Music plays a major role in the traditional ceremonies
of the Navajo people. Their songs, such as
“Song from the Mountain Chant” and “Song of the
Earth,” are deeply bound to ceremonies performed
for a variety of reasons, such as to evoke cures for
the ill or to celebrate and honor the gifts bestowed
by nature.
The Nightway Ceremony is a nine-day Navajo
healing ceremony undertaken to relieve stricken
people and in a larger sense to reharmonize and
reorder the natural world. The songs that comprise
the ceremony number into the 400s. The ceremony
is carefully constructed as a means of rebalancing
relationships with the Navajo universe and between
people, especially along lines of gender, authority,
and age. In general, the goal of the activity is to
reestablish beauty and remove ugliness from the
universe.
Well-trained medicine men, prepared by
decades of study in arcane details of the Navajo
healing arts, run the ceremonies. Many, including
current public-health officials of the Navajo, contend
that the Nightway Ceremony is effective in
healing the sick and ordering social relations
among the participants.
Navajo history has it that the Holy People gave
the Nightway to the Navajo after the earth was rid
of monsters. At that time, Holy People became invisible
and began to live in caves, mountaintops,
and sacred sites from where they could watch over
mortals below. This change in the status of the
Navajo Holy People can be set shortly after the year
1000, a date fairly late in the Navajo cosmic history.
Songs are probably the most significant element
of the Nightway Ceremony. A varied litany of
songs and chants, accompanied by instruments
such as the gourd rattle and the basket drum, are
meant to instruct, evoke, and exalt. There are unfortunately
few systematic records of the songs,
partly because Western ears have not been sensitive
to the differences among the various chants, and
partly because the medicine men have been reluctant
to have their ceremonies taped. Therefore the
songs have had to be re-created outside the actual
Nightway, a method that often creates a slightly artificial
reproduction. Nonetheless, full records of
the various song sets used in the ceremonies have
been enumerated, bearing such names as Songs of
the Highest Mountains, Songs of the Navajo Canyon,
Songs of the Sand Painting, Songs of the Killer Enemies,
and Songs of the Fringed Mouth Gods.
English Versions of Navajo Nightway
Ceremony Songs
Levy, Jerrold E. In the Beginning: The Navajo Genesis.
18, 41–42, 126–128. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998.
Wiget, Andrew. Handbook of Native American Literature.
59–60, 112, 348. New York: Garland Publishing,
1996.
A Work about the Navajo Nightway
Ceremony Songs
Faris, James. The Nightway: A History and a Documentation
of a Navajo Ceremonial. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1990.