James Mooney - Native Americans - 22 Books on History, Mythology, Culture & Linguistic Studies

Pĭké̆hodĭklad - Navaho

This, the first of the dry-paintings employed in the rites of the Mountain Chant—a nine days' healing ceremony of the Navaho—as in the Night Chant, is used on the fifth night, when the purpose of the performance is to frighten the patient, and thus banish the evil within him. The name of this painting, "Frighten Him On It," is identical with that of the one used at the corresponding moment in the Night Chant.

The whole represents the den of a hibernating bear. Inside the ceremonial hogán is thrown up a bank of earth two or three feet high, with an opening toward the doorway. Colored earths picture bear-tracks leading in; bear-tracks and sunlight—sun dogs—are represented at the four quarters, and the bear himself, streaked with sunlight, in the centre. The twigs at the entrance of the bear den represent trees, behind which bears are wont to dig their dens in the mountain side. Everything tends to make the patient think of bears. He enters midst deep silence and takes his seat upon the pictured animal. The play of his imagination has barely begun when a man, painted and garbed as a bear, rushes in, uttering hideous snarls and growls, in which all assembled join. Women patients seldom fail to faint.

The figures shown in the dry-paintings are conventionalized representations of the characters in Navaho mythology and of incidents in the myth. With how many such paintings the Navaho medicine-men are familiar is an unanswered question; but more than sixty have been noted, some of them most elaborate. In making them, the ground within the ceremonial hogán is evenly covered with fine brown earth, upon which the figures are drawn with fine sands and earths of many colors allowed to flow between the thumb and the first two fingers. The Navaho become so skilled in this work that they can draw a line as fine as a broad pencil mark. Many of the paintings are comparatively small, perhaps not more than four feet in diameter; others are as large as the hogán permits, sometimes twenty-four feet across. To make such a large painting requires the assistance of all the men who can conveniently work at it from early morning until mid-afternoon.

The most elaborate ceremonies are conducted between the first frost of autumn and the second moon following the winter solstice. While primarily designed to restore the health of an individual, they are intended also to benefit the entire tribe, many of the prayers being offered for the general welfare of the people rather than for the patient under immediate treatment. Nor, so far as the individual is concerned, is the ceremony designed necessarily for the cure of an acute ailment, but is for the treatment of long-standing chronic afflictions, mental or physical. Especially peculiar is the Navaho belief that many illnesses are the results of fright to which ancestors have been subjected during prenatal life, and long and costly ceremonies are often performed to rid persons of such baneful inheritance. In fact Indians physically normal have submitted to prolonged treatment by their medicine-men when advised by them for such imaginative reasons to submit to it.

The medicine-men, who are termed singers, hatálĭ, are a dominant factor in the Navaho life. Like all primitive people, the Navaho are intensely religious, and the medicine-men, whose function it is to become versed in the mysteries of religion, are ever prone to cultivate in the minds of the people the belief that they are powerful not only in curing disease of mind and body but of preventing it by their incantations. Anyone who possesses the requisite ability may become a medicine-man, but owing to the elaborate ceremonies connected with their practices it requires long years of application ere one can attain sufficient knowledge to give him standing among his tribesmen. To completely master the intricacies of any one of the many nine days' ceremonies requires close application during the major portion of a man's lifetime. The only way a novice has of learning is by assisting the elders in the performance of the rites, and as there is little probability that opportunity will be afforded him to participate in more than two or three ceremonies in a year, his instruction is necessarily slow. The medicine-men recognize the fact that their ritual has been decadent for some time, and they regard it as foreordained that when all the ceremonies are forgotten the world will cease to exist.

Hástĭn Yázhĕ - Navaho

The most pronounced dread manifested by the Navaho is that derived from their belief respecting the spirits of the dead. It is thought that the spirit leaves the body at death and travels to a place toward the north where there is a pit whence the gods and the animals emerged from an underworld before the first Navaho were created, and which the dead now enter. Their myths tell of the disappearance of a beautiful daughter of one of the animal chiefs on the fourth day after the gods and the animals came up into this world; diligent search was unrewarded until two of the searchers looked down through the hole and espied her sitting beside a stream in the lower world combing her hair. Four days later death came to these searchers, so that now the Navaho will go to any extreme to avoid coming into contact with spirits of the dead, tsí̆ndi, which they believe travel anywhere and everywhere at will, often doing evil, but never good. The body is prepared for burial previous to death, and is never touched afterward if it can be avoided.

To the end that the spirit may begin aright its journey to the afterworld, the body is taken out of the hogán through an opening specially made in the wall on the northern side, for the doorway always faces the east. The immediate relatives of the deceased avoid looking at the corpse if possible. Friends of the family or distant relations usually take charge of the burial. A couple of men dig a grave on a hillside and carry the body there wrapped in blankets. No monument is erected to mark the spot. Before the body is taken out, the hogán is vacated and all necessary utensils are carried away. The two men who bury the remains of the former occupant carefully obliterate with a cedar bough all footprints that the relations of the deceased may have made in the hogán, in order to conceal from the departed spirit the direction in which they went should it return to do them harm. The premises are completely abandoned and the house often burned. Never will a Navaho occupy a tsí̆ndi hogán, and when travelling at night he will take a roundabout trail in order to avoid one. Formerly horses were killed at the grave. So recently as 1906 a horse was sacrificed within sight of a Catholic mission on the reservation, that its spirit might accompany that of a dead woman to the afterworld. This horse was the property of the woman, and her husband, fearing to retain it, yet not daring to kill it himself, called upon another to do so.

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Although raiders and plunderers since known to history, the Navaho cannot be designated a warring tribe, for however courageous they may be, their lack of political integrity has ever been an obstacle to military organization. They never have had a tribal chief, properly so called, while their many leading men could never command more than a small following. Manuelito, who was acclaimed head-chief in 1855 at the conference with Governor Meriwether for the purpose of negotiating a treaty, probably had a greater following than any other Navaho in historic times, but he could never have relied on a majority of the warriors of his widely scattered tribe. Although divided into many bands, like the Apache, the Navaho, unlike them, were not engaged in ceaseless depredation, their sporadic raids having been conducted by small parties quite independent of any organized tribal movement. They preferred rather to follow a pastoral life. With their large population, had they possessed the Apache's insatiable desire for war and a political organization that permitted concerted action, the subjugation of the Southwest would have been far more difficult than it proved to be.