing Woman, and Talking God stands within it as the elder who found her, raised her among the Holy People, and sang her into life. What runs through all of it — the finding, the blessing, the first Kinaaldá — is hózhó, and Talking God is the Holy Person the ceremony calls when that order has to be made well again. He is the tutelary elder: the one who carries word, blesses, and sets right.

The nine nights

His living presence is clearest in a single great ceremony, and it is named for him. The Nightway — Diné Tłʼééʼjí, the Night Chant, popularly the Yeibichai after its grandfather — is the nine-night winter healing rite of which Talking God is the tutelary Holy Person. It is among the most sacred and most demanding of all the Diné ceremonies, one that a singer may spend much of a lifetime learning, and much of it is closed. It is sung only in the cold season, in frosty weather, after the first killing frost and before the spring stirs — the months when the thunder sleeps and the snakes are underground, and never at any other time. It is sought as a cure for grave and long-standing affliction: paralysis, blindness, deafness, and disorders of the mind. And it does more than treat the one patient. Like the whole ceremonial system it works to mend the balance between the people and the world — to bring back hózhó — so that the sick person and the order around him are made well together.

On the closing nights the Holy People themselves are present, as masked dancers — the yeʼii, taking on the form and the office of the gods, led by Talking God, who comes first and stands foremost among them. Male yeʼii are personified beside him, and a full ceremony may bring out many masks — the House God among them, the same elder who stood with him at the making of Changing Woman, the two chief yeʼii moving through the dance as they moved through the sacred history, paired at the beginning and paired again on the last nights of the rite. Within the nine nights the sacred designs are laid in colored sand, the iikaah, made and unmade inside the ceremony and never left standing past their hour. Here the account keeps its distance, and does so deliberately. The masks, the songs that summon the yeʼii, the exact order of the chant, the paintings destroyed before morning — these are held within the tradition, taught singer to singer, and they lose their nature the moment they are lifted onto a page for a stranger to read. What is public is the outline given above: a nine-night rite of the deep winter, a healing, its grandfather Talking God. The interior belongs to the singers who were taught it, and to no page, and it is left with them.

The outsider record of the Nightway is substantial, and it weighs on everything written about him. Washington Matthews’ study of the Night Chant, published in 1902 in the memoirs of a natural-history museum and reprinted since, remains one of the very few extended accounts of the ceremony ever set down — the fruit of more than twenty years spent with the hataałii, the singers, learning what they would teach. It should be read for exactly what it is: the tradition’s knowledge caught through the eye of an army surgeon turned ethnographer, some of it ceremonial matter shared under conditions its keepers did not mean to make common. The Diné themselves noted the strangeness of a stranger handling such things; there was talk that Matthews’ own late deafness and paralysis — the very afflictions the Nightway treats — had come to him through his long closeness to a power not his to handle. The record is valuable and it is partial, and the singers who carry the living ceremony stand above it.

For the ceremony is living. The Nightway is still sung today by hataałii for Diné patients, in the frosty weather, as it has always been sung. The land it is sung in is the same country the Diné were driven from and returned to — the homeland bounded by the four sacred mountains, out of which the people were marched southeast on the Long Walk in 1864 and to which the survivors returned by treaty in 1868; that history belongs in full to the account of the Diné, and it is enough here that Talking God’s ceremony is kept in the country the people came home to. He is still carved in wood and still woven into the Yeibichai rugs that take their name from him, still painted, still called on. He is not a figure closed into a finished past. He is a Holy Person of a present-tense faith, the grandfather of the yeʼii, and in the cold before a winter dawn, where the Nightway is being sung, the call that announces him still lifts across the frost — wu-hu-hu-hu-u — heard, as it has always been, before he is seen.

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