The Holy People

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Before the ground of this world was ever walked, it was climbed. The people who did the climbing were not yet the living Diné; they were the powers who went ahead of them, up through a stack of worlds each smaller and darker than the one above, and when they broke at last into the open air of this present world they had work to do — a sun to hang, a moon to set turning, mountains to raise at the four horizons — before anyone could safely live on the surface they had made. Those powers are the Diyin Diné’é. The name is usually rendered “Holy People,” from diyin, holy or sacred, and Diné’é, people. It does not point to one figure. It gathers a whole class of beings.

Two kinds of people

The Diné world is populated by two orders of person, and the language keeps them apart. On the ground walk the Nihookáá Diné’é, the Earth-Surface People — the ordinary living Diné, born, aging, mortal, who plant and herd and raise children within the bounds of this world. Around and before them stand the Diyin Diné’é, the Holy People, who moved through the earlier worlds, ordered this one, and did not stay in it as the Earth-Surface People do. The distinction is not the familiar one between mortals below and gods enthroned above. It is closer to a distinction of era and of office: the Holy People are the ones who came first and set things right, and the living Diné are the ones who inherit the world they set right, together with the ceremonies for keeping it so.

That this is a category, not a single deity, matters for how the whole system reads. The Diyin Diné’é include First Man and First Woman, Changing Woman, the Sun, the Hero Twins, Spider Woman, Talking God and the other yeʼii, Black God, Water Sprinkler, the Winds, and Coyote — a crowd of very different powers, some ordering and some disordering, held together less by family resemblance than by their shared work in the sacred history of how this world came to be. To enter the category is to enter that history at its beginning, in the lowest and darkest of the worlds, and to climb.

The knowledge of the Holy People reaches the documentary record chiefly through the Diné’s own oral tradition and through the ceremonial system that re-enacts it. It is held and transmitted by the hataałii, the singers, and it is the same body of knowledge the ceremonies carry. What outsiders possess in writing was set down later, and unevenly. The Army surgeon and ethnographer Washington Matthews published Navaho Legends in 1897, and had already produced The Mountain Chant in 1887 — described as among the first full published accounts of a Native American ceremony — recording material he had been allowed to learn under particular conditions. Gladys Reichard’s two-volume Navaho Religion: A Study of Symbolism followed in 1950; the Franciscan missionary-linguist Berard Haile worked for decades on the ceremonial texts, including the Blessingway. These are read here critically, as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century outsider record that preserved fragments faithfully and misheard others, and Diné voices — the singers and Diné scholars who correct and complete it — are given the first word. What follows tells the emergence as the tradition tells it: the sacred history of how the world was ordered, not a report about a world elsewhere. The published synthesis of that history, the Diné Bahaneʼ, is drawn on here at the distance of the public record.

The climb through the colored worlds

In the account the singers carry, existence begins in the First World, Niʼ Hodiłhił — a small place, and black as soot. It is not empty. Mist-beings and insect people move in it, and the first of the Diyin Diné’é are already present. First Woman, Áłtsé Asdzą́ą́, and First Man, Áłtsé Hastiin, come into being here, formed with the help of the winds and the clouds — she out of blue and yellow cloud with an ear of yellow corn, he out of black and white cloud with an ear of white corn — and they find one another by the light of their fires. From that first darkness the beings climb. The Second World, Niʼ Hodootłʼizh, is blue, a place of blue-furred creatures and quarrels. The Third World, Niʼ Hałtsooí, is yellow, crossed by a female river running one way and a male river the other, and it ends in a rising flood that drives everyone upward again. Through a hollow reed the people escape into the Fourth and present world, Niʼ Hodisxǫs, the white or Glittering World, the one whose surface the living Diné still walk.

Emergence into this world is not arrival at a finished place. The world is there, but it is unordered, and ordering it is the founding labor of the Holy People. Working together, First Man and First Woman and the others set the great lights: a Turquoise Boy is placed to become the Sun, Jóhonaaʼéí, and a White Shell Girl to become the moon, and the remaining stars are laid out in careful figures across the dark — until Coyote, impatient, seizes the blanket that holds the rest and flings them into the disorder that is the night sky’s scatter to this day. Then the mountains. The Holy People raise the sacred peaks that fix the four directions and bound Dinétah, the homeland: Sisnaajiní, Blanca Peak, in the east; Tsoodził, Mount Taylor, in the south; Dookʼoʼoosłííd, the San Francisco Peaks, in the west; and Dibé Nitsaa, Hesperus Mountain, in the north. The mountains are not decoration on the map. They are the pillars of the ordered world, dressed by the Holy People in white shell and turquoise and abalone and jet, and everything the living Diné do rightly is done inside the square they mark.

Sisnaajiní (Blanca Peak), the sacred mountain of the east, one of the four that bound Dinétah. National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Four, from the beginning, is the number the cosmos is built on. Four worlds climbed, four directions fixed, four mountains raised, four colors, four divisions of the day from dawn to night. The pattern is not incidental; it is the shape order takes, and the ceremonies later repeat it in their own fours. The emergence, told this way, is less a chain of events than the laying-down of a grammar — the arrangement by which a world can be lived in at all.

Setting the world in order

The Holy People do not vanish once the sun is hung and the mountains stand. Much of the founding work is still ahead, and it is done by particular members of the category, each with an office of their own. It is here that the concept branches into the figures who fill it.

On one of the sacred mountains the Holy People find an infant, and raise her, and she becomes Changing Woman, Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé — the most beloved of the Diyin Diné’é, and in many tellings the least ambiguous good. She matures within days rather than years, reaching womanhood in a single cycle, and she keeps pace with the year ever after, growing old with each winter and young again with each spring, the renewing mother whose body is the turning of the seasons. From rubbings of her own skin she forms the first four Diné clans — in the tradition’s account the Kiiyaaʼáanii, the Honágháahnii, the Tódíchʼíiʼnii, and the Hashtłʼishnii — so that the living people are, quite literally, made of her. And she conceives, by the Sun and by water, two sons.

Those sons are the Hero Twins, Monster Slayer, Naayééʼ Neizghání, and Born for Water, Tóbájíshchíní. The world into which they are born is not safe: it is prowled by the naayééʼ, the alien monsters, giant devouring things that have been killing the people. The Twins set out to find their father the Sun and win from him the weapons to destroy them. Their road is guarded by Spider Woman, Naʼashjéʼii Asdzą́ą́, who is also the one who taught the Diné the loom; she gives the Twins the feather and the words that protect them on the dangerous journey. What the Twins do on their return — the clearing of the monsters, and the deliberate sparing of a few, Old Age and Cold and Hunger and Poverty, because a world without them would be a world in which nothing grew or was earned — is the making of the world habitable. The Hero Twins leave the monsters they kill as the black lava and broken rock still lying across the land.

Among the ordering powers stand the yeʼii, and at their head Talking God, Haashchʼééłtiʼí, the caller of the dawn and spokesman for the Holy People, addressed as Yeʼii bicheii, “maternal grandfather of the yeʼii.” He is counted among the first four Holy People the ancestors met, alongside Black God, Haashchʼééshzhiní, keeper of fire, who set the stars in their proper figures before Coyote scattered the rest; Calling God or House God, Haashchʼééʼooghaan; and Water Sprinkler, Tó Neinilí, who brings the rain. The Winds, Nííłchʼi, run through everything — it is by the winds that the first people were given breath and by the fine wind at the tips of the fingers that a person’s nature is known.

And then there is Coyote, Mąʼii, who belongs to the Holy People and belongs to no order at all. He scatters the stars; he brings on the flood by his thefts; he introduces, by insisting on it, the fact that people must die. Yet the tradition does not simply condemn him: a world in which no one died would fill and choke, and Coyote’s disorder turns out to be woven into the possibility of any world that moves. He is the reminder, kept inside the founding history itself, that order was not free and is not total.

All of this ordering points at one word, and the word is Hózhó. It is the state the whole cosmos is arranged to hold — beauty, balance, harmony, right relation, the condition in which things are as they should be. Hózhó is not a feeling but a structure, and it can be broken: by sickness, by contact with what is harmful or foreign, by disorder let in through the cracks Coyote guards. The last and greatest gift of the Holy People to the Earth-Surface People is the means of keeping Hózhó, and of putting it back when it fails — the ceremonies.

The ceremonies they left

The relationship the Holy People established with the living Diné is not a closed chapter but an ongoing exchange, and its channel is the ceremonial system. The Diyin Diné’é gave the ceremonies; the hataałii, the singers, carry them; and through them Hózhó is maintained and restored. The ceremonies are a learned discipline of great precision — long song-sequences, exact procedures, sandpaintings laid down and destroyed within the day — and the training of a singer takes years.

At the center stands the Blessingway, Hózhǫ́ǫ́jí, the ceremony that reaches back to Changing Woman and to the origin of the ordered world itself. It is not a cure for a specific illness but the ceremony of establishing and holding Hózhó — sung for a girl coming into womanhood, for a new hogan, for a departing traveler, for the general keeping of good order — and it stands at the root of the whole system, the ground the other ceremonies grow from. Set against it, the Enemyway, Anaʼí Ndááʼ, restores balance after contact with what is foreign or hostile, cleansing the disorder that such contact leaves; it descends in tradition from the Hero Twins’ own return from the killing of monsters. The Nightway, Tłʼééʼjí, is a nine-night ceremony of the winter, in which trained dancers personify the yeʼii to mend deep and long-standing illness, and it is among the most demanding of all.

The Nightway’s chants, its masks, its sandpaintings and the songs that accompany them are sacred and closed. They are held within the tradition, known and rightly used only by singers who have been properly taught, and they are not the sort of knowledge that can be lifted onto a page and handed to a stranger without loss and without wrong. What can be said publicly — that the ceremony runs nine nights, that masked figures take on the yeʼii, that it treats grave sickness — is said here, and no further; where the tradition keeps a thing to itself, it is left kept. Matthews recorded parts of it in the 1890s and after, and later singers and scholars have both drawn on and corrected that record, but the working knowledge was never the ethnographer’s to give.

A Diné weaver at the loom, the art the tradition credits to Spider Woman. Photograph by George Wharton James, ca. 1900, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What the singers carry

The Holy People are not, in the Diné understanding, powers of a finished past. The order they set is maintained in the present tense, ceremony by ceremony, and the framework has held through history that might have broken it. In 1864 the United States Army drove thousands of Diné on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, far outside the four mountains; the return, under the 1868 treaty, brought the people home to a land re-centered on the sacred peaks — a history carried in full by the entries for the Diné and Canyon de Chelly, and named here only for what it shows: that even removed from Dinétah, the people kept the map the Holy People drew, and came back to it. The mountains that bound the homeland remain contested ground in the present — the western peak, the San Francisco Peaks, and the southern one, Mount Taylor, among the sites where the Diné have gone to law to defend a sacred geography — and the neighboring peoples of the Colorado Plateau, the Hopi of the mesas to the west and the Apache kin to the south and east, hold their own sacred relations to some of the same country.

The outsider record — Matthews in 1897, Reichard in 1950, Haile across the middle of the twentieth century — did real work and did real damage, freezing living ceremony into text, sometimes publishing what had been shared in confidence, sometimes simply mishearing. Diné scholarship and the singers themselves have spent the decades since setting it right, insisting that the account of the Holy People belongs first to the people whose Holy People they are. The turquoise mountain and the abalone mountain still stand where they were raised; the singers still sing the world back into Hózhó when it slips; the clans Changing Woman made from her skin still order who a person is and whom they may marry. The powers who climbed the colored worlds ahead of the people did not merely set the stage and withdraw. They left a way of keeping the world in order, and the keeping is still going on — sung, night after night, by the ones who were taught how.

→ Related: Changing Woman · Spider Woman · The Hero Twins · Talking God · Canyon De Chelly · Shiprock · Mount Taylor · The San Francisco Peaks · The Dine · The Hopi · The Apache